US considers hitting Iran with 'Mother of All Bombs'

More, we can speak to Ketavan Gorjastani, our foreign editor. Hello to you, Ketavan. What exactly is this mother of all bombs? What's it designed to do? Well, look, first with its official name, GBU-43B, as you said, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, MOAB, better known as a mother of all bombs, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal. It weighs about 10 tons and has a blast radius of about one kilometer. They say nine, ten city blocks is how far this blast radius goes. It was developed in the early 2000s, and it has only been in its modern form used once. It was already Donald Trump back in 2017 used against ISIS positions in Afghanistan. Now, this mother of all bomb is designed to explode several feet above ground. So it's great if you want to destroy huge areas on the surface or very shallow below ground, for example, tunnels or caves. That's exactly what it was used for in Afghanistan. What the mother of all bombs is not is a deep penetration bomb or weapon, unlike another bomb that we talked a lot about last year in June 2022, the bunker buster bombs. Those are the ones that were used by the U.S. in Iran to target those nuclear facilities that are buried deep underground under mountains, covered with materials like granite that need those bombs to go through. The mother of all bomb cannot do that. It cannot go that deep. So there are questions about how efficient it would be given the goals of the Trump administration in Iran. There are two targets that you mentioned, energy infrastructure. That, yes, this bomb would be likely to be used and be efficient because usually energy infrastructure is pretty much above ground or not buried deep. If it's to target nuclear facilities, we know that a lot of Iran's nuclear facilities or their most sensitive sites are buried deep underground, deep under those mountains. And therefore, this bomb would likely not be exactly the best use of this bomb. And that's one part, the efficiency of the bomb once it lands. The other thing to take into account is how do you get it there? Because of its size, because of its weight, it can only be transported by the C-130 cargo aircraft. And that comes with its own problems or dangers. The cargo aircraft, it's a big, fat plane. It's slow. It's very detectable by radars. It's much slower. And therefore, it's in danger when it goes into contested skies. So the United States would have to dominate the skies in order to send that cargo aircraft to drop that bomb and to do it so very safely. You know, Kevin, correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, you're a former Washington correspondent. Some of the speculation when Trump used the MOAB that first time, part of it was that he's interested to see what the U.S. arsenal can do. He has these things at his disposal. Given everything you just said, how likely do you think he'd use the MOAB this time? Well, look, one thing to remember is that this announcement, this reporting, is that the mother of all bombs was one of the options on the list of options put before the president. So it's not like the defense officials went ahead and told Donald Trump, let's use this bomb or that Donald Trump said, I want to use that bomb. It's one of the options. And that's how the Pentagon works. They come up with a series of options, whether it's a variety of targets, a variety of strategies, going from the simplest to the most complicated or out of the box options. They give Donald Trump or the president of the United States these options. They give the pros, they give the cons, and then they let the president decide. And it seems, according to the reporting, that a lot of those defense officials are pointing to these elements, to these aspects of the bomb to say, maybe this is not our best options for what we want to do in Iran. But to get back to the point that you were making about the big blast or the big show that Donald Trump would want, that is partly maybe the strategy here, according to some experts, is that if he were to use it, it could be a sort of going out with a bang, do this big explosion, say that you've achieved what you wanted to achieve and get out of this very unpopular war. The other possibility is that this is simply a psychological threat, a way to put pressure on Iran to say this is what we're thinking of possibly doing if you don't come to the negotiating table. The problem is we've seen whether it's military pressure or psychological pressure or economic pressure over the past eight months. Yes, Iran is weakened, but so far it hasn't gone to the point where it has forced Iran's hand to the point that they would accept the agreements that the U.S. wants on the terms that the U.S. wants. Of course, Donald Trump had said publicly he's not going to do anything before the midterms. After the midterms, maybe something will happen, but it seems that the people around him are not necessarily advising him to use at least the mother of all bombs. all right Kevin thank you very much Good reporting just stunning