U.S. to ISIS: Meet the ‘Mother of All Bombs’
U.S. biggest non-nuke hits Afghanistan Bomb made in ’03, but not used before
THE UNITED STATES unleashed “the Mother of All Bombs” on a network of ISIS caves and tunnels in eastern Afghanistan Thursday, the first combat use of the nation’s most powerful non-nuclear explosive.
The $16 million explosive — officially called the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast — was dropped about an hour after sundown on a tunnel complex in the Achin district of Nangarhar province, close to the Pakistani border, military officials said.
The Pentagon offered no immediate estimate of deaths or damage after the 21,600-pound behemoth was dropped from the back of a cargo plane and used a GPS-based navigation system to pound its target.
President Trump called the bombing “another successful job” during a press event at the White House.
“We’re very, very proud of our military,” he told reporters. “It was another successful event.”
He called the U.S. military the “greatest” in the world but declined to elaborate on whether he closely managed the unprecedented strike or delegated it.
“We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing, and frankly that’s why they’ve been so successful lately,” he said.
The U.S. estimates some 600 to 800 Islamic State fighters are present in Afghanistan, mostly in Nangarhar.
Ismail Shinwari, the governor of Achin district, said the strike hit a remote mountainous area with no immediate reports of civilian injuries.
Trump positioned the attack as evidence his new administration — still in its first 100 days — was taking a harder line than that of former President Barack Obama.
“If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that, really, to what’s happened over the last eight years, you’ll see there’s a tremendous difference, tremendous difference,” he said.
But not everyone was impressed, with some experts pointing out bombings in the area have been ongoing for years, though with little fanfare.
“Of 12,000 bombs U.S. dropped on Afghanistan in past 5 yrs, MOAB the first to be honored with its own press release (posted w/in hours),” Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tweeted.
The bomb dropped in Afghanistan had 11 tons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an explosive yield of 15,000 tons of TNT.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the strike targeted an area where ISIS militants had been able to “move around freely” and target American personnel.
“The United States takes the fight against ISIS very seriously, and in order to defeat
the group, we must deny them operational space, which we did,” he said in his daily press briefing.
Spicer said proper precautions were taken before the drop, but he punted follow-up questions to the Department of Defense.
The commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan said the bombing was a necessary response to recent expansions of ISIS-K, the Afghanistan branch of the terror group.
He said the ISIS fighters were using roadside bombs, bunkers and tunnels “to thicken their defense.”
On Saturday, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar, 37, of Edgewood, Md., died from wounds suffered in a Nangarhar firefight, officials said.
“This is the right munition to reduce these obstacles and maintain the momentum of our offensive against ISIS-K,” Gen. John W. Nicholson said in a statement about the MOAB drop.
The bomb, often described as a psychological tool as much as a physical devastation device, was developed in 2003 for potential use in the Iraq War and was tested at least twice that year but never used on the battlefield.
It cost some $314 million to develop and produce the 20 GBU-43/B bombs in the U.S. arsenal, according to military equipment website Deagel.com.
The munition reportedly packs 40% more power than the “daisy cutter” bombs used to pound the caves of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001.
A CNN report on a test at a Florida Air Force base noted that the blast unleashed a plume of smoke that rose more than 10,000 feet in the air and was visible from 40 miles away.
“It looked like a big mushroom cloud filled with flames as it grew and grew and grew,” Eglin Air Force Base spokesman Jake Swinson said at the time.
“It was one of the most awesome spectacles I’ve seen.”
In response, Russia touted its production of what it called “the Father of All Bombs,” which it said was four times more powerful than America’s explosive.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has been developing a new 15-ton guided bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which would be able to knock out Iran’s nuclear reactors.
Thursday’s big blast came the same day the Pentagon admitted that an Americanled air strike mistakenly killed 18 Syrian fighters allied with the United States in Syria earlier this week.
It also followed the unexpected U.S. air strike on a Syrian chemical weapons compound last week — Trump's first major military action in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s slaughter of his own people, including children.
As a presidential candidate, Trump vowed astonishing aggression in the battle against ISIS, even saying that the United States should kill the families of terrorists.
He promised that, if elected, he would “knock the hell out of” ISIS.