Jim Miklasheski just reported the pentagon has delivered the first moab to iraq...just incase the iraqi troops dig in and refuse to give up.
First MOAB has been delivered to Iraq...
- Thread starter bentwookie
- Start date
I first read it as "First MOAB has been delivered on Iraq" and was left wondering what we dropped it on
I heard there are 10 divisions of regular Iraqi military still in the North. Just one MOAB thinning out one of them may convince the rest to go home.
mother of all bombs, conventional anyway. pretty much an updated daisy cutter, but with more explosives, a guidance system.. around 24,000lbs total weight or thereabouts.
Interesting. In other words, our way of sidestepping using nuclear weapons by making a conventional bomb more powerful than the only nuclear weapons ever dropped in war. Man do we think up some interesting ways to kill each other and get away with it....
the only reason nukes are taboo is because they leave radiation on the land. Otherwise it would have been used a lot more.
Not to mention the MOAB is a fuel-air bomb. It doesn't leave an impact crater, and most hard targets remain standing. It just creates enough overpressure to flatten several square blocks worth of soldiers, vehicles, and weapons.
Close. "Mother Of All Bombs" is it's nickname. The real name that MOAB stands for is "Massive Ordinance Air Burst". It is basically an updated version of the "Daisy Cutter". More explosive (about 18,000lbs of high explosives), and it explodes above ground, about 300ft IIRC. Also, it makes a mushroom cloud that could fool enemy soldiers into thinking they have been nuked.
What are you talking about? According to the OP of a thread I got tossed out of this morning (by a Mod) the war is over and all that's left to do is "mop up".
I don't think they could use the MOAB unless the Iraqi troops were out away from civilian areas. They still control Tikrit and Mosul right now, and I imagine there are large numbers of civilians there.
Very innapropriate. At this point in the war, we should be looking to decrease bombings and further destruction of the country to a minimum. Why are they sending over these huge bombs? What kind of message does that send to Iraqis? It seems to be that the military chiefs are not happy with just testing these bombs at a test site, they are itching to actually see it in action and see how much destruction it will do. BTW, would you consider this a WMD? I think I would.
Actually, you are both wrong, but Tiger is a lot closer than sparkyclarky. A kiloton is 1,000 tons. The MOAB has less than 20,000lbs of explosives (I forget the exact figure), or put another way, less than 10 tons. 10tons/1,000tons = 1/100. Thats right, a MOAB yields less than 1% of one tenth the power of the smallest nuclear bomb used in warfare.
So next time before b!tching about the US dropping "conventional boms more powerful than nukes", try not to be off, by say, any more than TWO orders of magnitude. It would be an improvement.
Originally posted by: Insane3D
18,000lbs...20,000lbs total weight I believe.
I think you are right about the explosives weight, but I think the gross weight is higher...
EDIT: gross weight is 21,000 pounds
February 27, 2003: The U.S. Air Force is developing a new, 2nd generation, ten ton large, low air burst bomb. It will replace the older "Daisy Cutter" 7.5 ton bomb developed during the 1960s. This was a 7.5 ton bomb using a semi-liquid explosive for clearing landing zones in the Vietnam jungle. The terms "Daisy Cutter" actually comes from the four foot probe at the bottom of the bomb which triggered the explosion without creating a crater (helicopters don't like to land in craters.) The probe was later replaced with a radar altimeter fuze, but the nickname "Daisy Cutter" stuck.
The official designation was BLU-82 (or "Big Blue"). Until the BLU-82 came along, the biggest non-nuclear explosion obtainable was with a FAE (Fuel Air Explosives). FAE works by dropping a bomb that is actually a large aerosol dispenser. When the FAE "explodes" it first dispenses a large cloud of flammable material (anything like gasoline or propane will work). The cloud is then ignited and huge explosion results. There's one drawback, the size and density of the aerosol cloud depends a lot on the wind, air temperature and humidity. So the power of the explosion will vary a lot. But it's difficult to get a FAE to work in a bomb larger than 2000 pounds. The replacement for the BLU-82 bomb, called MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst) simply uses nine tons of more powerful tritonal explosives, rather that 6.3 tons of the slurry of ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminum used in the BLU-82. In dry, dusty conditions, the Daisy Cutter produces a mushroom cloud similar to that created by a nuclear explosion (and for the same reason, the sheer size of the explosion creates an upward pull that sends up a "mushroom" of smoke and dust on a column of smoke). In addition to a more powerful explosion, MOAB doesn?t need a parachute, like the Daisy Cutter, but uses a GPS (like JDAM) and an aerodynamic body to detonate the bomb at a precise area. Thus the MOAB can be dropped from a higher altitude (like outside the range of machine-guns and rifles). Like the Daisy Cutter, MOAB is shoved out the back of a cargo aircraft (usually a C-130, but since the MOAB uses GPS and higher altitude drops, the C-17 can probably be used as well.)
MOAB is a highly destructive and terrifying weapon. If used in Iraq, it would demoralize any Iraqi troops in the vicinity who survived the explosion. The force of a MOAB explosion is sufficient to knock over tanks and kill any people within several hundred meters of the detonation. After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States started to get rid of it's various FAE weapons. But some were left in the inventory when the Afghanistan came along and the success of Daisy Cutters there, plus the new Russian research in FAE weapons, led to the new American research effort. There may be larger, or simply more powerful, FAE weapons in the works. But for the moment, MOAB, using pretty old fashioned technology, is the biggest non-nuclear bomb around.
The official designation was BLU-82 (or "Big Blue"). Until the BLU-82 came along, the biggest non-nuclear explosion obtainable was with a FAE (Fuel Air Explosives). FAE works by dropping a bomb that is actually a large aerosol dispenser. When the FAE "explodes" it first dispenses a large cloud of flammable material (anything like gasoline or propane will work). The cloud is then ignited and huge explosion results. There's one drawback, the size and density of the aerosol cloud depends a lot on the wind, air temperature and humidity. So the power of the explosion will vary a lot. But it's difficult to get a FAE to work in a bomb larger than 2000 pounds. The replacement for the BLU-82 bomb, called MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Burst) simply uses nine tons of more powerful tritonal explosives, rather that 6.3 tons of the slurry of ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminum used in the BLU-82. In dry, dusty conditions, the Daisy Cutter produces a mushroom cloud similar to that created by a nuclear explosion (and for the same reason, the sheer size of the explosion creates an upward pull that sends up a "mushroom" of smoke and dust on a column of smoke). In addition to a more powerful explosion, MOAB doesn?t need a parachute, like the Daisy Cutter, but uses a GPS (like JDAM) and an aerodynamic body to detonate the bomb at a precise area. Thus the MOAB can be dropped from a higher altitude (like outside the range of machine-guns and rifles). Like the Daisy Cutter, MOAB is shoved out the back of a cargo aircraft (usually a C-130, but since the MOAB uses GPS and higher altitude drops, the C-17 can probably be used as well.)
MOAB is a highly destructive and terrifying weapon. If used in Iraq, it would demoralize any Iraqi troops in the vicinity who survived the explosion. The force of a MOAB explosion is sufficient to knock over tanks and kill any people within several hundred meters of the detonation. After the 1991 Gulf War, the United States started to get rid of it's various FAE weapons. But some were left in the inventory when the Afghanistan came along and the success of Daisy Cutters there, plus the new Russian research in FAE weapons, led to the new American research effort. There may be larger, or simply more powerful, FAE weapons in the works. But for the moment, MOAB, using pretty old fashioned technology, is the biggest non-nuclear bomb around.
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