ShareThisPerhaps it's only coincidence that the disclosure came as Iran was stalling on its pledge to allow U.N. inspectors into an underground uranium-enrichment facility that had remained secret until last month.
The Obama administration is not only retaining a Bush-era program to develop a massive new bomb of the kind known as a "bunker buster," it was letting a $52 million contract to speed deployment aboard the MOP, for Massive Ordnance Penetrator, aboard the B-2 Stealth bomber. The MOP could be in the arsenal next summer.
Bunker busters are designed to penetrate layers of earth and reinforced concrete to destroy underground military complexes. The current bunker buster is the 1-ton BLU-109, with 550 pounds of high explosives that can penetrate more than 6 feet of reinforced concrete.
The BLU is dwarfed by the MOP, which weighs 15 tons and carries 10 times the explosives. At 20 feet 6 inches long and just over 31 inches in diameter, it would look like a telephone pole falling out of the sky.
The existence of the MOP in our arsenal -- and perhaps one day in Israel's -- will greatly complicate the strategic thinking of Iran and North Korea. Short of an aggressor nation bent on committing national suicide, it is hard to envision a realistic scenario where the United States would use nuclear weapons. But the MOP is a conventional weapon with a narrow military use.
And its accelerated deployment sends an unmistakable message to Tehran and Pyongyang: Dig harder.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
Iran should shif their
Iran should shif their nuclear program to weaponiziation and test one ASAP. That will send the right message to Israel and USA. Moreover, MOP will not be of any conerns to them, and we save money by not wasting it on this weapon. A win/win situaton for all.
A Load of Crap Talk Dude
Yeah yeah yeah you boring Americans always boast that you have this that and the other in your world famous 'arsenal'. However, what is visible to almost everyone else in the world is that nothing of what you say you are having seem to be working right! This is why Afghanistan and Iraq, where you people boasted on the media as soon as you went in that the shooting war will be over in a matter of days, have now become death traps for US soldiers even to this day. So if the US drops one of these so called MOPs inside Iran, then that will be the end of the USA as well, because there is no way the US can fight at multiple fronts at the same time, especially when it is very obvious that it's forces are stretched too thin already.