‘Mother of All Bombs’ Is Successfully Tested

Debuting its biggest nonnuclear bomb, the Air Force on Tuesday dropped a 21,000-pound behemoth on a Florida test range in an exercise Bush administration officials declared a success.

Neither Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld nor Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would say whether the bomb would be used in any war against Iraq, although officials expressed hope the test alone would rattle nerves in Baghdad.

The bomb is officially called the “massive ordnance air burst,” or MOAB, although it has come to be called unofficially the “mother of all bombs,” an allusion to Saddam Hussein’s claim before the 1991 Persian Gulf War that that conflict would be the “mother of all battles.”

“Anything we have in the arsenal, anything that’s in almost any stage of development, could be used,” Myers said.

Cheryl Irwin, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said the test was considered a success.

“It did what they expected it to do. Nothing malfunctioned,” she said.

Rumsfeld said that the bomb, which was dropped out the back of a C-130 transport plane over a test range at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida Panhandle, was in some ways intended as a psychological weapon.

“The goal is to not have a war,” he said. “The goal is to have the pressure be so great that Saddam Hussein cooperates. Short of that

Some people in the surrounding area felt the detonation but said the effect was not as big as one might expect from such a large bomb.

“It was kind of weak,” said Patricia Sariego, a receptionist in Navarre, on the edge of Eglin. She said the blast shook doors.