LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The military has ordered 20 of the bombs for the tidy sum of $314 million. The bombs are guided by GPS and can be dropped by the B-52 Stratofortress bomber or the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.

The deployment of such heavy ordnance on traditional bomber platforms is a curious juxtaposition in an age of drones and precision strikes conducted with  lightweight ordinance. However, defense officials have stressed the need to maintain hard-hitting heavy ordnance in the US arsenal. 

While over the past two decades, the US has shifted focus to fighting loosely organized insurgent enemies, threats from large nations with sophisticated military capability, or even from terrorists hiding in deep subterranean complexes remains a possibility.

The bombs carry more than 5,300 pounds of explosives and are more than 20 feet long. Dubbed the "Massive Ordnance Penetrator" they are believed to be substantially more effective than the current bunker busting munitions in the arsenal.

Because of national security concerns, the Pentagon will not permit Boeing to comment about the program, although the existence of the program has been publicly acknowledged for some time. The bombs have been built and assembled at Boeing's Phantom Works facilities in St. Louis. Boeing works on a number of top secret projects in those facilities.

No photos of the bomb have been officially released, although illustrations and unofficial photographs have been widely circulated. Images depict the bomb with sophisticated GPS guidance equipment at the rear, along with air brakes and fins to arrest the fall of the bomb and steer it, insuring that it drops precisely onto the target in the configuration that allows maximum penetration into the earth.

It is believed that such bombs could conceivably be effective against hardened targets (underground bunkers) in countries such as Iran or North Korea, which are suspected to be developing clandestine and potentially threatening top-secret weapons projects.

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