Curtis LeMay (🔔 old timers) - Yes Trump went "Stone Age" last night. [View all]

LeMay has been the inspiration for several memorable movie characters. See below.

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.”

Has the US made similar threats before?
The phrase “bombing back to the stone ages” is widely associated with US Air Force officer Curtis LeMay, in the context of US threats against North Vietnam in LeMay’s 1965 book, Mission with LeMay.

“We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age,” he wrote. LeMay, who had played a central role in executing the World War II carpet bombing of Japanese cities in which between 240,000 and 900,000 people were killed, had by the time of the Vietnam War risen in rank to chief of Air Staff before he retired the year his book was published.

While he was no longer in office during some of the bloodiest US campaigns in Vietnam, American leaders appeared to follow through on Curtis’s advice.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/2/bomb-back-to-the-stone-age-us-history-of-threats-and-carpet-bombing


According to Michael S. Sherry, "Few American military officers of this century have been more feared, reviled, and ridiculed than Curtis E. LeMay."[86] According to Fred Kaplan:

Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film about nuclear-war plans run amok, is widely heralded as one of the greatest satires in American political or movie history. ... It was no secret—it would have been obvious to many viewers in 1964—that General Ripper looked a lot like Curtis LeMay, the cigar-chomping, gruff-talking general."[87]
University of Notre Dame Professor Dan Lindley points out parallels between LeMay and the characters of Buck Turgidson and Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, including close paraphrasing of statements by LeMay.[88]

Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, authors of the novel Seven Days in May (later to be a 1964 film starring Kirk Douglas), conducted interviews with LeMay who was angry with Kennedy for refusing to provide air support for the Cuban rebels in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.[89][90] The character of General James Mattoon Scott was believed to have been inspired by both LeMay and General Edwin Walker.[91]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay