The Kansas City Star November 24, 2011

New monster bomb heading to Air Force bases

By Darryl Levings

The belly of the beast known as the B-2 bomber is about to cradle a new creation.

And what a thing it is: two basketball rims high, heavier than six Ford F-150s and with a name only a janitor could love.

The freshly tested Massive Ordnance Penetrator is built to rip deeper into underground, hardened targets than anything ever devised. The bomb has 10 times the explosive power of the last model of bunker buster, the BLU-109.

Years in the works, it’s now officially a big scary piece in the tense political-military chess being played around the Iranian nuclear program. News of the MOP’s readiness came soon after a United Nations agency warning of Iran’s secret work toward nuclear weaponry, hidden in steel and concrete complexes, some tunneled into mountains.

“It’s named for ‘mopping up Iran,’ ” suggested John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a website for military policy research. “I can’t imagine what else they’d being using it for or pointing it at.

“They’ve been thinking about building such a thing for some time. Once they were able to come up with a design, it was just a matter of time before they built it,” he said. A good part of the 20-foot weapon is the 2.5 tons of high explosive, but “the nose is just a solid piece of steel. It has a fuse, but that’s not in the nose.”

The design is to smash deep through rock or steel-hardened concrete to reach “hard and deeply buried targets,” as Brig. Gen. Scott Vander Hamm, 509 Bomb Wing commander at Whiteman Air Force Base at Knob Noster, Mo., said in Air Force Magazine. The base declined to comment for The Star.

The first batch of 20 bombs, reportedly costing around $314 million, is being handed over to the Air Force. Presumably, some already may be at Whiteman, a fairly quick delivery, as the MOPs reportedly are the creatures of Boeing’s Phantom Works, a top-secret plant in St. Louis.

At 15 tons — 2.5 of them packed conventional explosives — the non-nuclear weapon is about four tons heavier than the so-called “Mother of all bombs,” the GBU-43 surface bomb.

News reports said the GPS-guided device also could be dropped from the old B-52 Stratofortress, but Pike said more likely it was made for the sneakier B-2. “It’s not a ‘stand-off’ bomb. Basically, I think, you have to get into spitting distance. It’s got wings, but I think they’re just to stabilize its weight.”

Some experts noted that while drones and lightweight weaponry are now popular, the old standby for some jobs is still the very-big TNT bomb used since World War II.

In other news involving the stealth bombers at Whiteman, a new fix has been decided upon for an old problem.

The manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, has a contract to install a redesigned metal plate called the aft deck to shield the B-2’s composite airframe from the exhaust heat and vibration of its four engines.

Repairing the resulting airframe cracks has been expensive, according to a report on the DEW Line defense aviation website, contributing to the average cost of one hour of bomber operation climbing from $86,000 to more than $135,000 in five years.