New Delhi: In an address to Americans and the global community late Wednesday, US President Donald Trump laid out a now-familiar narrative of US dominance over Iran. His speech was packed with sweeping statements that Tehran’s forces have been decimated, that “there’s no country like us anywhere in the world, and we’re in great shape for the future”, and warnings that more strikes could come if no deal is reached to end the conflict.
And then, as he announced US plans to destroy Iran, came the line: “We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.”
This isn’t the first time the Stone Age has been referenced by the US. In 2006, the US allegedly threatened Pakistan in similar words, and back in the 1960s, similar language was used by US Air Force officer Curtis LeMay in his memoir in the context of the Vietnam War.
A military idiom, “bombing a place to the Stone Age” means to completely destroy a society until it is reduced to a primitive, pre-industrial state.
Trump’s threat Wednesday didn’t go unnoticed.
In response, the Iran Embassy in India stated on their official X handle Thursday: “We will not be driven back to the Stone Age by your bombing. We are a nation with 7,000 years of civilization. History knows us well. What is clear is this: it is YOU who have carried the killing of children and crimes against humanity from the Stone Age in the modern world.”
We will not be driven back to the Stone Age by your bombings.
We are a nation with 7,000 years of civilization.
History knows us well.
What is clear is this: it is YOU who have carried the killing of children and crimes against humanity from the Stone Age into the modern world.
— Iran in India (@Iran_in_India) April 2, 2026
And their foreign minister also posted.
There's one striking difference between the present and the Stone Age: there was no oil or gas being pumped in the Middle East back then.
Are POTUS and Americans who put him in office sure that they want to turn back the clock?
— Seyed Abbas Araghchi (@araghchi) April 2, 2026
Previously, the US is said to have threatened Pakistan in a similar vein.
Back in 2006, then Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf told CBS television in an interview that the then Bush administration in the US had threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” after the 9/11 attacks if the country did not cooperate with the war on terror.
He said the threat was made by assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan’s intelligence director. “The intelligence director told me that (Mr Armitage) said, ‘be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the Stone Age’,” Musharraf was quoted as saying.
Armitage, in an interview with NBC News, later said his remarks during the conversation were misrepresented.
And in the 1960s, LeMay wrote in Mission with LeMay: My Story: “My solution to the problem (of North Vietnam) would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with air power or naval power, not with ground forces.”
Interestingly, according to an article in Asia-Pacific Journal looking at the history of “back to the Stone Age”, the phrase is “hardly original”.
The article says LeMay “cribbed it” from a 1960s column by humourist Art Buchwald, “who used the phrase to caricature” the Republican party’s “attitude toward Vietnam”.
Buchwald caricatured the stakes of the 1964 US election as the then President Richard Nixon’s Republicans were known as habitual bombers, it says. Buchwald’s original pun played on the idea of a “time bomb”, a neat bit of wordplay suggesting that relentless bombing would quite literally rewind history.
All of it makes the US government’s commitment to the phrase all the more impressive.
What began as satire and criticism wrapped in irony—targeting Republicans—gradually came to be repurposed into actual rhetoric. In a bleak way, it shows how a joke about excessive militarism seems to have become standard operating language for it.
Today, the only thing that’s really travelled through time is the joke itself.
Mrinalini Manda is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism, currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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