MOAB-The Mother of All Bombs-Wanna take a RIde?

On March 11, 2003, the United States Air Force tested one of the largest conventional bombs ever built.

It is called the MOAB Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB) weapon and is shown here being prepared for testing at the Eglin Air Force Armament Center on March 11, 2003.

The Pentagon hopes the test will pave the way for use of the bomb against critical targets on the surface and underground..

The MOAB is a precision-guided munition weighing 21,700 pounds and will be dropped from a C-130 Hercules aircraft ( C-130) for the test. It will be the largest non-nuclear conventional weapon in existence.

The Air Force released video of the Tuesday's test, which showed the bomb falling through the sky and bursting into a massive fireball upon impact. A cloud of smoke then rose hundreds of feet into the sky

Video of C-130 deployment In this video, supplied by the U.S. Department of Defense, you can see the pallet and bomb come out of the back of the plane and then separate from one another within a few seconds.

Due to the size of the ordnance, the item is extracted from either an MC-130 Talon II or “Slick” C-130 Hercules by way of a parachute.

The bomb then accelerates rapidly to its terminal velocity.

It was the final test of the new Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, and the first to use actual explosives. Two previously undisclosed tests, one in February and one on Friday, were inert.

The video was released in hopes of placing additional pressure on the Iraqi military, officials said.

"The goal is to have the pressure be so great that IRAQ cooperates," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters. "Short of that -- an unwillingness to cooperate -- the goal is to have the capabilities of the coalition so clear and so obvious that there is an enormous disincentive for the Iraqi military to fight against the coalition."

The National Earthquake Information Center said it found no seismic activity as a result of the explosion, as some in the military had indicated might occur. A 10,000-foot cloud had been expected and local residents had been warned of possible loud noise

Kathy Fite, a waitress at the International House of Pancakes in Fort Walton Beach, about 20 miles from the test site, said she heard the explosion, but it did not rattle the restaurant's windows or shake the ground.

She described the explosion as loud, but "not real loud." Fite said the blast was comparable to the sound of warships that sometimes test fire in the area.

Pentagon officials said they were examining results of the test to determine whether it worked as designed.

MOAB, privately known in military circles as "the
mother of all bombs," has been under development since late last year.

As originally conceived, the MOAB was to be used against large formations of troops and equipment or hardened above-ground bunkers. The target set has also been expanded to include deeply buried targets

But military officials say that the MOAB is mainly conceived as a weapon employed for "psychological operations." Military officials say they hope the MOAB will create such a huge blast that it will rattle Iraq troops and pressure them into surrendering or not even fighting.

Officials suggest perhaps the Iraqis might even mistake a MOAB blast for a nuclear detonation.

The MOAB is deployed on a pallet from a C-130 aircraft. It initially has a parachute, but as it deploys, the Inertial Navigation System and Global Positioning System (GPS) take over. The bomb also has wings and grid fins for guidance.

The MOAB is an Air Force Research Laboratory technology project that began in fiscal year 2002 and is to be completed this year.
DoD photo. (Released)

Massive Ordnance Air Burst. It is a bomb designed to destroy heavily reinforced targets or to shatter ground forces and armor across a large area.

In this short TRETISE, we'll examine this new high-powered bomb and see where it fits into the U.S. arsenal.

Here are the basic facts about the MOAB:

It is currently the largest conventional bomb (as opposed to a nuclear bomb) in the U.S. arsenal.

The bomb weighs 21,700 pounds (9,525 kg).

The bomb is 30 feet long and 40.5 inches in diameter.

It is satellite-guided, making it a very large "smart bomb."

It bursts about 6 feet (1.8 meters) above the ground.

The idea behind an "air burst" weapon, as opposed to a weapon that explodes on impact with the ground, is to increase its destructive range.

A bomb that penetrates the ground and then bursts tends to send all of its energy either down into the ground or straight up into the air. An air burst weapon sends a great deal of its energy out to the side.

The MOAB is not the largest bomb ever created. In the 1950s the United States manufactured the T-12, a 43,600-pound (19,800-kg) bomb that could be dropped from the B-36.

Compared to a nuclear bomb, the MOAB produces a tiny explosion. The smallest known nuclear bomb -- the
Davy Crockett fission bomb -- has a 10-ton yield.

The difference is that a nuclear bomb that small weighs less than 100 pounds (45 kg) and produces significant amounts of lethal radiation when it detonates.

For comparison, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 14,500 tons of TNT and weighed only 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) -- half the weight of the MOAB. See my
How Nuclear Bombs Work .

The Delivery

Instead of being dropped from a bomber through the bomb bay doors, the MOAB is pushed out of the back of a cargo plane such as a C-130 The bomb rides on a pallet.

A parachute pulls the pallet and bomb out of the plane and then the pallet separates so that the bomb can fall. Once the bomb is falling, a guidance system based on
the Global Positioning System takes over and directs the bomb to its target.

The weapon is intended to have a high altitude release, allowing for greater stand-off range for the delivery vehicle.

Following deployment from the aircraft via parachute, the MOAB weapon is guided approximately 3 nautical miles through a GPS system (with inertial gyros for pitch and roll control), JDAM actuators, and is stabilized by series of fixed wings and grid fins.

The weapon, which uses the aircraft’s GPS prior to launch, takes several seconds to reconnect to the GPS signal after it has been deployed, which is normal for GPS weapons.

The Power Inside

The MOAB is built by Dynetics
.
The 21,700-pound [9,500 kilogram] bomb contains 18,700 pounds of H6, (Trional) an explosive that is a mixture of RDX (Cyclotrimethylene trinitramine), TNT, and aluminum ( The aluminum improves the brisance of the TNT -- the speed at which the explosive develops its maximum pressure.

The addition of aluminum makes tritonal about 18%
more powerful than TNT alone.)

H6 is used by the military for general purpose bombs. H6 is an Australian produced explosive composition. Composition H6 is a widely used main charge filling for underwater blast weapons such as mines, depth charges, torpedoes and mine disposal charges.

HBX compositions (HBX-1, HBX-3, and H6) are aluminized (powdered aluminum) explosives used primarily as a replacement for the obsolete explosive, torpex.

They are employed as bursting charges in mines, depth bombs, depth charges, and torpedoes. HBX-3 and H-6 have lower sensitivity to impact and much higher explosion test temperatures than torpex.

The MOAB weapon produces a very large explosive blast, with lesser fragmentation effects due to a thin-walled aluminum casing.

A Daisy Cutter, was developed during the Vietnam war. The Air Force could drop a Daisy Cutter to create an instant helicopter landing site.

The explosive force would clear out trees in a 500-foot-diameter (152-meter) circle.

It contains 12,600 pounds (5,700 kg) of ammonium nitrate, aluminum and polystyrene, a combination known as GSX (gelled slurry explosives). GSX is commonly used in mining and is a commercial high explosive that is inexpensive and easy to produce. TNT is a military high explosive.

Many in the military are wondering why the new MOAB bomb has not been used in Iraq. The rumor is that the only one available was the one used in the live test.

But there aren't many targets for the MOAB. Some call it the "humane bomb," as nearly all bombs of this type (the earlier BLU-82 "Daisy Cutter") have been used to clear helicopter landing zones or minefields.

In Iraq it would be more useful for it's psychological effect. A MOAB going off in a dusty landscape tends to create a visual effect similar to that of an atomic bomb. There's something about a mushroom cloud billowing up in the suburbs of Baghdad that sends a certain kind of message.

The MIRVman