‘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”.

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.

Here is more about what Trump recently said, and what US presidents have said and done before.

What did Trump say in his speech about Iran?
During his prime-time address to the nation, Trump said, referring to Iran: “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks, we’re going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong.”

Trump also said “discussions are ongoing”, adding that the conflict could end over the same period.

The current war on Iran began on February 28 when the US and Israel launched their attacks. Tehran hit back, targeting Israel and 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 ages” threat implies that the US will destroy structures and buildings that characterise a modern society, “then this would be illegal because it implies directing attacks against civilian objects”.