The US military is apparently secured the funding to develop and build a new bunker-buster bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (or MOP bomb for short), the largest conventional explosive ever developed. The behemoth would be over 30,000 pounds, ten times the blasting power of its predecessor the BLU-109, GPS guided, and designed to be dropped from B-2 bombers. If all goes according to plan, Boeing should have the MOP available for action by mid-2010.
The political implications of this are pretty obvious: the government is fast-tracking this project because they want the capability to blow up hidden, underground Iranian and/or North Korean nuclear facilities, should these nations go any more rogue. President Obama has been committed to trying to use diplomacy to talk these two nations down from their nuclear ambitions, but it usually doesn't hurt to back up negotiations with a big stick of dynamite.
But there is another factor at play here, too: the President's stated plan of nuclear disarmament. One of Obama's most notable diplomatic thrusts since entering the international stage has been towards stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons that might fall into the wrong hands and working with the other nuclear powers on a multilateral disarmament plan. In short, the President wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. As counter intuitive as it might seem at first, building bigger conventional bombs is a part of that.
I know what you must be thinking: if we build our conventional warheads to nuclear size, what is the difference? But the difference between nuclear and conventional bombs is like night and day. After a blast from regular explosives, people can move back into an area and start rebuilding the next day. A nuclear detonation leaves the land poisoned with radiation, damaging the surrounding environment and making the area uninhabitable for years or decades.
So it is a good thing that we are adding bigger conventional bombs to our arsenal, because if we ever did need to blow up something so big we would not be forced to use nuclear bombs with such devastating environmental repercussions.
Source gather.com
The political implications of this are pretty obvious: the government is fast-tracking this project because they want the capability to blow up hidden, underground Iranian and/or North Korean nuclear facilities, should these nations go any more rogue. President Obama has been committed to trying to use diplomacy to talk these two nations down from their nuclear ambitions, but it usually doesn't hurt to back up negotiations with a big stick of dynamite.
But there is another factor at play here, too: the President's stated plan of nuclear disarmament. One of Obama's most notable diplomatic thrusts since entering the international stage has been towards stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons that might fall into the wrong hands and working with the other nuclear powers on a multilateral disarmament plan. In short, the President wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. As counter intuitive as it might seem at first, building bigger conventional bombs is a part of that.
I know what you must be thinking: if we build our conventional warheads to nuclear size, what is the difference? But the difference between nuclear and conventional bombs is like night and day. After a blast from regular explosives, people can move back into an area and start rebuilding the next day. A nuclear detonation leaves the land poisoned with radiation, damaging the surrounding environment and making the area uninhabitable for years or decades.
So it is a good thing that we are adding bigger conventional bombs to our arsenal, because if we ever did need to blow up something so big we would not be forced to use nuclear bombs with such devastating environmental repercussions.
Source gather.com
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