US drops 'largest non-nuclear bomb' in Afghanistan | Hacker News Reader

US drops 'largest non-nuclear bomb' in Afghanistan

independent.co.uk

55 pointsvs4vijay58 comments

The title is inaccurate. This is known as the Mother-of-all-bombs (MOAB unofficially, or GBU 43/B officially). For people who like comparisons, Russia tested the Father-of-all-Bombs in 2007, which is believed to be 4x more powerful. The FOAB is a thermobaric explosive that offers certain advantages over common explosives.

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_of_All_Bombs

Perhaps should include "in the US' arsenal", or "ever dropped"

Or just "their largest..."

I don't think it's so inaccurate it should be flagged. It's implicit. Why would the US be dropping Russia's bombs?

I seriously doubt that's why HN posters flagged this article.

You know they're not going to say, oh there was also a village there with about only 250 mountain people living in it. Hey sorry buddy, you, your children, your goats all die today cause the man in the suit said so. Because they want to push this narrative of ISIS being the really bad guys that need to be killed so you guys be scared of them, we'll take them out for you. These politicians are incapable and uninterested in solving real problems so you take the easy way make deamons and keep fighting them -- war is good money, the politicians can look good fighting the bad guys while not doing anything really and the peoples minds are occupied by this conflict so they don't question you too much. I hate ISIS as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean these guys are the good guys.

Just replace the name of Afghanistan with with Australia, America or any other country you can think of. Better yet, Saudi Arabia cause that will easily fit with some peoples world view. The first question that I get in my head is. How is this even legal? other than the fact that.. Yea We've got the money and the resources and you poor fella wont be able to hit us back in your dreams, ever. So take that!

I just get a feeling that somehow, non-english speaking, non-white people are not as equal as others and for some people the're doing a favor to them treating them as humans. This is not in the philosophical debaty sense, but in the real tactical sense. You want to throw a bomb at Hiroshima, yea kill a million people and end the war. Today lets drop bombs on some third world country. The great leader is always doing something worthy of praise. How is this different from some crazy north Korean dictator other than more savvy and politically correct propoganda on one side and not on the other. Just cause the US is a democracy this is valid? Cause they are so powerful they can do this and no one will question them... What if some other "Bad" guy did it. What if Putin is doing this kind of stuff. Killing of people is killing of people. This is like taking a shotgun to kill a rat. Sure you'll kill it but you're probably insane.

Just imagine the US as one person and Afghanistan as another person. The first guy goes like here dude, take a punch on the face, there was a fly sitting there I was just trying to kill it. Also, I'll keep punching you to kill flies whether you're sleeping or awake, whether you like it or not.

What goes through the minds of the people at the Pentagon who release such info? Do they see this as some achievement?

What makes you think taking out ISIS is not an achievement?

They got all of ISIS with one bomb? Good job, promotions all around.

Semantics...

I'm ALL for taking out ISIS. But, with carpet bombing huge areas, the likelihood of unintended collateral damage is very high. Which brings us to the general attitude of the U.S. in war - "When it comes to innocent lives, only U.S. lives matter!!"

There's ZERO chance that the U.S. would tolerate collateral damage on it's own citizens in the name of getting ISIS, so why accept the possibility of non-American causalities?

Because the USA government funded ISIS to begin with? There is no advantage to removing ISIS they aren't a threat to the US but are anti-Assad so they support our interests in the region indirectly.

Furthermore they are great scapegoat for an executive government power grab and building a surveillance state.

It doesn't hurt that prolonged military engagements do wonders for the profits of the military-industrial complex either.

They may see it as a warning to North Korea

> Do they see this as some achievement?

I assume it serves a propaganda purpose.

>What goes through the minds of the people at the Pentagon who release such info? Do they see this as some achievement?

Would you rather it was done in complete secrecy? The openness of our military is one of the great strengths of American democracy.

>The openness of our military is one of the great strengths of American democracy.

lmao if you believe that's true.

War is a great way for the corporate media and the government to work together to manufacture public opinion. The Syrian airstrikes earlier in the month was a moment of circling the wagons for the movers and shakers, as the media was able to demonstrate their abilities to Trump and co. that if they work together then poll ratings and viewership numbers go up. It's win-win for the establishment.

This is fulfilling an election promise to "bomb the shit out of them".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWejiXvd-P8

Bright lights, big noises, it plays well to some of his electorate.

speculating because I have not spoken to a publicity offer at the Pentagon.

They view popular suppport of military actions as an important strategic objective because they require congressional support for their procurement budgets, and executive support (capitulation to?) for their planned operations. War is political and they do this kind of thing to manage the politics of war.

The immediate followup question then becomes: why does the Pentagon view bragging about weapons as effective for gathering political support for their wars?

I can't say that I have a clear notion of why they believe this. Perhaps because it plays to the pornographic nature of the mainstream media in the U.S., which enthusiastically embraces spectacles of violence. Perhaps because they are correct to believe that a majority of Americans are stimulated by war porn. The media certainly believes that. They get the ratings. Or perhaps you're right and its less sophisticated than I am imagining. Maybe the Pentagon really does think it's a kind of accomplishment worth bragging about.

Seems it was an isolated mountain tunnel system only inhabited by ISIS. No real objections to me from that.

1. "Only inhabited by ISIS" - Really? Says who? There were no villages or civilians within the kill perimeter?

2. What's the aftermath of a 21,000 pound munition on the environment and resources of the region. Do a google search for the impact of bombing in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc on local cancer rates.

Maybe you still don't object...but at least we can be clearer on the true impact of the bombing.

Besides its concussive pulse, the weapon is designed to draw in air from underground/fortified structures in the blast radius. E.g. asphyxiate people hiding in tunnels. It no doubt will leave a crater, but my understanding is that the crater would be less than that left by a similar quantity of TNT.

I would think it would be pretty easy to verify the absence of villages within a mile. And this isn't the type of weapon that causes cancer.

How would you verify it then? Do you have the coordinates for where the bomb dropped and recent maps of the area? A year ago we said that all ISIL soldiers had been removed from the area, verification seems tricky.

You don't think blowing bits of a building in a twenty mile radius would cause cancer?

> You don't think blowing bits of a building in a twenty mile radius would cause cancer?

No; why would it? You cause cancer by damaging the DNA of cells. A mere explosion isn't going to do that.

Buildings are made of things like lead and asbestos, blowing small bits of a building over a huge radius seems like a likely hazard. Plus, whatever the hell the bomb is made of.

Ah, I see. Well, that's kind of true, but it's like saying that earthquakes cause cancer, because when the building collapses in an earthquake, it also spreads things like asbestos into the air. I mean, it's still true, but it's so much a smaller effect than the other problems, it's pretty much ignored.

Do you think letting ISIS operate freely in the region is better than the speculative notion that building debris will cause cancer someday? Do you think the US should merely inform the local governments and hope they will do something?

Regardless, I agree that the US should never get involved in the Middle East militarily. There is NO way to prevent civilian deaths, there is no way to prevent people on the Left from reducing ALL military action to American imperialism.

I didn't realize dropping this bomb or doing nothing were the only possible options, the whole 26 day campaign with two wounded US soldiers they did last year led me to believe there may be more options.

What reason is there for a war of aggression beyond imperialism?

I don't think it's reasonable to characterize the war in Afghanistan as "imperialism".

So what do you call a war who's aim is to install a friendly government and take over some amount of the nation's sovereignty?

I suppose I would call it that if that were the aim of the war.

Our goal was removing the Taliban, and taking the right to police residents of the country, particularly Bin Laden, without the need of jurisprudence. Set up a friendly government, take over sovereign right. What am I missing here?

Okay. What does that have to do with "war of aggression" and "imperialism". We weren't there on a lark.

Starting the war for those aims is a war of aggression, removing the Taliban is setting up a friendly government, removing their right to police is a removal of sovereignty.

Really confused what you're going on about, you keep saying I'm wrong but don't try to say why.

>Starting the war for those aims is a war of aggression...

No it isn't. That's not at all true.

Yeah, it is. There's millennia of precedent here and I'm not going any further to argue against "nuh-uh."

Precedent? This isn't a court case. I begin to see the problem here: You're misapplying a historical template. This isn't 19th Century British Empire - the US had an iron-clad casus belli in Afghanistan, and to ignore that is to completely mischaracterize the situation.

"This isn't a court case, they had an iron-clad case for war." The only point of a cassus belli is to justify your war of aggression, if someone declares war on you the case for it is clear.

And no, the cassus belli was not iron-clad. There are only three legal ones under current law. Defense, defense of an ally, and a UN approval. First two don't work, Afghanistan hadn't declared any wars, and the third never happened.

So you wouldn't classify Napoleons invasion and the creation of Westphalia as a war of aggression?

How about Ceasars invasion of Gaul? He had a casus belli.

What makes you sure it doesn't cause cancer...because it's not an atomic weapon?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/14/iraq.military

"The amount of DU used during the Iraq war has not been revealed, although some estimate it was more than a thousand tons."

Why are you bringing up DU?

DU is used in warheads >> DU releases radiation >>> radiation causes cancer. Therefore, you could link the bombs that use DU to cancer.

In this case, maybe they didn't have DU, but there are still other nasty contaminants that come with 22,000 pounds of explosives dropped in a relatively small area (not to mention the 10s of thousands of smaller bombs being dropped throughout that country and other war zones).

>DU is used in warheads >> DU releases radiation >>> radiation causes cancer. Therefore, you could link the bombs that use DU to cancer.

All that is true and totally irrelevant, since DU is used almost exclusively in anti-armor kinetic rounds. This is just a really big firecracker.

>In this case, maybe they didn't have DU, but there are still other nasty contaminants that come with 22,000 pounds of explosives dropped in a relatively small area...

Are there? Do you have some reason to think that's true?

Read the article linked to in my earlier comment.

What does it have to do with the subject article? Again, there's no DU in this bomb.

Wikileaks posted this excerpt from an NYT article, saying that these strikes hit a network of tunnels originally funded by the CIA for the mujahedeen. The Tora Bora tunnels are in the same region as the recent airstrike, but I haven't been able to ascertain if it's the exact same tunnel complex.

"The first time bin Laden had seen the Tora Bora caves, he had been a young mujahedeen fighter and a recent university graduate with a degree in civil engineering. It had been some 20 years before, during Washington's first Afghan war, the decade-long, C.I.A.-financed jihad of the 1980's against the Soviet occupation. Rising to more than 13,000 feet, 35 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Jalalabad, Tora Bora was a fortress of snow-capped peaks, steep valleys and fortified caves. Its miles of tunnels, bunkers and base camps, dug deeply into the steep rock walls, had been part of a C.I.A.-financed complex built for the mujahedeen."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/lost-at-tora-bora...

Various sources are reporting a $16M unit cost for this bomb (excluding R&D costs). That's more than half the unit cost of the C-130 aircraft that delivers it.

It's also about 600 times as much as the cost for a Daisy Cutter, which it sorta replaces. (According to [1] those cost $27,000)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/07/afghanistan.te...

I wonder what is the environmental impact of such a bomb.

The US oligarchy doesn't care about lead levels in tap water in cities across the US, so they care even less for citizens of Afghanistan (or Iraq, or Syria, or Bosnia, or Serbia) exposed to chemicals. Not to mention, to depleated uranium.

The cancer rates in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc have skyrocketed in the past decades. Some believe it's tied to the relentless bombings:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/14/iraq.military

Cancer screening has also skyrocketed and cancer is up in lots of places without active conflict.

I don't mean to minimize the actual destructive effects of war. But the evidence for cancer as being among them is far from conclusive.

Cancer screening skyrocketing doesn't account for a skyrocketing rate of cancer...it would simply capture more of the absolute number.

Towards the end of WW2, Britain's 617 Squadron ("Dambusters") used 10-ton Grand Slam bombs against massive concrete fortifications, such as U-boat pens, and structures, such as bridges, that could be destabilized by underground explosions. Because they were designed to penetrate concrete, they probably had more steel and less explosive than this bomb.

Because, when it comes to civilian lives or collateral damage, only U.S. lives matter!!!

OP why did you leave out the rest of the title?

> US drops 'largest non-nuclear bomb' in Afghanistan in area populated by Isis members

Kind of leaving a very important detail out here.

Because for the US, all areas of Afghanistan bombed are populated by ISIS.

because of 80 char. limit in title field

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