The Mormon Behind the Mother of All Bombs
You know what’s really scary? US Cold War foreign policy.
As soon as the United States touched down in Vietnam the jungle terrain caused problems. Infantry maneuvers were a crapshoot, and the Army couldn’t get many mechanized vehicles through the foliage — mobility had to depend on helicopters. On the other hand, the Vietnamese knew exactly how to maneuver in this landscape to thwart American tactics. The country was theirs.
Helicopters are nice on the level fields of Europe, but jungles are dense and helicopter blades are fragile. You can’t just set them down in the middle of trees — you either have to find a suitable landing site, letting the land choose where you can and cannot fly, or start blasting holes in the jungle.
At first, the US was using surplus World War II bombs for this purpose but eventually wanted something specially designed. To this end, the army built the BLU-82 bomb. The size of a small car, the BLU-82 could blast a 260 foot radius hole in the jungle foliage. It was a hell of a bomb — the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US Cold War arsenal — and it was based on research conducted by a Mormon.
Melvin A. Cook was born in Utah and quickly showed an aptitude for explosive chemistry, achieving his PhD in 1937. He went to work at DuPont and developed the shaped charges that went into the bazooka anti-tank weapons used during World War II. After the war he investigated the Texas City disaster, a deadly cargo ship explosion in Galveston, Texas. The explosion was driven by a massive amount of ammonium nitrate which in turn caused sympathetic blasts in a nearby oil farm, killing 600 people. Returning from the disaster, Cook began tinkering with using ammonium nitrate’s explosive properties in a more controlled way. In 1957, he unveiled a new explosive mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, and fuel oil. Called “slurry,” the charges were nearly impossible to light off accidentally, making them very safe for the people using them. Not so much for whatever was on the other side. While originally intended for mining, the US military put the violent potential to use in the BLU-82.
The United States dropped the first of these monster bombs in 1970, over Laos. The US had been secretly fighting in the Laotian Civil War since 1964, blanketing the country with air strikes to fight the Laotian Communists. The bombing campaign was so extreme that Laos ended up being bombed more than any other country in history. The US dropped two million tons of cluster munitions and other weapons, more than all the bombs dropped throughout World War II by all sides.
BLU-82s were so big that they even dedicated bomber planes like the B-52s couldn’t carry them. The Air Force had to lift the massive weapon in C-130 transport planes and drop it out the back on a cargo pallet. While originally intended to blast holes in the jungle the Air Force, horrifyingly, used them against troop concentrations and infrastructure.
Like in Vietnam, the United States lost the war in Laos. The BLU-82s were moved to storage until the early 90s, when they were pulled back into service to begin softening Iraqi positions before Operation Desert Storm. From the Washington Post:
U.S. warplanes have begun dropping giant BLU-82 "daisy-cutter" bombs and other fuel-air explosives on Iraqi positions to "experiment" with their effectiveness in clearing minefields or blasting away berms and clusters of trucks and armored vehicles, Neal said.
The BLU-82, whose powerful blast can destroy anything within a wide circle, was used during the Vietnam War to instantly clear helicopter landing zones. Fuel-air explosives, dubbed a "poor man's atom bombs," disperse a petroleum mist cloud and then ignite it, producing a massive fireball and concussion over a broad area that can detonate land mines [sic].
The official Air Force website, however, gives a much darker description of BLU-82 operations, emphasis mine:
During Operation DESERT STORM, MC-130E "Combat Talon" aircraft from the 8th Special Operations Squadron dropped 11 BLU-82/Bs, primarily for psychological effects.
BLU-82s were used up to Bush’s Middle Eastern wars, used to collapse cave complexes while hunting for Osama bin Laden. Making a full circle, the last one was dropped in 2008 over the Utah military testing range. The BLU-82’s descendent, the GBU-43/B MOAB, was first used in 2017 against ISIS.
Despite being a scientist, Melvin Cook didn’t apply scientific rigor to the rest of his beliefs, for he was an ardent Young Earth creationist, even writing the introduction to Joseph Fielding Smith’s Man, His Origin and Destiny. Science was good enough to invent bombs, but not good enough to find out how old the Earth was, go figure.
Cook’s son — Merrill — followed in his footsteps, founding the Cook Slurry Company to continue development of slurry explosives. Tiring of the bomb business Merrill got involved in Utah politics, serving as the representative for Utah’s 2nd Congressional District (currently held by Chris Stewart, former Air Force pilot and writer of Mormon apocalypse fanfics.) While in office Merrill got a reputation for erratic behavior, screwing up his job so badly that a Democrat replaced him for the district — in early 2000s Utah.