Dropping the Largest Bomb
Six years ago today the United States dropped the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in its arsenal onto a target in Afghanistan. Exploding in the late evening in a small valley in Achin, an Afghani district dense with opium poppy farms and fields of golden wheat, locals said they saw a sky full of fire and felt the ground move beneath them. The long cloud of the explosion would hang in the sky for hours to come, darkening the reddening sky as the sun set over Afghanistan.
The MOAB, nicknamed Mother of All Bombs, is the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat and has the power of a small tactical nuclear weapon. Designed by Albert L. Weimorts Jr., also known for designing “Bunker Buster” bombs used in Iraq, the MOAB was manufactured at the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, which houses about a third of the DoD’s munitions stockpile. The MOAB was designed in only nine weeks, to be available in time for the start of the Iraq War.
The MOAB’s large explosion, first seen in a test in 2003, gave it the potential to cause terror in enemy fighters, in line with the DoD’s “Shock and Awe” strategy forIraq. However, it was not used in Iraq, with one former military official citing concerns over the possibility of civilian casualties because of the bomb’s large blast radius.
The MOAB was used for the first time on April 13, 2017 on a heavily fortified ISIS compound in the district of Achin. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, Achin was a stronghold for Mujahidin, freedom fighters that were fighting against Soviet control of their country. Fast forward to 2015 and the region is a stronghold of Islamic State Khorasan, the Afghani affiliate of ISIS. In the weeks before the bombing the Afghan army had unsuccessfully attempted to take control of the compound in Achin, which had an underground system of tunnels and which was defended using IEDs.
General John W Nicholson, at that time the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, called the compound “an extensive obstacle to our progress,” referring to the US campaign against ISIS in Afghanistan. Facing scrutiny after the strike, Nicholson affirmed that the 20,000-pound MOAB was the appropriate weapon to “reduce that obstacle,” which was blocking US progress on its strategic goals for the region. The bombing was well planned according to Nicholson: “Of course, we communicate constantly up and down the chain of command about what we’re doing here down on the ground.”
An Afghan army official estimated that 94 militants were killed, including four ISIS commanders.
Were there any civilian deaths? While none were officially reported, Afghani parliamentarian Esmatullah Shinwari said he heard from residents of Achin that a teacher and his young son were killed in the blast. Some have reasoned that it was unlikely for civilians to be in the area, which had been occupied by militants for so long. But with such a large blast radius — the MOAB has a blast radius of one mile — controlling civilian casualties could be an impossible task.
If the report is true, and a teacher and his son were killed in the bombing, can we despite the lack of information imagine who they were? Being in Achin, they were probably Pashtun, the dominant ethnic group in the region and in Afghanistan in general. We can imagine them dressed in clothing typical of the region, light linen garments with long sleeves, crisply white. Did the father live his entire life in Achin, marrying and raising a son there? Perhaps he studied in Kabul, which is only 130 miles by road from Achin. Who did the teacher and his young son leave behind? — No, there’s almost nothing we can say about them with certainty.
With the two largest bombs ever used in war, dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, tens of thousands of deaths were recorded. In this third largest bomb ever used we have recorded the deaths of a few dozen militants, and possibly a teacher and his young son who, if not killed, at least haunt our stories of that legendary day like ghosts.
