In the early hours of June 22, under the obsidian veil of an Iranian night sky, the rumble that shattered the silence wasn’t an earthquake, nor a rogue missile test – it was the unmistakable echo of America’s return to high-stakes preemptive warfare.

Without warning and under a tightly sealed cloak of military secrecy, the United States launched a strategic airstrike that not only caught Tehran off guard, but stunned much of the world. In less than an hour, three of Iran’s most fortified nuclear facilities – Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan – were either reduced to rubble or rendered inoperable by a mix of stealth bombers, submarine-launched cruise missiles, and the world’s most powerful non-nuclear penetrating bomb.

Fordow, buried deep beneath the mountains near Qom, and once considered immune to conventional air power, was directly targeted by the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound behemoth that had never before been used in combat. Simultaneously, waves of Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from US submarines in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, neutralised command centres, radar installations, and power grids surrounding the Natanz and Isfahan complexes — each a crucial link in Iran’s nuclear fuel cycle.

While official statements from the Pentagon described the mission as a “limited but decisive tactical operation", the implications were anything but limited. For the first time since the covert cyber campaign known as........

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