THE bombing of underground Iranian nuclear facilities by the US Air Force on June 22 used seven B-2 bombers to drop 14 bombs that penetrated deep into the earth before exploding. The specific model of bomb was the Guided Bomb Unit 57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (GBU-57A/B MOP). 

The GBU-57A/B MOPs contain classified technologies that cost millions of dollars to achieve. In publicity for the bombs, the US Air Force says that the US military began to develop them after the invasion of Iraq, with the aim of destroying “weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities.”

The oft-repeated “weapons of mass destruction” lie used to manufacture consent for the devastating illegal invasion of Iraq thus continues its legacy today. But the concept of such “bunker-busting” bombs is far older, with its origins in the development of aerial bombing over the past century. 

In Britain, many people tend to think of the London Blitz as a historic milestone of military destruction of civilian areas from the air. But the first aerial bombing of England took place more than 20 years earlier in WWI, at first with German zeppelin raids. Then, on a warm Friday afternoon in May 1917, came the first aeroplane bombing: twenty-one Gotha biplanes carrying explosives. Their planned target was London, but thick cloud made them turn south and drop their bombs on Folkestone instead. People were out shopping in the streets: 95 were killed and 195 were injured. 

In response to German Gotha raids on England, the colonial military general Jan Smuts wrote a report on British air power the same year. At the time, military planes were separated into different divisions, but after the Smuts report, in 1918, they were combined into a single British Royal Air Force. The RAF would then become an institution that served as a deadly tool of colonial control. 

Around the world, the new RAF attempted to justify its existence through the doctrine of “air policing.” Under this euphemism, settlements whose inhabitants resisted colonial rule would be ruthlessly bombed until they agreed to whatever terms were dictated. These atrocities took place outside Europe: few British politicians who reacted with horror to the 1937 bombing of Guernica by fascist forces allied with General Franco saw any similarity with the actions of the RAF in the wider empire. 

The connection between aerial bombing and colonialism ran deep. Shortly after writing his report on air power, Smuts became prime minister of South Africa in 1919. Ten years later, in 1929, he told an audience at the University of Oxford about new plans for a system of racial segregation. There would be separate institutions for “the two elements of the population.”

"Separate institutions involve territorial segregation of the white and black,” he explained. “Institutional segregation carries with it territorial segregation.” Though apartheid was not formally enacted until 1948, it grew out of these ideas: the word — literally meaning “aparthood”  — was first used the same year Smuts set out his plans. 

The strategy of territorial separation shared the same logic as the justification of aerial bombing: the creation of areas where, in the eyes of those with the bombs, there was no such thing as an innocent civilian. History repeats itself: Israeli defence minister Avigdor Lieberman said in 2018 that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” an opinion shared by the majority of Israelis in a poll conducted in June 2025. 

But at the time of the bombing of Guernica, the notion of bombing civilians (at least, those outside of the colonies) was decried as unacceptable. For example, following Guernica, the US government passed a resolution in 1938 condemning the “inhuman bombing of civilian populations.” This resolution was rapidly forgotten at the onset of WWII, as both the Allied and Axis powers murdered more than a million civilians with indiscriminate bombing raids. 

As WWII progressed, bombs grew ever more powerful, designed by scientists with the aim of making warfare ever more deadly. This meant that military assets had to be built deeper and deeper underground and protected with thicker walls.

Once more, scientific innovation was at the scene of the crime: the British engineer Barnes Wallis helped develop “earthquake bombs” such as the Grand Slam, designed to bury themselves deep into the ground in the hope of targeting underground bunkers before exploding.

Modern bombs, as used in the Iranian bombing, are scaled-up versions of the same idea, albeit through technological developments in explosives and satellite-guiding rather than in raw size. The GBU-57A/B MOP is actually two metres shorter than the Grand Slam, and weighs only slightly more. 

The fantasy of aerial bombing has always been the prospect of striking at the enemy without any risk to oneself. With the global segregation of populations into the imperialist core and its periphery, where freedom of movement is prevented by draconian immigration laws and violent border control, people living in states or regions deemed inimical to the US and its allies can face violent aerial attacks at any moment. 

It is unsurprising that Trump, with his claimed distaste for foreign wars and his love of domination, was keen on the concept of a “surgical strike” on Iran. He has likened his actions to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, repeating the spurious claim “that hit ended the war.” The aggressive attack from the supposed “candidate of peace” (according to JD Vance) proves that, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, the self-image of America as the world’s policeman remains strong. 

In this doctrine, the US has a monopoly on global violence, one that can be exercised on a whim without respect for international law. In Trump’s worldview of the Middle East as an unruly colony, the strikes against Iran are necessary to bring them into line. 

The absurdity is self-evident. The words of Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson, spoken in 1937 in a parliamentary debate about Guernica, remain all too relevant: “The facts are there, and the world knows them; and to do General Franco justice, he does not seem to take great pains to hide the facts.”