James Dunnigan at Strategy Page reports on the recent confirmation by the US military of rumors that America’s heaviest Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) has been improved.  Successful tests of the weapon in 2013 were apparently against an accurate replica of the main Iranian nuclear weapons development facility at Fordo, which is said to have sections that go as deep as 90-meters.  Moreover, according to Dunnigan’s article:

The GBU-57 contains 2.4 tons of explosives and costs $3.5 million each.  In the last few years several B-2 bombers have been equipped to carry these weapons (two bombs per B-2).  This was apparently meant to send a message to Iran and North Korea.  There were no known targets for such a weapon anywhere else, but there are plenty of such targets in Iran and North Korea.  Moreover, even if there were deep bunkers in Somalia or Afghanistan you don’t need a stealth bomber to deliver an MOP.  The enemy in those countries have no way of detecting a high flying B-52, much less a stealthy B-2.  But Iran and North Korea do have radars, and a B-2 could slip past those radars and take out the air defense system command bunkers, or any other targets buried deep.

The 6.2 meter (20.5 foot) long MOP has a thick steel cap, which was originally designed to penetrate up to 7.9-61 meters (26-200 feet) of concrete (depending on degree of hardness) or up to 61 meters of rocky earth before exploding.  This was the original spec, which is now supposed to be improved.

Now if we only had a Commander-In-Chief who was willing to use this firecracker.