Videos: How the ‘mother of all bombs’ (which the US dropped on Afghanistan) works
‘Drop one of these and you can take out one large amount of target, in one big boom.’
“Drop one of these and you can take out one large amount of target, in one big boom. That’s what it does and it does it very very well.” That’s how a military capabilities expert describes the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) in the video above, which goes into the specifics of the weapon.
The non-nuclear weapon, which is packed with about 8,500 kg of explosives, and is also called the mother of all bombs (still MOAB), was used by the United States in Afghanistan on Thursday, to target caves used by ISIS fighters.
The video below from CNN looks at the specifics of the bomb, which was originally created for the Iraq War and tested in 2003.
The bomb is of lower intensity than the atomic weapons which the United States used against Japan during World War II. This video by NBC compares how the largest non-nuclear weapon used by the US during wartime stacks up against a nuclear one.
In the US, Democratic have expressed doubts over the use of the MOAB. “We are escalating in an area I think we should be deescalating in,” California Democrat Representative Jackie Speier told CNN. “Coupled with what happened in Yemen, what happened in Syria, these are efforts that are made to suggest that we will be engaging in wars in three different countries simultaneously.”