The Pentagon announced that on Thursday, it dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal for the first time in combat, hitting an Islamic State (ISIS) target in Afghanistan.
Pentagon spokesman Adam Stump said in a press conference that the bomb was dropped on a cave and tunnel complex in the Achin district of the Nangarhar province, a remote area in the country’s east which borders Pakistan. The Achin district is the focus of ISIS activity in Afghanistan and a US Army Special Forces soldier was killed there on Saturday. The US has been actively fighting in Afghanistan for fifteen years and there are currently an estimated 8,400 US troops in the country.
“We have the greatest military in the world,” President Donald Trump said in a press conference about the bomb-strike. “We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing, and frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.”
The Afghan Ministry of Defense released a statement that the blast killed 36 militants and collapsed three tunnels.
The 30 foot-long GBU-43 weighs in at 21,600 pounds and contains 11 tons of explosives. It is named the Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB), but its acronym has led to the nickname, ‘the mother of all bombs’. The $16 million bomb is rolled off the back of a MC-130 cargo aircraft and guided in to the target by GPS. Exploded at a set height above the ground, its blast radius is estimated to extend up to one mile.
