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| The 'Mother of All Bombs' Isn't Tha |
| The 'Mother of All Bombs' Isn't That Big. Why Did It Unsettle Us So Much?
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 18-April-2017
11:0:12 AM |
| On Thursday, the United States dropped a bomb in Afghanistan, near a place called Achin. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast blew up a cave complex used by Islamic State fighters - and, shortly thereafter, the media. The coverage of the MOAB was an incredible mix of hysteria and hardware pornography. "Fox & Friends" even soundtracked the gun-camera video of the explosion.
Nearly 16 years after 9/11, we remain at war in Afghanistan. The U.S. Air Force has already dropped 457 weapons there in 2017. Something about this one, though, made people a little crazy. Maybe it's the nickname: Mother of All Bombs. Why so much attention to one bomb, and so little attention to the lingering war?
Yes, the bomb was big. The MOAB explodes with a force equivalent to about 11 tons of TNT. It is the most powerful conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal, although the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is heavier. Different munitions are better for different missions, but the overall destructive power of the MOAB is similar to other bomber payloads, such as a fully loaded B-52 bomber carrying more than 50 750-pound bombs. The MOAB is, itself, a replacement for an older, only slightly less massive bomb popularly known as the Daisy Cutter, which the United States used to terrible effect in Vietnam, Iraq and, yes, Afghanistan.
The MOAB certainly shocked and awed observers here. Several news organizations reported that the GBU-43 had a yield comparable to the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. That is nonsense: The GBU-43 explodes with a force of about 11 tons of TNT. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was about 1,000 times
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