by WorldTribune Staff, June 19, 2025 Real World News
Hundreds of feet inside a mountain about 18 miles northeast of the city of Qom in northwestern Iran sits the Fordow fuel enrichment plant.
Only the U.S. has the precision-guided GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator. / U.S. Air ForceIf Israel is to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it must take out Fordow.
“The entire operation … really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,” Israeli Amb. to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter told Fox News.
About the only way Israel can get to the deep underground facility is a bomb that only the United States has.
Related: Iran’s strategic assets survive underground, thanks to North Korean expertise, June 17, 2025
That would be the 30,000-pound, precision-guided GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, also known as the “MOP.”
Also known as the “bunker buster” the U.S. Air Force said that the MOP was “designed to accomplish a difficult, complicated mission of reaching and destroying our adversaries’ weapons of mass destruction located in well protected facilities.”
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian, told the Financial Times on Wednesday: “To destroy Fordow, which the MOP was explicitly designed for, would probably take at least two bombs, each hitting exactly the same spot.”
The MOP can reach the depth of a 20-story building underground.
Axios’ future of defense reporter Colin Demarest said a B-2 bomber, which is capable of quietly flying extraordinary distances, dropping a MOP is about as potent as it gets — shy of nuclear power.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to provide details of U.S. military plans in Iran during an open-door Senate hearing on Wednesday. He said only that if and when President Donald Trump orders a strike, the Pentagon “will be ready to execute it.”
Is U.S. set to deploy 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator? added by Editor Two on June 19, 2025
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