Defense experts warned that the MOAB was an 'indiscriminate terror weapon'

Military analysts in the U.S. say that because the 21,000-pound massive ordnance air burst, or MOAB, is so huge, it can be dropped only from a military cargo plane that flies slowly and at relatively low altitudes, making the plane vulnerable to antiaircraft weapons. And because the bomb causes devastation across such a broad swath, it is unlikely to be used against anything but a large concentration of entrenched enemy troops — just the kind of target likely to be armed with antiaircraft weapons."It's really quite improbable that it would be used," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a defense think tank in Arlington, Va."The Pentagon is committed to avoiding large concentrations of civilians, and it is committed to avoiding putting its pilots and its planes at unnecessary risk. The only real use for this kind of indiscriminate terror weapon is to scare the bejesus out of Saddam Hussein."The MOAB shares the same acronym as Hussein's memorable threat in 1990 that he would wage the "mother of all battles" against U.S. troops. [The Los Angeles Times]