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The worm has turned. The US finally has a leader andis weak no more on stopping these Muslim terrorist murders! I bet North Korea just got the same message, too!
Last edited by texan2yankee; 04-13-2017 at 12:03 PM..
It was originally called "Massive Ordnance, Air Blast", or M.O.A.B.
After Saddam Hussein made enough threats against U.S. forces chasing him across various middle Eastern countries, he finally announced that once they got into Iraq, he would give them the "Mother of all Battles".
Lots of jokes were made about that. And this bomb, which was developed around that time, was promptly re-christened the "Mother of all bombs". It was a joke, but a good one. Its original name, "Massive Ordnance Air Blast", might have been invented just so they could use the acronym for the joke.
It's a "Fuel-air explosive" bomb. It's dropped over the target, falls with a retarding parachute, and is triggered in midair. Then it splits open and sprays explosive vapor (a lot of vapor) over a large area to mix with the air. Then a mechanism generates a spark, and boom. FAEs come in different sizes, the MOAB is the largest.
Dynamite bombs usually do their damage with concussion, flying shards of sharp steel, and flame. The MOAB does it pretty much only with concussion. It can knock buildings flat for half a mile around, kill large concentrations of troops, cave in tunnels deep underground, etc.
It's actually not the heaviest bomb ever used. England had one called the "Tall Boy" in WWII, that weighed 10,000kg (22,000 pounds). It was a conventional dynamite (or some similar explosive) bomb. They dropped a few of them on the German battleship "Tirpitz" at its dock in Norway.
Fuel-air explosive bombs have more effect than a similar weight of dynamite or other such conventional explosive. Dynamite (and the other such explosives) are a combination of explosive compounds and oxidizer, all of which make up the weight of the device core. FAE bombs contain only the explosive compounds. The rest of the chemical combination comes from oxygen in the air. So a dynamite etc. bomb would have to weigh more than the FAE, to provide the equivalent explosive power, since it must carry its own oxidizer in the bomb case.
The US just dropped the mother of all bombs on ISIS in Afghanistan -- here's what that means
“The whole point of the MOAB (Massive ordnance air blast, AKA Mother of all bombs) is that it causes over-pressure,” Dr. Adam Lowther, director of the US Air Force’s school of deterrence told Business Insider in a phone interview.
That overpressure, caused by the bomb detonating at a low altitude over the target, crushes underground tunnels and bunkers, like the kind often employed by ISIS.
...
For comparison, the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II had an explosive yield of about 15 kilotons. Lowther says the MOAB doesn’t even come close, at 0.1 or 0.2 kilotons.
So what it does is push everything towards the earth's core with a crapload of pressure.
Bombs don't win wars, but we've been dropping them for so long, why stop now?
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