“Father of all bomb,” Russia’s answer to US’s “Mother of all bomb”

Following the US “shows of power” by dropping a GBU 43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), also known as ‘mother of all bombs’, on ISIS caves in Afghanistan, Russia has answered that by dubbing its powerful weapon as “father of all bomb”.

In 2007, Moscow tested the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power (ATBIP), which has been dubbed the ‘father of all bombs’.

According to some report, the bomb is four times more powerful than the MOAB. Though lighter at 7,000kg.

Last week, the US dropped the most destructive non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on an alleged target of the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan.

The destructive bomb, officially known as the GBU 43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast and colloquially as ‘the mother of all bombs (MOAB)’, has been in the US arsenal since 2003.

MOAB weighs over 10,000kg and its blast yield is equivalent to that of 11 tonnes of TNT.

The MOAB was developed to replace the BLU-82, also known as the ‘daisy cutter’, a 6,800kg bomb used in the Vietnam war to create instant helicopter landing sites. The explosive force could vaporise trees in a 76-metre radius. The MOAB is, however, not the heaviest bomb in the US arsenal.

The heaviest conventional bomb possessed by the US military is the 14,000kg GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), which has never been used. However, its blast yield is lower than that of the MOAB.

The US bomb can’t be considered as the most destructive conventional bomb, because Russia has ATBIP.

In 2007, Russia tested the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power (ATBIP), which has been dubbed the ‘father of all bombs (FOAB)’ as it is four times more powerful than the MOAB.

Though lighter at 7,000kg, the bomb has a blast yield equivalent to that of 44 tonnes of TNT.

The blast yields of these bombs are minor compared to nuclear weapons. The ‘little boy’, the bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during the Second World War, had a blast yield equivalent to that of about 15,000 tonnes of TNT — over 300 times the destructive power of the FOAB.

The most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated was the ‘tsar bomba’, the ‘king of all bombs’, when it was tested in 1961. Its blast yield was equivalent to that of 50 megatonnes of TNT.