What is MOAB – Mother of All Bombs?

It’s a weapon that justifies the use of the word ‘terrifying’ to describe its power and marks a deadly ramping up of America’s military initiative abroad.

The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, nicknamed MOAB, or ‘Mother of All Bombs’, is a 21,600 pound, GPS-guided munition that is America’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb.

Almost 20 feet long, it truly is the queen of the so-called ‘bunker busters’.

Deployed from as high as 20,000 feet, the MOAB races to the ground at supersonic speed before slamming its way toward a hardened target through layered subterranean defenses such as native rock, reinforced concrete, and steel plates.

The 11-tonnes of TNT warhead then bursts about 6 feet (1.8 meters) above the ground.

The idea behind an ‘air burst’ weapon, as opposed to a weapon that explodes on impact with the ground, is to increase its destructive range.

A bomb that penetrates the ground and then bursts tends to send all of its energy either down into the ground or straight up into the air.

An air burst weapon sends a great deal of its energy out to the side.

As a precision-guided ‘smart bomb’ the MOAB is designed to cause maximum damage to bunkers, tunnels and other areas that can typically withstand even large standard bombs or artillery strikes.

It can kill people within several hundred metres of the point of detonation, and cause lung damage and other injuries over an even wider area.

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