‘The Bomb Lady’ and the Forerunner of the ‘Bunker Buster’ Used in Iran

After the United States dropped 14 “bunker buster” bombs on two nuclear sites in Iran, Anh Duong looked up the weapon’s technical details and felt a rush of familiarity.

Ms. Duong, 65, is a former Vietnam War refugee who escaped Saigon and found a home with her family in Washington. Long determined to give back to the nation that sheltered her, she got her chance a month after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when she was the leader of a team of U.S. military scientists that created an explosive in the same family as the bunker buster used in Iran.

It was the BLU-118/B, a laser-guided bomb designed to travel deep into confined spaces like the underground tunnels occupied by Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. BLU stands for Bomb Live Unit, not Big, Loud and Ugly, “which is maybe what the soldiers say,” Ms. Duong said in an interview at her home in suburban Maryland.

The bomb produced a high-temperature, sustained blast, “so that our guys would not have to flush out these hills or caves by foot,” she said. Used repeatedly in Afghanistan, the weapon developed by the Navy’s “Bomb Lady” and her team is credited by others with shortening America’s longest war.

Before designing the BLU-118/B, Ms. Duong and her team were working on a new generation of “high-performance, insensitive explosives, that could take the ride and abuse” of traveling through layers of rock or walls of masonry before detonating.

These were part of the family of explosives packed into the bunker buster, officially the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, that the United States used in Iran. A dozen of the bombs were dropped on the Iranian nuclear site at Fordo, which is deep underneath a mountain. Two more were dropped on the nuclear facility at Natanz.