Tehran / Washington — The United States has hurled its heaviest conventional hammer into the Iran war, as waves of B‑52 Stratofortress bombers roared across the region to pound Iranian missile sites in what Pentagon officials call a “strategic night of reckoning.”

Taking off from distant airbases and refuelling in flight, the lumbering giants arrived over Iran under cover of a dense electronic‑warfare screen. At pre‑planned H‑hour, their bomb bays snapped open, releasing carpets of precision‑guided munitions onto Revolutionary Guard missile brigades, storage depots and suspected launch tunnels stretching from Khuzestan in the southwest to the desert belts east of Tehran.

Local residents reported a continuous rumble in the sky followed by rolling chains of explosions that lit up ridgelines and plains alike. Amateur videos show multiple secondary blasts as buried rockets, fuel tanks and ammo stacks detonated in spectacular fireballs. Western intelligence sources say early imagery suggests dozens of launchers and support vehicles were destroyed, along with key command vans used to coordinate salvos at Israel and US bases in the Gulf.

In Tehran, state media condemned the B‑52 raids as “carpet terrorism,” insisting many missiles had already been dispersed and vowing that “Iran’s response capability remains intact.” But unusually subdued IRGC spokesmen admitted to “painful losses” in several brigades and promised that surviving units would “adapt and strike from new horizons.”

Analysts warn that deploying B‑52s — Cold War icons built to crush hardened targets at scale — signals Washington is no longer focused on pinprick deterrence, but on systematically grinding down Iran’s missile machine, even at the risk of driving the conflict into a far more unpredictable and dangerous phase.