Thursday, November 24, 2011

AF Fielding new Ground Penetrator Bomb

A B-2 Spirit soars after a refueling mission o...Image via Wikipedia
The belly of the beast known as the B-2 bomber is about to cradle a new creation.
And what a thing it is: two basketball rims high, heavier than six Ford F-150s and with a name only a janitor could love.


The belly of the beast known as the B-2 bomber is about to cradle a new creation.
And what a thing it is: two basketball rims high, heavier than six Ford F-150s and with a name only a janitor could love.
MOP being offloaded in preparation for its fir...Image via Wikipedia
The freshly tested Massive Ordnance Penetrator is built to rip deeper into underground, hardened targets than anything ever devised. The bomb has 10 times the explosive power of the last model of bunker buster, the BLU-109.
Years in the works, it's now officially a big scary piece in the tense political-military chess being played around the Iranian nuclear program. News of the MOP's readiness came soon after a United Nations agency warning of Iran's secret work toward nuclear weaponry, hidden in steel and concrete complexes, some tunneled into mountains.
"It's named for 'mopping up Iran,'" suggested John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website for military policy research. "I can't imagine what else they'd being using it for or pointing it at.
"They've been thinking about building such a thing for some time. Once they were able to come up with a design, it was just a matter of time before they built it," he said. A good part of the 20-foot weapon is the 2.5 tons of high explosive, but "the nose is just a solid piece of steel. It has a fuse, but that's not in the nose."

Read more: www.military.com/news/article/af-fielding-new-ground-penetrator-bomb.html
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