MOPping Up: The USA’s 30,000 Pound Bomb
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During the Second World War, attacking heavily protected targets like U-boat pens and protected “V-weapon” facilities was a key challenge. Enter a brilliant British engineer named Barnes Wallis, fresh off the dam-busting “Upkeep” bouncing bomb. His next trick was a 12,000 pound weapon called the “Tallboy,” a streamlined, spin-stabilized bomb with an estimated terminal velocity of over Mach 3.5 when dropped from 20,000 feet. That mass, at that speed, carrying 5,200 pounds of Torpex D1 explosive, made a crater 80 feet deep x 100 feet across when it hit. By 1945, Wallis’ next “Earthquake bomb” was in production – the 22,000 pound “Grand Slam.” They made short work of U-boat pens.
These bombs went out of fashion with the advent of nuclear weapons, but if you wait long enough, fashion comes around again…
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With the demise of the RNEP nuclear bunker-buster program, the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency has stepped out of its usual verification and WMD detection/ destruction programs to fund a project called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). This 30,000 pound weapon is approximately 31.5 inches in diameter and 20.5 feet long, with about the same amount of explosives inside as Wallis’ Tallboy (5,300 pounds). It isn’t the biggest bomb the USA has ever built – the 44,000 pound T12 has that distinction – but it could well become the biggest conventional bomb ever used. Even the famous GBU-43 MOAB (Mother Of All Bombs) fuel-air explosive weighs in at only 21,000 pounds.
Unlike the MOAB, however, this project’s goal is a GPS-guided, penetrating weapon that can be carried aboard B-52 Stratofortress or B-2 Spirit bombers to defeat “a specialized set of hard and deeply buried targets” like bunkers and tunnel facilities. Some graphics show expectations of over 60 feet of concrete destroyed, and a USAF article stated that the bomb was meant to penetrate 200 feet underground before exploding. The B-2 will be able to carry 2 MOPs: one in each bay, mounted to the existing forward and aft mounting hardware.
According to GlobalSecurity.org the MOP, also callled or “Big BLU” or “Direct Hard Target Strike Weapon” program in some documents, required a total of $11.4 million for development. If so, that’s a very frugal program.
Contracts and Key Events
The program would appear to be in the “Task Order 2” stage of weapon development and preliminary testing.
Oct 23/08: Boeing announces a July 2008 test, in which a new fuze well design allowed a Small Diameter Bomb fuze in an 1,800-pound warhead to survive “a supersonic impact into high-strength reinforced concrete and soil” at Holloman AFB. Research partners included Applied Research Associates (ARA), L-3 KDI Precision Products, and Ellwood National Forge Co.
The design is the result of data collected from a 2006 test at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, when Boeing propelled a 1,800-pound penetrator warhead at more than 2,300 feet per second through high-strength reinforced concrete. Steve Vukelich, director of Special Programs at Boeing says that “This design concept can be incorporated into existing weapon fuzes and [is] currently being considered for a number of advanced weapons.”
Feb 6/08: The Register reports that the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) will now be dropped for the first time from a B-52 Stratofortress bomber in June 2008, in a test originally scheduled for August 2007.
The problems apparently stem from the bomb rack. It has proved impossible to hang the MOP from existing racks, and a whole new subsystem has had to be designed, reportedly pushing program costs up by $10 million and causing a 10-month delay.
Dec 18/07: A team of weapons specialists at Whiteman AFB, home of the USA’s B-2 sealth bomber fleet, loaded a 20-foot long, 700 pound mock MOP into a B-2 bomb bay replica that’s used for training purposes. Interesting comment by weapons loader Tech. Sgt. Jason Hermann of the 509th Maintenance Group:
“I couldn’t help but notice how enormous the bomb was hanging in the weapons bay. It looked much larger once we had loaded it into the weapons bay than when it was on the loading adapter.”
See USAF article: “B-2, MOP A Devastating Combo.”
March 14/07: Boeing announced that on a MOP bomb body successfully completed a static tunnel lethality test (i.e. “there’s supposed to be an earth-shattering ka-boom!”) on this day at White Sands Missile Range, NM.
