President Harry S. Truman authorized the first nuclear attack in the history of the world, on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945. Around 70,000 people, nearly all of them civilians, were vaporized, crushed, burned, or irradiated to death almost immediately. Another 50,000 probably died soon after. The bomb exploded with the force of more than 15,000 tons of TNT.

But the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and its supporting strike group launched the “largest airstrike in the history of the world” from an aircraft carrier on Somalia in February, said Adm. James Kilby, the Navy’s acting chief of naval operations, while speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations’ Robert B. McKeon Endowed Series on Military Strategy and Leadership on Monday.

The strike involved 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets that launched from the Truman as the carrier strike group operated in the Red Sea, a Navy official told The Intercept on condition of anonymity. When it was over, Somalia had been pummeled by around 125,000 pounds of munitions, according to Kilby. Those 60 tons of bombs killed just 14 people, according to Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

A Navy official clarified that Kilby’s “off the cuff” remarks did not mean the airstrike was comparable to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II or even other massive bombing raids like President Richard Nixon’s 1972 Linebacker II raids in North Vietnam, also known as the “Christmas bombings.”

“This was a time span of minutes, it was everything hitting, and all of it coming from one aircraft carrier. That’s historically significant.”

Other strikes from aircraft carriers have been larger in terms of bomb tonnage dropped during a single day, including during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and during the Afghan War, according to the official. “It’s the effort from a single carrier in such a short time span,” he said, noting that the Hornets each struck their target in rapid succession. “This was a time span of minutes, it was everything hitting, and all of it coming from one aircraft carrier. That’s historically significant.”

The official refused to offer further information, which he said would constitute “tactical details.”

At the time of the mega-strike in the Horn of Africa, AFRICOM downplayed the scale of the attack using boilerplate language. “In coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, U.S. Africa Command conducted airstrikes against ISIS-Somalia on Feb. 1, 2025,” reads the press release. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS-Somalia operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth also offered a similarly

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