On Friday, Gen. John Nicolson said that US forces on the ground in Afghanistan called in the strike instead of Washington. Just one day prior, Trump had refused to confirm whether he had authorized the strike.
The giant bomb is a weapon of mass destruction, Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group said on a recent episode of Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear. It could also be a very effective scare tactic.
"It’s a show of force" and it "was used just hours after the Pentagon admitted that one of their airstrikes in Syria had mistakenly killed 18 of our so-called rebels," Mello pointed out.
"They’re on a roll," Loud & Clear host Brian Becker observed sardonically.
"It’s a psychological weapon," Mello said of MOAB’s main purpose. It evolved from a previous bomb variant that was designed to clear out forests without leaving a crater so that helicopters could still land. "It would be more effective to use smaller bombs, and many of them," Mello continued, speaking from New Mexico.
"It makes a propaganda point" Mello noted, confirming Loud & Clear host Brian Becker’s inquiry that the 21,000 pound bomb was primarily a shock-and-awe weapon.
But it’s not entirely clear whether GBU-43 accomplished the Pentagon’s stated aim of snuffing out an underground network of tunnels. "It’s a military freak," Mello pointed out, but the MOAB is "an obsolete and ineffective bomb."
"I don’t think it scares North Korea, I don’t think it scares anybody," he said.
Mello predicted that it would help Trump’s ratings, but so far, it hasn’t proven to be much of an approval boost. A Marist poll released Friday tabbed Trump’s approval rating at 39 percent, just one basis point higher than a 38 percent score he received at the end of March.
Mello could not confirm whether citizens had died in the blast. But he did note the bomb was basically pushed out of the back of a slow-flying cargo plane with a parachute attached. "It’s a weapon to use against relatively defenseless countries."
