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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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Now that Putin's dissolved that pesky and meddlesome parliament, his plans for the Russian conquest can proceed apace.
First up: Ukraine! Ukraine is weak.
They have WMD! They harbor terrorists!
Seriously? Isn't it ironic that MOTHER Russia built the FATHER of all BOMBS to outdo UNCLE SAM's MOTHER of all Bombs? Its almost mind-blowing...
...and it should be known by now
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
It just might be enough to destroy the Angels that are a'comin' in 2015!
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
- 223,188 kilograms benzol
- 56,301 kilograms of nitrocellulose (guncotton)
- 1,602,519 kilograms of wet picric acid
- 544,311 kilograms of dry picric acid (highly explosive, and extremely sensitive to shock, heat and friction), and
- 226,797 kilograms of TNT
The Explosion leveled Halifax, and caused over 10,000 casualties.The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Don't worry - the US will soon respond with their "Alcoholic Step-Dad of All Bombs."
Dark Reflection
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!
It's on Russian TV news channel web site:
http://www.1tv.ru/news/n108915
To play, click on a bomb's image in the right upper corner shown after flash loading.
France is planning to test Le Grand-père de Toutes les Bombes next week.
The week after that North Korea is threatening to test indoor plumbing.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It doesn't pollute the environment... it just incinerates it!
preads 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.
Here's a slightly more accurate description of what it does....to people.
They're indiscriminate and quite possibly the cruelest way of killing people save WW1-era chemical attacks.
The fact that the US and Russia are the only countries to use and develop them should speak volumes.
Please help metamoderate.
Nah...that type of thing is more widely known as a fuel-air explosive. Even my old flight sims from the late 1980s called them that. (Even back then the common target was Iran...)
Comparing these things to nukes really underestimates the power of a nuke. Consider the wikipedia entry on the Moab.
It's got a yield of 11 tons of TNT. That means the Hiroshima bomb, at approximately 15 kilotons, was about 1300 times stronger. And a Minuteman ICBM, at 1.2 megatons, is 109,000 times stronger. The Tsar Bomba weapon had a yield equal to about 40 Minutemen, or around 4.4 million Moabs.
I know there's additional factors when it comes to amount of destruction inflicted, but still, it's clear that these fuel-air devices are a drop in the ocean compared to a nuke.
The phrase "weapon of mass destruction" annoys me because it equates so many lesser things with nukes, which are, in my opinion, the only WMD, other than perhaps a really vicious plague weapon the likes of which we haven't yet seen.
Hollywood has built far larger bombs. One of the largest was named Pluto Nash. Not many people have heard of it inspite of it not being a secret project. Smaller tactical bombs were created by the likes of Pauly Shore. Not as powerful but equally devasting at killing 90 minutes of your life.
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
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.
Communism is one man taking advantage of another man.
And Capitalism is the exact opposite of that.
http://www.deagel.com/Land-Attack-Cruise-Missiles/Kh-15_a000869001.aspx
May I suggest you stop using Wikipedia as the source of your "expertise"? Or just shut the fuck up. Whatever works for you.
This bomb made Chuck Norris sneeze.
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?)
Fuel Air Devices aren't really that interesting, from a fundamental engineering standpoint. Scaling them up isn't that hard -- you just add more fuel. Eventually you run into delivery problems. Like the Tsar Bomba (the Russkies giant H-bomb), it's more of a question of priorities than design ability. You can scale a hydrogen bomb up pretty much arbitrarily, by adding more tritium; similarly, FADs can be made bigger simply by adding more fuel and then changing the dispersion calculations accordingly (so that you achieve the right fuel/air mix at the right target altitude). The real question is 'why would you bother?' It's probably easier to drop twice as many bombs of half the size, than one really monster bomb, in most combat scenarios.
I don't really doubt that you could make a FAD that's bigger than the MOAB. They have more real-world experience in the area than other nations -- they used FADs extensively in Chechnya -- and have shown a propensity in the past for building "the biggest" simply for the penis-length factor. That doesn't mean that the rest of the world should be rushing out to do the same thing, or really care.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Yes, during WWII it was actually quite common for planes to attack surface ships with iron bombs, or even just strafe them with machine gun fire. That became problematic with the availability of air cover from aircraft carriers and better ship-mounted defensive systems, so it went out of style until cruise missiles were developed and standoff attacks were made possible.
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?
The Russians seem to think so.
In 1999, the Russian Army evacuated the city of Grozny of civilians, leaving (obstensibly) only the dug-in insurgents in the city. Russian forces then cordoned the city and laid waste to it with massive barrages of fuel-air munitions, delivered via TOS-1. The city was totally destroyed.
That was using Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE's), which use aerosolized hydrocarbon-based fuel. Judging from the mass-to-yeild ratio reported for this new bomb (~5.5x that of TNT), it's an aluminum-based thermobaric munition. Thermobarics use aluminum (or less commonly boron) based fuel, distributed and usually detonated by high explosive charge. Compared to fuel-air bombs this results in greater reliability, more energy released per unit mass, and much more energy released per unit volume (since 75% aluminum + 25% composition-B HE is about 2.5x denser than hydrocarbon-based fuels).
For what it's worth: (1) the old-generation american fuel-air explosives used ethylene oxide as their fuel, which increased reliability but at the expense of energy density. (2) the american armed forces have aluminum-based thermobaric munitions in their inventories, too.
And yeah, comparing FAE's and thermobarics to nukes is misleading. Thermobarics can offer up to ~8x the energy density of conventional high explosives, but even small nukes generate thousands times more boom per unit weight. Nukes are the cheap and easy way to destroy a city, but the Russians decided the political price would be too high, and used FAE's instead (which are much cheaper than equivalent-yield high explosives, but nowhere nearly as cheap per unit yield as nukes).
-- TTK
I agree, Tu 160 does not have anything to do with that. Now TU-22M Backfire is a completely different matter. It was designed as an antifleet weapon, built as an antifleet weapon and is still considered by the USA to be the most dangerous antifleet weapon in the Russian arms inventory.
As far as what is feasible to attack with what here is a nice diagram: http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/bomber/range.gif
As you can see most of USA is within range even without considering the use of cruise missiles.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Bombers, carrying cruise missiles, do quite well at attacking naval formations. The Russians maintained hundreds of bombers specifically for the purpose. (And the F-14/Phoenix combination was designed expressely to combat them.)
Except for one little problem - the Russians didn't have any small fast aircraft that could strike naval battle groups in the GIUK, let alone deep in the North Atlantic. Though normally I am loath to send someone to Tom Clancy for military information - dig up a copy of Red Storm Rising and read his and Larry Bonds' take on what a WWII Battle of the Atlantic might have looked like in the 1980's. He gets it pretty close.
Bombers are not designed to attack navy ships.
Wrong. Take Tu-22M for instance. Or the Tu-16. Or even the B-52. Some of these aircraft served in hundreds in dedicated anti-shipping regiments.
Battle carrier groups are heavily fortified structures.
Wrong again. Heavily defended? Yes. Fortified? Hell No. Not since world war 2 when the armored battleships went the way of the Dodo. Modern warships dont have anything more than splinter armor.
Even back then, they would use small fast aircrafts to hit our ships, not monsters aircrafts that make inviting targets
Wrong two more times again. One, Small aircraft lack the range, endurance and payload to effectively hunt the carrier battle groups. Two, These "monster" aircraft are not quite the easy target you think they are because they have stand off weapons.
Finally, you are wrong when you contradict the GP that Tomcat/Phoenix was a direct responce to these bombers. The Tomcat was specifically designed for intercepting heavy cruise missile carrying bombers.
And you have the gall for berating the GP and mods about modding without a clue!!!
The bomb, George. The fuel-air bomb. Well now what happened is, one of our base commanders, he had a sort of, well he went a little funny in the head. You know. Just a little... funny. And uh, he went and did a silly thing. Well, I'll tell you what he did, he ordered his planes... to attack your country. Well let me finish, George. Let me finish, George. Well, listen, how do you think I feel about it? Can you imagine how I feel about it, George? Why do you think I'm calling you? Just to say hello? Of course I like to speak to you. Of course I like to say hello. Not now, but any time, George. I'm just calling up to tell you something terrible has happened. It's a friendly call.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
sigs are hazardous to your health
They weren't. During Soviet times, the twenty or so that were actually deployed were based in Priluki, which is in Ukraine, about 100 km east of Kiev. Not far from Chernobyl, incidentally, and not exactly northern Siberia. After the breakup of the USSR part of those planes were scrapped, the remainder were given to Russia in exchange for gas debts. The Russian Tu-160s are based at Engels-2, which is on the eastern shore of the middle Volga opposite Saratov, south of Kazan' in European Russia, also not exactly northern Siberia.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
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.
In my day, Soviet Union created world's largest Micro Chip!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."