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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?
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
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.
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.