Israel has pushed the US to use its ‘bunker buster’ bomb on Iran. Here’s what the weapon can do

As President Donald Trump is warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, officials and experts have suggested the US’ 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb is the only weapon capable of destroying the Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant, a facility thought to be to key Tehran’s nuclear program, which is carved into a mountain and extends deep underground.

As President Donald Trump is warming to the idea of using US military assets to strike Iranian nuclear facilities, officials and experts have suggested the US’ 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bomb is the only weapon capable of destroying the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, a facility thought to be key to Tehran’s nuclear program, which is carved into a mountain and extends deep underground. The GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which has yet to be used operationally, is designed for “reaching and destroying our adversaries’ weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities,” according to a fact sheet from the US Air Force. The weapon is a 30,000-pound bomb with 6,000 pounds of “high explosives,” said Masao Dahlgren, a fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies Missile Defense Project. It has “really thick, hard shell,” Dahlgren explained, in order for the explosives to withstand the impact of the ground and penetrate to the depths it’s intended to reach. “There’s the shell and there’s the explosive in the fuse – the explosive needs to be robust enough to not detonate without being fused, the shell needs to be strong enough to go down that far and to hit that hard and to impart enough energy to even go down that far. And then the fuse needs to be hard enough to survive all that, and smart enough to know when to blow up,” Dahlgren said. “It’s a really complex program.” The exact size of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant is unclear; CNN has reported that that its halls are estimated to be 80 to 90 meters underground. A UK-based think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, said the MOP may not even be able to reach Fordow, saying in a recent report that it would “likely require multiple impacts at the same aiming point to have a good chance of penetrating the facility.”