The DoD Just Released Footage of the Mother of All Bombs Strike
Spoiler: It's a big explosion.
On Friday morning, the U.S. Department of Defense released footage of the GBU-43/B MOAB, aka the Mother of All Bombs, striking an ISIS-controlled cave network in the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. The video is grainy footage from the cameras on the modified C-130 transport plane used to deploy the weapon, but you can clearly see the massive explosion that follows.
The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S.’s arsenal (Russia’s Father of All Bombs is allegedly bigger), and until the strike at 7:33 p.m. local time on Thursday, it had never been used in combat. The 21,600-pound weapon was designed in the early 2000s during the Iraq War and has a destructive force equal to 11 tons of TNT exploding. It’s still a small fry compared to a nuclear bomb, but it also doesn’t have the related toxic fallout and radiation. Still, the MOAB is intended as a weapon of intimidation and fear, used to crush medium-soft targets like caves and canyons with its concussive force.
You can watch the DoD’s released footage of the strike below.
