But there is another option — the Mother of All Bombs:
The Marine Corps’ most (in)famous technologist has a solution for the Gulf oil spill: Blow the crap out of it, with the Mother of All Bombs.
Over the past decade, no one in the Corps has been more creative, more persistent and more migraine-inducing in his pursuit of warfighting gadgetry than Franz Gayl. Some of his ideas were rock-solid, like small spy drones and bomb-resistant trucks. Eventually, the Pentagon bought tens of thousands of the trucks, due in large part to his agitating and whistleblowing efforts.
Other concepts of his were more fringe: oribiting troop transports, super-strength exoskeletons, laser guns that could roast insurgents alive.
Now Gayl, a civilian scientist (semi-) employed by Quantico, may have come up with his most dramatic idea yet: Use a 21,000-pound megamunition to generate a king-sized shock wave that would force those leaking pipes on the seabed shut.
Deploying the GBU-43 MOAB — known as the “Massive Ordnance Air Burst” or “Mother of All Bombs” — would be “proven, safe and ‘green,’” Gayl tells our pal David Axe, of War Is Boring. The bomb consumes all its own fuel, after all. And it’s not a nuclear weapon, like the one the Russians allegedly used to shut down out-of-control wells. If there are no MOABs to be had, Gayl adds, a Vietnam-era Daisy Cutter will do just fine.
The rest here.





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