FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER DUBBING ITS most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever developed "the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB), the U.S. military finally found an opportunity to test the ordnance on the battlefield. In April 2017, intelligence officials had located a large cell of Islamic State Khorasan, the terrorist group also known as ISIS-K, hiding in a cave complex in Nangarhar province on the border with Pakistan.
The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, to use its official name, had shown promise during demonstrations in testing grounds, such as Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, since its unveiling in 2003. But the Pentagon had never deployed it in actual battle, over concerns about civilian casualties. This cell, however, was believed to be remote enough for a MOAB deployment.
According to the initial assessment by the Afghan Ministry of Defense and local media reports, the surprise blast swept through the caves with ease, causing at least 36 casualties, without harming any known civilians. (The U.S. government never publicly released its own damage assessment.) For the Pentagon, this was more than a strike against terrorists: It served to demonstrate the feasibility of its newly developed weapons systems.
In many ways, Afghanistan was the ideal battleground for trialing new technology. Unlike in Iraq and Syria, much of the fighting took place in rural or mountainous areas with low concentrations of civilians. Using the GBU-43/B near urban centers would constitute a war crime under international law because the force would have been "indiscriminate," causing civilian deaths and the destruction of critical infrastructure.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March - April 2022-Ausgabe von Popular Mechanics.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der March - April 2022-Ausgabe von Popular Mechanics.
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Henrietta Lacks - It's not surprising that Henrietta Lacks-whose
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Dante Lauretta sat in the backseat of a helicopter hovering high above a remote patch of Utah desert, waiting for a small, twinkling speck in the sky to plunge toward earth.If you didn't know better, you might think what was beginning to burn through the skies above the American southwest in the early hours of September 24, 2023, was a shooting star. But it wasn't a shooting star. Or a meteor. It was a dishwasher-size capsule filled with bits of ancient asteroid-priceless matter from the dawn of the solar system. In other words, it was a treasure chest moving at 27,000 miles per hour and sizzling at a temperature half that of the sun's surface.
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