OKAY, WE GET THAT THE UR WOULD BE EMBARRASSED IF NUKING IT WORKED...:

Marine Techie: End Gulf Oil Spill With ‘Mother of All Bombs’ (Noah Shachtman, June 10, 2010, Wired)

Over the past decade, no one in the Corps has been more creative, more persistent and more migraine-inducing in his pursuit of warfighting gadgetry than Franz Gayl. Some of his ideas were rock-solid, like small spy drones and bomb-resistant trucks. Eventually, the Pentagon bought tens of thousands of the trucks, due in large part to his agitating and whistleblowing efforts.

Other concepts of his were more fringe: oribiting troop transports, super-strength exoskeletons, laser guns that could roast insurgents alive.

Now Gayl, a civilian scientist (semi-) employed by Quantico, may have come up with his most dramatic idea yet: Use a 21,000-pound megamunition to generate a king-sized shock wave that would force those leaking pipes on the seabed shut.

Deploying the GBU-43 MOAB — known as the “Massive Ordnance Air Burst” or “Mother of All Bombs” — would be “proven, safe and ‘green,’” Gayl tells our pal David Axe, of War Is Boring. The bomb consumes all its own fuel, after all. And it’s not a nuclear weapon, like the one the Russians allegedly used to shut down out-of-control wells.

...but from a Democratic perspective isn't there considerable benefit to showing the government can do something effectively and only it can?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2010 9:05 PM