MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, will for the first time be tested with it’s explosive payload today, thus paving the way for use in Iraq as both a powerful physical and emotional weapon.
"The Tuesday test was expected to generate so much noise at the Eglin Air Force Base test site that nearby residents were warned in advance. A 10,000-foot cloud is expected to result.
The bomb carries 18,000 pounds of tritonal explosives, which have an indefinite shelf life. It replaces the Vietnam-era “Daisy Cutter,” a 15,000-pound bomb with 12,600 pounds of the less-powerful GSX explosives.
As originally conceived, the MOAB was to be used against large formations of troops and equipment or hardened above-ground bunkers. The target set has also been expanded to include deeply buried targets."
and…
“Officials say they hope it will create such a huge blast that it will rattle Iraq troops and pressure them into surrendering or not even fighting. Officials suggest perhaps the Iraqis might even mistake a MOAB blast for a nuclear detonation.”
I’d love to see a video clip of this. I’d hate to be anywhere near when the damn thing goes off. Lord have mercy on anyone that get’s in it’s way.
I can’t express how much I want to see this thing go off. BOOOOOM. I’d actually give up sex to see it. Well, I don’t have sex. I’d give up nachos to see this thing explode.
Heh, unfortunately, the might concentrated here can’t just be focused on one bad guy, whether he be a problem neighbor or Saddam. If he tries to hide in a bunker and we go after him with one of these badboys, a whole lot of other stuff is going to get messed up. It certainly will be interesting to see where they’ll decide to use this to it’s greatest advantage.
Well, yeah. Or if we ever decide to use this thing against say, North Korea. I just think it might be a bad idea to give an enemy the impression that he’s just been nuked.
During the Gulf War (Episode I), I was with the 2nd Marine Division Headquarters element, sitting very near the Fire Support Coordination Center (they had the best coffee), so we had early warning on the MRLS and Daisy Cutter missions. Someone had figured out how to call back to stateside over a TA-312 field telephone at our HMMWV, and I was on the phone with my then sweetie back in NC when a Daisy Cutter (plus other goodies) mission was run to ignite the ditches filled with oil that the Iraqis had dug, and generally disrupt the equipment and personnel in that particular area. We were maybe 6 miles from the Kuwaiti border. I don’t think the HMMWV actually was rocked up onto two wheels by the blast, but we certainly felt it and the springs were affected. My girlfriend heard it and asked “WHAT WAS THAT!?!” I told her it was one of ours, not incoming stuff, which then freaked her out because I was close (she didn’t know where we were).
In short, I wanna see that video.
And the lack of EMP and radiation may indicate it was a big boom and not a nuke.
I don’t know if I should be happy that there wasn’t “any seismic activity”, or worried that they felt a need to check on it. :eek:
I mean, cheese & crackers, folks, I’d like to think our military wouldn’t want to trigger an earthquake in enemy territory, but when Star Wars got approved I gave up on thinking that Congress and/or the military wouldn’t waste their time with kooky projects.
I bet someone named Igor worked on this.
On the one hand–cool toy. What can I say; I’ve always loved those shows they do on the demolition experts who flatten buildings.
On the other hand–:eek: The idea that things like this are even conceived of, much less developed and needed, gives me the cold grue.
I saw a video of a bomb on the news yesterday - it was big, it was deployed via a parachute to the earth and it caused a helluva an explosion. Unfortunately, the sound was muted, so I don’t know just what it was. Was it the bomb in question?
Whats the big deal? i tried looking up the explosive power of tritonal explosives on the internet, and i couldn’t find info on how powerful they were compared to TNT, but a bomb with 18000 lbs. of explosives in it is not a big bomb. A suitcase nuclear weapon (1 kiloton, roughly 0.002% as strong as the Soviet made Tzar bomba nuclear weapon) is as powerful as 2,000,000 lbs of TNT.
What are the odds that the name Mother Of All Bombs was chosen first, after which there was a furious scrambling to find a “real” name that used the same inital letters?
You mean like how IBM came up with the term “spooling”, and then retconned the word to stand for “Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On Line”?
(Or, for that matter, the POWER architecture, which was the basis for the modern PowerPC microprocessor – IBM retconned the name to stand for “Performance Optimized With Enhanced RISC”.)
