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> Test of 'massive' Air Force Bomb Set for Tuesday at Eglin

This day-before announcement precludes any legal action
by enviros concerned about the wildlife that will be
lost (and some certainly will).

> A conventional bomb so big that it's first name
> is "massive"...

Hmm. Just how big does a "conventional" weapon need to be
before it's considered a WMD? I suspect that the blast
effects of this thing (and the current BLU-82) overlap
the smaller tactical nukes.

> Air Force officials Monday warned residents of
> communities surrounding the western half Eglin's
> 724-square-mile military reservation to be prepared...

No map handy, but 724 sq.mi. would be 27 miles square,
so the blast site can't be further than 13 miles from
every perimeter.

I assume the USAF has done it's homework, but I wouldn't
have guessed that 13 mi is necessarily a safe distance.

> ...test will be conducted only under weather conditions
> best for minimizing the sound and inside a buffer zone
> to keep a shock wave and debris from the explosion
> inside Eglin's boundaries.

Even if the shock wave degrades at the boundary, the
remaining pressure wave and noise could still be risky.
Anyone reading mapped this out yet?

> The backup date for the test is Thursday...

Also too soon for protests.

> ...40 percent heavier than the 15,000-pound BLU-82,
> billed as the world's most powerful non-nuclear bomb
> and known to send up a mushroom cloud similar to a
> nuclear weapon.

This is sensationalizing.
A barrel of gasoline will "send up a mushroom cloud".

> It was most recently dropped in Afghanistan on caves
> where al-Qaida leaders were suspected of hiding.

If Osama is dead, and has been for some time, he was
probably done in by a BLU-82.

> In the Persian Gulf War, it was used to clear minefields.
> MOAB is expected to be ready for use this year if the
> test is successful.

I wonder if, using a suitable detonation altitude, it
can be used to neutralize saboteurs in oil fields,
yet leave the equipment undamaged.

I wouldn't have guessed that 13 mi is necessarily a safe distance

There shouldn't be a problem. The kill radius of these is measured in hundreds of yards not in miles, and for that reason these press reports about the magnitude of this bomb and the smaller Daisy Cutter are highly overblown.

For comparison purposes, "Little Boy", the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, had the explosive equivalent of 20 kilotons - 20,000 tons of TNT. This bomb, massive as it is, comes in at 10 and one half tons. Doing the math, it is .0525 % (five and a quarter ten thousandths) the destructive force of what would now be a minor league nuclear device.

Are MOAB and Daisy Cutter tremendously effective at clearing ground and snuffing cave and bunker dwellers? Absolutely. But I think that has much more to do with what the fuel/air detonation does to the local atmosphere than the sheer power of the bomb.

Now what Iraq has to consider is that a likely response to a WMD attack on us or the Israelis will be something thousands of times bigger. Little Boy caused the deaths of over 100,000 people in a city that amounted to a small suburb of Baghdad. I'm not certain they understand what kind of fire they will play with if they start using biochem.