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On 13 April 2017, the United States dropped the largest non-nuclear weapon ever deployed in combat — the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, referred to by its retronym the Mother of All Bombs.' In response, investigative journalist Amber Lyon posted to Facebook her recommendation that people take iodine tablets and other precautions, because the U.S. government is hiding the true harm caused by the weapon: Lynn’s claims appear to rest on two largely factual (but not necessarily relevant) assertions: First, that the MOAB is a big bomb; and second, that the United States has used radioactive material in its non-nuclear arsenal in the past. MOAB Is a Big Bomb The MOAB is the largest conventional (i.e., non-nuclear) weapon ever dropped in combat. A fairly simple bomb that took only nine weeks to develop in the leadup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, 18,700 pounds of its total 22,500-pound mass (or 8,482 out of a total of 10,205 kilograms) come from its BLU-120/B warhead, according to the 2013 USAF Almanac produced by Air Force Magazine. The warhead itself, delivered by a satellite guidance system, is simply a tank filled with a high-energy explosive dubbed H6, which is a mixture of cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, TNT and aluminum (though some outlets report the use of a similar explosive named tritonal). Its yield, equivalent to 11 tons of TNT, however, pales by many orders of magnitude in comparison to any nuclear bomb used in combat or included the US Nuclear arsenal, as noted by Axois: Indeed, the W87 thermonuclear warhead widely deployed in the current United States arsenal is reported to possess a 300 kiloton yield. Still, despite its significantly lower yield, the MOAB is a deeply destructive tool. It was built primarily as a successor to the Daisy Cutter, which was employed during the Vietnam War to clear massive areas of thick forest. Its simple warhead ignites just above its target, producing a supersonic shockwave meant to clear massive areas of fighters, IEDs, and other defenses. This approach differs from a bunker-busting bomb, made to penetrate a building or the ground, as discussed by Wired magazine in an article following the 2017 MOAB bombing: This distinction is an important one, as it is directly relevant to the main arguments offered by Lyon — that it is likely the United States military would have included non-disclosed radioactive material to the bomb to add to its destructive capabilities. United States Already Uses Depleted Uranium In response to numerous comments on her Facebook post, Lyon repeatedly shared the same report, authored by Barbara Koeppel in the Washington Spectator, about the use of radioactive materials in weapons employed in Iraq: Though the article makes factual points regarding the use of radioactive materials in conventional weapons, its arguments are, broadly speaking, irrelevant to the MOAB. This is because the MOAB is neither a bunker-busting bomb nor is it, in fact, a thermobaric bomb. A thermobaric bomb is a very specific type of weapon that, similar to a Daisy Cutter or a MOAB, creates damage though a blast wave, but unlike those weapons does so in a two-stage process that first disperses fuel, then ignites that fuel in combination with the oxygen present in the air, increasing its deadly impact with a one-two punch of a massive shockwave and the removal of oxygen. This process is described in a Human Rights Watch report on the use of the most common class of thermobaric weapon — the fuel-air explosive — by Russia in the Chechen conflict of the late 1990s: As mentioned in the Washington Spectator report, the United States did deploy a fuel-air explosive weapon in the caves of Afghanistan in 2003. A piece for the Weekly Standard about that incident later stated that this variation on a fuel-air bomb was specifically designed to penetrate into bunkers or, more specifically, cave systems, necessitating a protective shell: While — to be clear — the United States says that both the BLU-118/B used in 2003 or the MOAB used in 2017 do not make use of depleted uranium, it would make significantly more sense for a thermobaric bunker-busting bomb like the one used in 2003, as depleted uranium retains its sharpness even when penetrating thick bunkers, per Foreign Policy: Such a substance could conceivably be warranted for a bomb designed to explode underground, but it would be extremely counter productive for MOAB both from an added weight perspective as well as an explosion dampening perspective, as alluded to by Wired: For these reasons, and even if you are skeptical of the United States record of being less than forthright about their use of depleted uranium in the past, the idea that MOAB, specifically, would employ depleted uranium makes little sense. Further, as MOAB’s main destructive capabilities come from an air shock wave and not from the direct destruction of rock (another conceivable source of trace amounts of uranium dust), there are few mechanisms by which the weapon could introduce anything radioactive on a local, let alone global, level. In other replies to her post, Lyon seems to suggest the global aspect of her argument is less scientific than spiritual: This statement is a far cry from her earlier calls for everyone on Earth to take iodine tablets, but it is as philosophically impossible to address as her original claim. Repeatedly, Lyon challenges her detractors to prove that the United States is not lying about the effects of the MOAB, shifting the burden of proof away from her own argument, possibly because the only evidence she provides are her observations that the bomb is big, and that the U.S. has used depleted uranium in the past While we cannot prove a negative (the logical fallacy that Lyon's argument lives and dies on), we can state that it would be counterproductive for the MOAB to contain depleted uranium. Comparisons to nuclear fallout, while a good way to get attention for a Facebook post, also erroneously imply that MOAB’s yield approaches anything near that of a nuclear bomb. For these reasons, we rate Lyons claim of global radioactive effects from MOAB as unproven, but unlikely.
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