The Marine Corps' most (in)famous technologist has a solution for the Gulf oil spill: Blow the crap out of it, with the Mother of All Bombs.

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. If there are no MOABs to be had, Gayl adds, a Vietnam-era Daisy Cutter will do just fine.

Either one ... can be enclosed in a simple pressure shell, that is augmented with several tons of liquid oxygen canisters, and lowered to just a few meters above the leaking well head. An oxygen-enhanced MOAB or Daisy Cutter detonated at a water depth of 5,000 feet will indeed have an interesting effect on all the well-related plumbing and equipment that is above, at, and slightly below the sea floor.... The exploding MOAB or Daisy Cutter would have an incredible implosive-sealing effect on oil plumbing within the immediate vicinity of the detonation.

Gayl's active, active mind hasn't stopped looking for ways to bring technology to bear to solve the most intractable problems. Nor does he limit himself by exploring the implications of those solutions. For instance: what would happen if the Mother of All Bombs went off-target at the bottom of the Gulf?

UPDATE: Gayl sends along this handy set of slides, depicting how the MOAB vs. spill operation might work.

Photo: USAF

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