Da Bomb Meet the Air Force's "palace buster."

[rossana <rossana at comodinoposta.org>]

http://www.slate.com/id/2080106/

Da Bomb Meet the Air Force's "palace buster."

In-Depth Coverage

By Fred Kaplan

So, what about this Mother of All Bombs? Last Tuesday, the U.S. Air 
Force tested a new and very powerful weapon called the Massive Ordnance 
Aerial Burst. The resulting acronym, MOAB, spells out the more colorful 
title as well-no doubt, deliberately so, as a snarling in-joke reference 
to the "mother of all battles" that Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf waged 
against Iraq in '91. Was MOAB, in fact, tailor-made for the impending 
Gulf War II? How will it be used, against what sorts of targets? And 
just how big a Mother is it?

First, it's big, but not that big. On the night of the test, ABC News 
reported that the bomb was "similar to a small nuclear weapon." Time 
magazine, in strikingly similar language, reported that it "packs the 
punch of a small nuclear weapon." Let's do the math. The MOAB weighs 
21,000 pounds, including 18,000 pounds' worth of high explosives. That's 
9 tons. The teeniest nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile has the 
blast-power of 1,000 tons (one kiloton, in the parlance). In other 
words, had Time's reporter been a bit less giddy, he would have written 
that MOAB (which, by the way, the Air Force pronounces "mo-ab") "packs 
one one-hundredth the punch of a small nuclear weapon."

Nor does such a big conventional bomb mark any great technological 
achievement. During World War II, Britain's Royal Air Force built a 
22,000-pound bomb called the Grand Slam, which Lancaster bombers dropped 
on Nazi U-boat pens. The U.S. Army Air Force built a 44,000-pound bomb, 
called the T-12 Cloudmaker, though the war ended before it was used. 
(Again, by comparison, the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima released the 
explosive energy of 13,000 tons, or 26,000,000 pounds.)

Still, 18,000 pounds is a lot for a conventional bomb that falls from 
the sky. It is, by the Air Force's own labeling, a "massive ordnance" 
(even if by no stretch a weapon of mass destruction). It delivers about 
10 times the blast of most U.S. Air Force and Navy bombs ("smart" or 
otherwise). It's about one-fifth larger than the BLU-82 "Daisy Cutters," 
which, at 15,000 pounds, were until now the most powerful bombs in the 
U.S. non-nuclear arsenal.

According to Jim "Jake" Swinson, public affairs officer at Eglin Air 
Force Base, where the new bomb was developed, MOAB is meant to be a 
"modernization" of the Daisy Cutter. It's a fair inference, therefore, 
that it will be used for much the same kinds of missions. The Daisy 
Cutters not only make a huge explosion, they are designed to go off 
about six feet before they hit the ground. They don't plow much of a 
crater, but they flatten almost everything (people and most buildings) 
within a radius of a few hundred feet. In Vietnam, they were used to 
create instant helicopter landing-pads in the middle of thickly foliated 
jungles.

Some Daisy Cutters-how many has never been revealed-were used in the '91 
Gulf War. According to the official U.S. Air Force study of that war, 
they were dropped from MC-130 gunships "to clear mine fields and support 
psychological operations." Swinson explains what is meant by this latter 
term: "If you're facing a couple of divisions and you wanted to give 
them an opportunity to surrender, you could drop a few of these things. 
They'd see and hear how effective they were, and the commander could 
calculate that they might all do better to give up. Or if they didn't 
give up, they'd be so frightened, they'd dig themselves in to the point 
where they'd no longer be effective combatants."

Another conceivable use for either Daisy Cutters or MOABs, though 
Swinson chose not to speculate on such matters, might be to pulverize a 
couple of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces-as a potent symbolic 
gesture, if nothing else. (John Pike, head of GlobalSecurity.org, agrees 
with this scenario and dubs the MOAB a "palace-buster.")

One problem with the Daisy Cutter, from an operational standpoint, is 
that it drops on a parachute. The pilot has to fly right over the target 
and unload the bomb from a very low altitude, so it doesn't drift with 
the wind-a very dangerous thing to do if enemy air-defense batteries are 
anywhere near. MOAB, on the other hand, works the same way as modern 
smart bombs: It's guided to the target either by GPS satellites or, if 
those fail for some reason, by inertial gyroscopes. This means the pilot 
can drop it from far above the range of any air-defense radar. MOAB also 
has wings; they're not powered, but they do allow the bomb to glide 
toward the target from a distance of at least a few miles, providing the 
pilot an additional measure of safety. To a distant observer, the 
explosion would come seemingly from nowhere.

Was the MOAB designed specifically for the coming Iraq war? In one 
sense, no. In another sense, almost certainly. The idea for this bomb 
has been around for many years. Eglin Air Force Base, which is in 
Florida, is home of the Air Armament Center. Every aerial bomb and 
missile that the U.S. Air Force has built in recent years was first 
hatched at this center, along with many, many more that never made it 
that far. As Swinson describes it, "We've got a think tank down here 
that's out of this world. We have this genius named Greg Jenkins who has 
these ideas that are so far off the map, he has to prove they can 
exist-and he usually does." A few years ago, the Air Force asked Eglin 
to come up with some ideas for the next-generation gunship. The center's 
chief engineer, Steve Butler, formed a team called Task Force Warlord 
that, Swinson says, came up with 184 ideas. With so many on the docket, 
a couple will probably be approved. "Some of our concepts," Swinson 
says, "stay on the shelf for years before the Air Force decides they're 
needed."

Eglin has been strongly pushing of late for weapons along the lines of 
MOAB. Butler, the chief engineer, said last October at a Precision 
Strike Technology Symposium at Johns Hopkins University's Applied 
Physics Lab, "We'd like to create a family of weapons of very large size 
that are uniquely available to go after certain targets."

Another in this family of weapons is Big Blue, a 30,000-pound "cousin" 
of MOAB that's designed to penetrate the earth and blow up deep bunkers. 
Swinson says that as far as he knows, Big Blue doesn't exist yet. 
"However," he adds, folksily, "a lot of things that 'don't exist' do 
exist." (It may be worth noting that John Pike, who follows new weapons 
programs assiduously, says he'd never heard of MOAB-or anything 
answering to its description-before last Tuesday's test.)

Though MOAB was on the shelf for years, the coming war probably did 
trigger its move to production. One clue is the acronym. The people who 
name new weapons sometimes have a dark sense of humor about their job; 
it's inconceivable that they devised this name without intending the 
double entendre. Another clue is the timing. According to the Air Force, 
Eglin received the order to put the concept into development last 
October. To go from initial development to operational testing in just 
five months indicates an accelerated schedule. Last October was when 
President Bush started sending troops to the gulf in a serious way. 
Coincidence? I don't think so.