China shows its own Mother of all Bombs

A newly released video by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) shows the airdrop of a new aerial bomb – the Chinese “Mother of all Bombs”.

The video has been published by the PLAAF official account on the Chinese social network Weibo to mark the 73rd anniversary of its creation. No further details about the new bomb has been provided.

Beijing-based military analyst Wei Dun Xiu suggests that the use of a thermobaric bomb has been demonstrated in the video.

Based on the power of the explosion, Wei suggests that PLA military engineers have created their own mother of all bombs, similar to the American GBU-43B.

For the first time the existence of such a bomb in the Chinese army became known in 2019, when a video from the Chinese state-run company NORINCO appeared online.

Even then military analysts suggested that the PLA had tested the largest non-nuclear bomb of Chinese design. For the first time the Chinese army demonstrated the destructive power of its own mother of all bombs.

The main bomber of the Chinese Air Force H-6K is able to drop only one such bomb at a time, Xinhua news agency reported in 2019.

The new video from November 11 confirms that China has developed a thermobaric bomb of high power and successfully tested it. However, its use in real conditions still raises questions.

Of the entire fleet of the PLA Air Force, only the H-6K bomber is capable of carrying such a bomb. But to drop it, the bomber needs to enter the zone of destruction of the enemy’s air defense.

The American GBU-43B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb is designed to be dropped from the B-2 stealth bomber. Only because of its complete air dominance in Afghanistan, the US Air Force ventured to drop the mother of all bombs from the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

Therefore, until the end of the development by the Chinese military of its own H-20 stealth aircraft, the effective use of a thermobaric bomb in the event of a conflict with the United States over Taiwan is questionable.

Military Monitoring / ABC Flash Point News 2022.