United States President Donald Trump warned Iran on Wednesday that he would bomb the country “back to the Stone Age.”
A few minutes later, his Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doubled down on that rhetoric, with a short post on X that said simply: “Back to the Stone Age.”
Bombing a place in the Stone Age generally means carpet bombing it, destroying all its modern infrastructure so that it returns to its primitive state.
But these threats from Trump and the US are not new – instead, they are based on Washington’s decades-long legacy of threatening to carpet bomb countries during their military operations, and often carrying out those threats.
Here’s more about what Trump has said recently, and what US presidents have said and done in the past.
What did Trump say about Iran in his speech?
During his prime-time address to the nation, Trump said, referring to Iran, “We’re going to hit them very hard in the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.”
Trump also said that “discussions are continuing”, adding that the conflict could end within this period.
The current war on Iran began on February 28 when the US and Israel launched their attacks. Tehran retaliated and targeted Israel and the Gulf countries.
More than 2,000 Iranians have been killed in the war so far. Thousands of civilian sites, including hospitals, schools, universities and pharmaceutical factories, have been attacked by Israel and the US.
Janina Dill, a global security professor at the University of Oxford, told Al Jazeera that if Trump’s “Stone Age” threat meant the US would destroy the structures and buildings that characterize modern society, “then that would be illegal because it implies directing attacks against civilian objects”.
The structures and buildings that characterize modern society include energy infrastructure, telecommunications structures, civil industries, educational, cultural or medical facilities.
“The announcement that they will yet again be targeted wholesale would be a systematic and serious violation of the long-standing laws of war,” Dill said.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), international humanitarian law prohibits the deliberate targeting of civilian objects during war.
“This statement is particularly appalling because it refutes the claim that the United States is fighting the Iranian regime, which more broadly means a war against the Iranian people and society.”
Iran is home to one of the oldest human civilizations – and its empires built canals, highways, armies, modern currency systems and made major advances in science, medicine and philosophy – more than a millennium before the birth of the Americas.
Has America given such threats before?
The phrase “bombing into the Stone Age” is widely associated with American Air Force officer Curtis LeMay, in reference to American threats against North Vietnam in LeMay’s 1965 book, Mission with LeMay.
“We will bomb them and take them back to the Stone Age,” he wrote. LeMay, who played a central role in carrying out carpet bombing of Japanese cities in World War II that killed 240,000 to 900,000 people, rose to the rank of Air Force chief of staff by the time of the Vietnam War, before retiring the same year his book was published.
While he was not in office during some of the bloodiest American operations in Vietnam, American leaders appeared to act on Curtis’s advice.
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War began as France attempted to re-establish control over its colony of Indochina after World War II. Communist-led Vietnamese nationalists, the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, fought the French and defeated them in 1954.
Vietnam was then temporarily divided along the 17th parallel: North Vietnam under a communist government led by Ho Chi Minh, and South Vietnam as an anti-communist state supported by the United States.
The US continually deepened its involvement, from financial aid and military advisors to the South Vietnamese government in the 1950s to full-scale military intervention in the mid-1960s, including large troop deployments and widespread bombing.
In December 1972, President Richard Nixon ordered a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, particularly Hanoi and Haiphong, known in the US as the “Christmas Bombing”.
The US carried out intensive bombing, claiming to hit enemy positions and supply routes in South Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos.
Overall, millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded in the war.
first gulf war
In August 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, accusing the leaders of overproducing oil to lower prices and damaging Iraq’s war-torn economy after a prolonged conflict with Iran in the 1980s.
Iraq justified the invasion by reviving its long-standing territorial claim on Kuwait’s Ottoman and British-era borders.
Iraqi forces quickly overran Kuwait, capturing its capital within days and forcing Kuwait’s 13th emir to flee to Saudi Arabia. Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah led the Kuwaiti government in exile while Iraqi forces controlled his homeland.
In January 1991, the United States led a global coalition of several dozen nations, including Western, Arab, and other Muslim-majority states, to expel Iraqi forces at the request of Kuwait and several of its Gulf neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia. This attack was named Operation Desert Storm.
Meanwhile, former US Secretary of State James Baker met Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva on January 9. At that meeting, Baker threatened to bomb Iraq “back to the Stone Age” if the US did not withdraw from Kuwait.
Some analysts say that, especially since the 1991 Gulf War, the United States increasingly relied on precision-guided weapons and targeting specific military and strategic sites rather than indiscriminately bombing entire cities.
But other analysts argue that the US bombing of Iraq was similar to carpet bombing in practice, as US forces dropped large numbers of unguided, or “dumb” bombs, causing widespread damage to infrastructure and urban areas.
post 9/11
On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda hijackers seized four American commercial airliners. Two were blown into the World Trade Center towers in New York, another hit the Pentagon in Virginia, and one crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after protests by passengers.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed, and the attacks prompted the United States to launch a global “War on Terrorism” targeting al-Qaeda and other groups designated as terrorist organizations.
Following the attacks, Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, who was president from 2001 to 2008, later reported that senior US official Richard Armitage had warned that his country would be “bombed back to the Stone Age” if it refused to join the war against the Taliban.
Has the US carpet bombed other countries?
During World War II, American carpet bombed Japanese cities as well as cities in Asia, including the Philippines, which were controlled by Japanese forces.
During the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953, the US bombed North Korea heavily, with some officials saying nearly every city was destroyed. The US bombing destroyed 95 percent of North Korea’s power generation capacity and more than 80 percent of its buildings.
