MOAB BREAKOUT

What it actually is

Massive Ordnance Air Blast. Air Force Research Laboratory, Al Weimorts, about nine weeks of design for Iraq 2003. Tested 11 March 2003 on Eglin Range 70. Never used there. About 15 built at McAlester Army Ammunition Plant. One expended.

Yield is about 11 tons TNT, 46 gigajoules. That is the blast neighborhood of the smallest US nuclear artillery round, with none of the nuclear effects. The fill is H6: RDX, TNT, aluminum powder, and wax. Aluminum stretches the pressure pulse. It is not a fuel-air explosive and it is not a thermobaric weapon. Those labels keep getting repeated. They are wrong.

The Air Force’s historical unit quote is about $170,000 in mid-2000s dollars. “$16 million” is not a unit price.

Against a city

One aimpoint. The kill mechanism is overpressure, plus whatever the blast picks up. The case is aluminum, so this is not a classical thick-steel fragment bomb.

In the open, serious damage to ordinary buildings and exposed people is hundreds of meters, not a mile of leveled city. The “one mile blast radius” line is a press figure. Out there you are in broken glass and light damage. Streets and canyons duct the wave farther than flat ground. Reinforced frames lose facade and glass well outside the ring that guts a light building. They do not disappear.

There is no nuclear thermal pulse and no firestorm. A typical Vietnam Arc Light cell put roughly 10 to 17 MOAB-equivalents of high explosive across a box about 1.5 by 0.5 miles. One MOAB is one point inside that class of effort.

Against a hardened target

The case is light on purpose, and the fuze is meant to burst above the surface so the energy runs sideways and into openings. A contact burst would dump a lot of it into a crater. It does not penetrate rock or reinforced concrete.

What it can do: collapse a cave mouth, a shallow unlined gallery, a trench, a soft bunker, and people or stores inside a confined valley. That was Achin. ISIS-K had gone into tunnels and IED belts, and the force on the ground could not clear them. Nicholson called it the right munition for that problem. Afghan accounts put some of those tunnels near 40 meters. That is not a lined, decoupled hall behind blast doors and turns.

An open portal and a short straight run can still kill inside. Doglegs, debris plugs, and a real blast door are how you beat an airburst. The deep door is a MOP problem.

The weapon built for the buried problem is the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Midnight Hammer, 22 June 2025: seven B-2s released 14 of them, 12 on Fordow and 2 on Natanz. Open reporting puts Fordow’s halls on the order of 80 meters down, and even the penetrator is argued at that depth. Open sources also record later MOP use in 2026. MOAB was never the tool for that target.

The limit is the airplane

• A drogue extracts the cradle off the ramp, then comes off. The bomb free-falls. It is not a parachute-retarded weapon all the way down, and it has no standoff.
• It was designed around the MC-130H. That jet is retired. It still will not fit a bomber bay. Against any real air defense, the release aircraft is the vulnerable part. Achin was a permissive valley.
• GPS/INS, a handful of rounds, one combat shot. Achin casualty counts were never clean: Afghan figures ran from 36 into the mid-90s, including commanders. ISIS denied losses. A small number of civilian deaths was alleged. The Pentagon’s first statements had no solid damage number.

Use a MOAB on an area, a canyon, or a tunnel mouth you can fly a C-130 to. Use MOPs, in trains, on a volume that is actually buried. Do not brief the nickname.

Open-source order of magnitude. Not a weaponeering solution and not a classified damage estimate. Overpressure rings depend on burst height, terrain, and construction.