Security ... think about it!
It looks like the Air Force will be getting a new toy. The Pentagon recently awarded a nearly $52 million contract to speed up delivery of the "massive ordnance penetrator" or MOP. The MOP, which will be the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, is a precision-guided bomb that will carry 5,300 pounds of explosives and is designed to destroy deeply buried and hardened underground targets. Not surprisingly, the MOP began development during the Bush administration – which certainly would have coveted such a weapon as part of its policy of preemption (more properly prevention since the Bush administration’s national security policy called for preempting emerging threats before they materialized rather than preemptive defense against known, imminent threats). What is surprising is that the Obama administration has decided to accelerate the program so that the MOP can be aboard B-2 stealth bombers as soon as next summer.