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Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb
mahesh_gharat writes "Russia has tested the "Father of all bombs," a conventional air-delivered explosive that experts say can only be compared with a nuclear weapon in terms of its destructive power.The device is a fuel-air explosive, commonly known as a vacuum bomb, that spreads a high incendiary vapour cloud over a wide area and then ignites it, creating an ultra-sonic shock wave and searing fireball that destroys everything in its wake."
Who's your daddy? FOAB! :-)
Seriously though, Russia has for many decades going back to just after WWII had a predilection for one upping the West in terms of military hardware. They have often defaulted to building bigger engines than just about every other jet fighter (Mig-25), the biggest cargo plane I've ever been in, the An-224 (though there is a bigger 225), bigger submarines (Typhoon class), the Soviet KV Big Turret Tank of 1942 (exception for the German Landkreuzer) and more. Those Bear bombers are pretty damned big aircraft too...
I'm actually not surprised to see weapons like this developed given the nuclear weapon treaties of the past 40 years, but if the participating members including Russia and the US continue pushing nuclear ambitions, we will have lost all credibility here.
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--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
This type of bomb is mostly ueseful for chest-thumping. It cannto be used in any situation were you cannot commit atrocities. It has unreliable yield. This seems to be manly a gesture by the current primitives in the Kremlin that is intended to tell the world, that they still are a global power. Pathetic, really.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
One of the great military advantages of modern nuclear devices is that they pack an enormous amount of power into a relatively small space. A small nuke can be made to sizes no bigger than conventional bombs, so the bombers/missile/icbm can carry a lot of them. They also scale very well, every small amount you can increase in size allows for a huge increase in power, normal bombs have a more linear scale. This thing must be huge since there has to be more conventional explosive packed into it to get the same effect, this limits the amount they can produce and carry. It's probably too big to be easily fit onto an ICBM, and if you could there'd probably be just the one warhead instead of the dozens that can be carried with a nuclear configuration.
This is just another example in Russia's long history of impressive, unwieldy, and impractically large weapons. The Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever created and tested by man (even at half it's theoretical strength) broke windows hundreds of miles away and registered on seismic instruments all over the world even though it was detonated in Northern Russia.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Having a President who gleefully revels in anti-intellectualism has its consequences, fellow citizens.
But, hey who cares! Freedom's on the march!
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
And thus, Halifax's urban growth was stunted, causing it to be one of the smallest cities in the West today, (under 200,000 people), and yet because it is placed on a huge natural shipping harbor and has a nice climate, it has all the benefits of a major metropolis. --Yet it suffers from none of the congestion and other big city problems the rest of the nation has to deal with. It still has a small-town feel. Having visited, I must say it's easily one of the most wonderful cities I've ever seen. Cleanest city air I've ever breathed.
I bet New York, Chicago, Toronto and all the rest could have benefited from a city-leveling whollop a century ago as well. It'd be far, far nicer if people would just stop having so many babies and treat the land with a bit of reason and respect, but failing that, a ship full of munitions appears to do a fair job.
-FL
"They're indiscriminate and quite possibly the cruelest way of killing people save WW1-era chemical attacks."
I'd imagine being slowly hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda or fed into a paper shredder in Baghdad by Uday and Qusay might have been a little less pleasant.......
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Fixed that for you:
***Capitalism*** is evil. A harsh statement, granted. But when you see the 100s of millions of people it has enslaved for the benefit of the few people at the top, there's no other word for it but evil.
"It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it." -Robert E. Lee
Has it ever occurred to you that Russia could be using these bombs to:
a) Sell to other countries.
b) Act as a counter-balance to U.S. global hegemony.
No, of course you haven't.
Oh, but it has. Unfortunately they are completely useless for both purposes. Which, incidentially, is quite obvious.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Sure you can, if you don't mind a few casualties. The Russians seem to have a liberal policy about random deaths in terrorism matters.
Example: when 32 Chechnyen separatists took over the Beslan School and had 1200 hostages ( several hundred of them children ), Russian security forces used tanks ( firing - according to one of the tank comander's testimony - "antipersonnel-high explosive shells" ), flamethrowers, and at least one Mi-24 helicopter gunship.
At least 334 hostages died, and approximately 700 were wounded.
This is a weapon for political control as much as for war. They already have more nukes than they can reasonably use. What is the point of building a non-radiactive bomb this powerful? The only reason seems to be so you can retake the territory soon after. They're going to use it on their own territory.
As others have noted, you generally get much more militarily useful effect with multiple small weapons rather than one large one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Everytime I buy something it seems that only a month later a cheaper, faster, or larger version will appear.
:-)
The quad core MOAB is coming out soon
Table-ized A.I.
Whaddya know, bombers attacking ships. With cruise missiles! Oh the humanity!
The reality is that the Soviet Navy simply never hoped to match the blue-water capabilities of the US Navy, thus the use of the long-range bomber and the cruise missile as the primary attack weapon against surface combatants. Large numbers of Soviet bombers were tasked to naval aviation regiments throughout the Cold War.
And finally, the manned strategic bomber went the way of the condor in the early 80s. The Soviets had no illusions about their ability to successfully penetrate US air defenses, which is why they increased their ICBM throw weight enormously during the 70s and 80s. That was the actual "missile gap", not the one Kennedy claimed existed in the early 60s. Soviet bombers in the Cold War existed almost solely to fight the US Navy. You won't read that on Wikipedia, but you could read it on Jane's or FAS.
Oh, they've still got lots of nukes, and if they want more they can probably just buy some back on the black market - but they'll probably want to save those for special occasions. No, I see this as more of a way to show off what they can do relatively cheaply and cleanly. Say you've just invaded, oh, I don't know, Futtbuckistan. You've got most of the population subdued and happy, but there's a large rebel base you want to level. Light the blue touchpaper, drop it out the back of an Antonov, and when the dust settles send in the Corps of Engineers to build a shiny new town that you can hand over to a bunch of well-behaved peasants from a neighbouring region. When the rains come they can grow crops without worring about radiation, they'll have a nice place to live, and the whole country will know what happens if you don't play ball. Carrot and stick in one. Nobody is game to use nukes because, well, they're nukes - but a power that had a halfway-decent rationalisation for using one of these could probably talk their way out of the international backlash... and if they couldn't, well, would you really want to piss them off, knowing what they were capable of?
When will they learn, it's the width of the explosion that counts.
Please...
As the most basic of examples, New York City tried to succeed from the union because its financial backers depended on slave cotton. The US was _built_ on slave labor after all (both african and asian).
Historically and currently, capitalism has gone hand in hand with physical slavery and poor working conditions/sweatshops that leave people no options other than the "choice" to work and that limit ethical/caring business owners from providing for their employees because major corporations have broad government support/subsidies and complete control of distribution systems.
Communism to work relies on an idealized version of humans, one that is not lazy or greedy. It is very simple at its core, the whole "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," thing. However that assumes that people are willing to work hard at the job given to them, even if it isn't what they really want and even if there's no difference in benefit doing so. It also assumes that they are willing to take only what they need, no more, so that others can have what they need.
Well that proves not to be human nature. It can work on a small scale, but as a whole humans are lazy and greedy.
Capitalism seeks to play one on the other. You don't get to have anything just for existing, you have to work for things. So if you want stuff, you work. The more you want, the more you need to work. It uses greed to overcome laziness. Not a perfect system, but it at least does seem to work and create a functioning economy.
In reality we don't go for unrestricted capitalism in any country I'm aware of, but even the more socialist nations are based on capitalism. The government may take more of your money, and more of the basics may be provided at a common expense, but you still have to work if you want more, and working can get you more if you are willing to do it.
Like it or not, it is just what makes economies grow and seems to make life better for everyone. While capitalism isn't good at ensuring everyone gets an equal slice of the pie, it makes the pie grow large enough everyone gets more. Communism is so concerned with giving everyone an equal slice (except the leaders of course) at all costs that the pie ends up being very small and you have less.
Seriously, spending so much time, effort, money and resources on something so utterly useless. Think about the possibilities of where this all would be better spent on. I know this comment will probably inspire a lot of morons to reply that it _is_ useful, or even more moronic 'jokes' from people who simply have no clue of what they're saying.
And isn't this a country that could use every penny to help their own people? Really sad, and pointless. I love to hear a good motivation why it would be useful. I can't think of any. And let's be honest, the only use for a bomb of this size would be death and destruction. Makes me so sad to think about it. Wars are useless too.
I love this quote and believe it with my entire soul: "What you resist persists. - Carl Jung"
You're "shocked, just shocked!"?
Of course I wouldn't wish harm upon another person, and certainly not 10,000 of them. But that doesn't mean I'm incapable of seeing demographic patterns and making comments upon them. The world doesn't go away just because it happens to not fit with with moral code. Sheesh.
-FL
Put it this way, if a neighbour (who you hate and who hates you) down the street rigs up a gun in their yard and says it's a defense system against you, then sure it's a defense system against you.
;).
But if that neighbour puts the gun in the yard of your next door neighbour, then while it might still be a "defense system against you" and still not quite "gun to your head" "defense", it doesn't quite give you the same warm fuzzy feeling of "defense against you", hope you know what I mean
In other words it sure seems the US likes to do defense in an offensive manner.
Then look at some posters here saying the Mig 25 sucks because it has short range. While that "short range" might make it hard for a country like the USA to attack another country (naturally to defend itself from that evil country), that's not such a big problem if you're only using it to intercept stuff that's entered YOUR country.
Same for the big bomb - sure it's useless in destroying fortified stuff. But in your territory the fortified buildings are mostly yours, and the bomb sure works fine on "trespassers" (troops, supply vehicles, relatively lightly fortified camps).
Same for nukes that can't destroy hardened targets. Yes they're useless for a first strike, but if you have enough of them, maybe the USA won't do that first strike on you (or at least you can have bitter revenge).
A lot of that "crappy" russian stuff isn't so bad if you mainly have defense in mind.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think the Russians are good guys (hah!), but at least they rarely go around pretending or believing they are.
"Regardless, burns are the most painful injuries you can possibly suffer from"
I suggest that in the future, you actually know what you're talking about instead of just acting like you do.
"Third-degree burns additionally have charring of the skin, and produce hard, leather-like eschars. An eschar is a scab that has separated from the unaffected part of the body. Frequently, there is also purple fluid. These types of burns are often painless because nerve endings have been destroyed in the involved areas."
See that "painless" part. Pretty much refutes your statement in its entirety.
As to the most painful, I think getting shot in the gut and dying a week later after your own feces has been leaking into your abdomen is pretty bad. In fact, that's what I've heard is the worst, but I'm not claiming it outright like you are because I'm smart enough to know I haven't done the research.
Lastly, if we really want to talk about painful, try VX
"Normally, an electric nerve pulse would cause the release of acetylcholine over a synapse that would stimulate muscle contraction. The acetylcholine is then broken down to non-reactive substances (acetic acid and choline) by the acetylcholinesterase enzyme. If more muscle tension is needed the nerve must release more acetylcholine. VX blocks the action of acetylcholinesterase, thus resulting in sustained contractions of all the muscles in the body. Sustained contraction of the diaphragm muscle causes death by asphyxiation."
All your muscles spasm pretty much simultaneously, so you take on something of a pretzel shape while having a heart attack and suffocating.