MOAB

Submission 28,765

About

MOAB is an initialism for Massive Ordnance Air Blast or Mother of All Bombs, which became the subject of an image macro series and photoshop meme after the United States dropped the weapon on ISIS forces in Afghanistan in mid April 2017.

Origin

On April 13th, 2017, the United States dropped a MOAB in the Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, marking the first time the device had been used in combat.

That day, Twitter user @JackPosobiec^[4] tweeted a picture of an explosion along with the Shortly after, a screenshot of the tweet reached the front page of /r/dankmemes,^[2] where it gained over 9,500 points (86% upvoted) and 100 comments in less than 24 hours.

Spread

Shortly after, several other MOAB-related image macros reached the front page of /r/dankmemes^[5]^[6]^[7] (shown below). That day, Redditor jokmor submitted a post asking "What is the 'MOAB' and what are the ramifications for using it?" to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[1] Meanwhile, several threads speculating that "MOAB memes" were "on the rise" were submitted to the /r/memeeconomy^[3] subreddit.