The revolutionary bunker-busting ordnance used in a recent strike against Iran's Fordo nuclear facility was 15 years in the making, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Caine said Thursday.
Speaking from the Pentagon, Caine said that the U.S. began developing a specialized weapon in 2008, soon after Iran's ultra secret facility buried nearly half a mile underneath a mountain was revealed.
Caine said that a Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) officer briefed on the subject quickly determined that the U.S. did not have a "weapon that could adequately strike and kill this target."
The DTRA then initiated the development and construction of the 30,000-pound GBU-57 series MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator) that would become the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. military.
"Weaponeering is the science of evaluating a target," Caine said. "… Ultimately, weaponeering is determining the right weapon and fuse combination to achieve the desired effects and maximum destruction against a target."
"In the case of Fordo, the DTRA team understood with a high degree of confidence the elements of the target required to kill its functions and the weapons were designed, planned and delivered to ensure that they achieve the effects in the mission space."
Caine described the intense workload of not only the scientists, but also the computing power needed to develop the MOPs.
"We had so many PhDs working on the MOP program doing modeling and simulation that we were — quietly and in a secret way — the biggest users of supercomputer hours within the United States of America," he said.
The GBU-57 series ordnance is so large they can only be dropped by B-2 bombers.
"(They) tried different options, tried more after that, they accomplished hundreds of test shots and dropped many full-scale weapons against extremely realistic targets for a single purpose: kill this target," Caine said.
The weapon is "comprised of steel, explosive and a fuse programmed specifically for each weapon to achieve a particular effect inside the target," Caine said.
The decade and a half of intelligence gathering and analysis gave the U.S. military the precise targets within Fordo to drop MOPs, specifically two ventilation shafts that would aid the bomb's journey deep inside the facility.
"Each weapon had a unique desired impact, angle, arrival, final heading and a fuse setting," Caine said. "The fuse is effectively what tells the bomb when to function. A longer delay in a fuse, the deeper the weapon will penetrate and drive into the target."
Caine also praised two DTRA officers who had spent "their life's work" engineering the bombs dropped on Fordo.
"One of them said, 'I can't even get my head around this. My heart is so filled with the pride of being a part of this team. I am so honored to be a part of this,'" Caine said. "To you both, thank you and thank you to your families.
"Operation Midnight Hammer was the culmination of those 15 years of incredible work, the air crews, the tanker crews, the weapons crews that built the weapons, the load crews that loaded it."
James Morley III ✉
James Morley III is a writer with more than two decades of experience in entertainment, travel, technology, and science and nature.