Our Best Look Yet At The Massive Ordnance Penetrator Bunker Buster Bomb
Posted by
JD (aka Jason Dean)
May 4 '23, 11:11
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New images released by the U.S. Air Force provide what appears to be our best look yet at a live example of the service’s 30,000-pound class GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker buster, or MOP.
The MOP is the most powerful and deeply burrowing non-nuclear bunker buster on earth and is critical to taking out highly fortified targets buried under literal mountains, like those found in Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea
As the image caption notes, two MOPs have been added to the arsenal of Whiteman’s 509th Munitions Squadron, in order to test the performance of the weapons, although only one of these appears in the pictures.
At present, the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is the only aircraft able to employ the MOP operationally, although, as The War Zone has noted in the past, B-52 bombers have dropped them during testing.
The Air Force’s future B-21 Raider stealth bomber is expected to be able to carry one MOP while the B-2 carries two.
Clear details as to which version of the MOP this particular example is, along with its warhead, aren’t provided in the images
Arguably the most intriguing part of the images relates to the markings describing the unique cocktail of explosives that fill the MOP, which detail their respective weights
The markings also note the total nominal weight of the MOP as being 27,125 pounds.
What's perhaps most compelling about these numbers is that the MOP is only 20% explosive by weight.
While this ratio isn't unheard of for much smaller bunker busters, for something that is heavier by a factor of more than five, this is quite fascinating and provides a key detail as to how MOP fulfills its very challenging application.
As The War Zone has outlined in the past, MOP development efforts date back to at least 2002.
In 2009, Boeing was awarded contracts to complete aircraft integration with MOP.
Little is known about how many total MOPs have been delivered to the Air Force by Boeing
According to the service, 20 MOPs had been delivered by Boeing (accurate as of November 2015).
The MOP seen in that image, unlike the more recent pictures from Whiteman AFB, shows the bomb equipped with its control section and wings attached, including its pop-out grid fins.
Air Force disclosures of MOPs historically have come at moments of heightened tension – designed in part to send a message of U.S. military strength to its adversaries.
Indeed, the current flurry of MOP pictures comes amid a spike in geopolitical friction, including between the United States and North Korea over that country's ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs.
As we have noted in the past, MOPs could prove instrumental in penetrating the various very deeply buried missile tunnels and other underground military facilities in North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia.
While the optics of recent MOP images being released are at least in part designed to project U.S. military might to its adversaries, if nothing else they provide an exceptionally detailed look at these extremely heavy bombs.
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