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Share the fruits of all our labour
At 7:32 pm local time in Afghanistan, it was eleven in the morning in Boston and I was asleep. On the one hand I suppose I might have wanted to be awake for the historic moment of the first combat use of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, since it is the largest non-nuclear bomb we have ever dropped on people. (We have one larger, I read; we've never used it. I don't want to feel that might be coming.) On the other, I don't know what difference it would have made, since bombing first and holding press conferences later appears to be the order of the day. I can't even tell when this was planned or decided. If the president was directly involved—coyly, he won't say—I imagine it appealed to him because of the hyperbole. Even if it does nothing but worsen the chaos and raise more anger and shift the Overton window of acceptable firepower, "Mother of All Bombs" sounds tough, right? Definitive. The last word. Somehow I doubt it.
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I am sorry to have been the vector. It was the first thing I saw when I got back to the internet. I was not happy.
... one can only suppose it was designed to terrorize.
The Boston Globe agrees with you: "Massive weapons like this one are especially useful if what you're looking for is shock and awe — a display of raw military power. Indeed, that seems to be one of the reasons the US military developed MOAB in 2003 . . . Fifteen years later, this same psychological aspect may again be paramount, a way for the Trump administration to send a message to ISIS and its allies: we're coming for you with everything we've got."
(The Globe also uses Boston's North End to demontrate the destructive range of the GBU-43/B. I've been thinking all afternoon of a line I love from Mystery Men (1999): "Totally non-lethal, but totally effective." Only reversed: just because a bomb isn't nuclear doesn't put it automatically in the first rank of go-to options. Doesn't make it a good idea. Doesn't make it all right.)