‘Bomb back to the Stone Age’: US history of threats and carpet bombing

United States President Donald Trump warned Iran on Wednesday that he would bomb the country “back to the stone ages”, reports Al Jazeera.

Minutes later, his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth doubled down on that rhetoric, with a short post on X that only said: “Back to the Stone Age.”

To bomb a place to the Stone Age typically refers to carpet bombing it, destroying all its modern infrastructure so it reaches a primitive state.

But these threats from Trump and the US aren’t novel �" instead, they build on Washington’s decades-old legacy of threatening to carpet bomb countries during its military campaigns, often delivering on those threats.