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Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Sep 12, 2007 09:11 PM
from the big-boom dept.
from the big-boom dept.
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."
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Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Funny)
Every American should have a small (<5MT) hydrogen bomb in their homes to drop on the advancing Reds from their flying car should the need arise. There's no need for costly quasi socialist spending on Statist "Air Ministry" rife with bureaucrats. If those Commisars knew that they had to avoid provoking millions of normal Americans rather than a small group of fellow travellers in Washington, I bet they'd be much more cautious.
Better, if the cars were nuclear powered with a reactor and had an auto pilot like the German V2s, they could just be launched in waves by the militia to spread deadly radiation over an advancing Red army. Small towns would club together to buy a few cobalt salted 5MT devices to drop just in case the Reds proved to be hard to stop.
Most Americans will buy at least one car, and our Founding Fathers believed in the right to bear Arms, not just guns. Why not try to combine the two?
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure they've really one-upped the US here.
This is a fuel-air bomb. It would be physically almost impossible for it to have the raw destructive power of the high explosives in the MOAB. Predictably, there are no actual specifications listed for the bomb in the Bloomberg article (ok, I didn't read it all the way through, but usually those things are at the top), just vague assertions like it being the "most powerful fuel air bomb" and "four times more powerful than the MOAB". That could mean a bunch of different things - it has four times the vacuum power? A four times larger radius pressure wave? (Note that fuel air bombs often have larger but slower - and therefore less destructive - pressure waves.) It doesn't mean that it has four times the explosive power of the MOAB, because that would be pretty ridiculous.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life. High explosive bombs like the MOAB, by contrast, are just the opposite - they don't look very impressive (no big mushroom cloud) but they do massive amounts of damage. If you're anywhere near a high explosive bomb when it goes off, you may not get burned, but you will end up in about a thousand different pieces, as will everything else around you that isn't buried 100 feet below the ground.
Nuclear bombs sort of combine the worst effects of both high explosive and fuel air bombs. But if you're going for destructive power in a non-nuclear bomb, a fuel air bomb is not what you want to use.
It's probably true; doesn't mean it's important. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that anything that can "clear the area of life" counts as doing a hell of a lot of damage.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at their feature sets, among other things- the Buran was designed later, had quite a few key design decisions made that increased its design effectiveness immensely, and, sadly, never really flew.
If the Soviets copied it, they did it by taking pictures of the outside and them using their imaginations to fill in what they thought the inside looked like.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Blackjack might look like the Lancer but it really is a completely different aircraft. Not only is it bigger, it's also heavier, faster and carries a lot more ordnance.
The Soviet Union designed the TU-160 as a counter weight to the US carrier groups. If WWIII had actually started, those birds were the only thing in their inventory that could effectively counter a Navy task force. In fact their entire strategy for a land war in Europe depended on them interdicting shipping from the US across the GIUK line. The bombers would attack the escort ships with massive conventional cruise missile swarms, or single nuclear ones.
Bears, Bisons, Backfires and Blackjacks. That's why the Aegis cruisers were designed, and that's why the F-14 Tomcat and the AIM-54 Phoenix were rushed into service.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.deagel.com/Land-Attack-Cruise-Missiles/Kh-15_a000869001.aspx [deagel.com]
May I suggest you stop using Wikipedia as the source of your "expertise"? Or just shut the fuck up. Whatever works for you.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [fas.org]
As you can see most of USA is within range even without considering the use of cruise missiles.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
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!!!
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Funny)
How big was Gandhi's fuel air explosive?
Just in time too (Score:5, Interesting)
First up: Ukraine! Ukraine is weak.
Re:Just in time too (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed! The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away, and no star system will dare oppose Putin after this demonstration of the full power of FOAB. The Rebel alliance will be crushed in one swift stroke!
Re:Just in time too (Score:5, Informative)
What's interesting is *who* is getting pushed for the elections which will happen soon, not the ordinary and mundane mechanics of parliamentary democracy.
INVADE! (Score:5, Funny)
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...
Father of All Bombs? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Father of All Bombs? (Score:5, Funny)
Paving the way for a whole dysfunctional family of bombs.
Pervy uncle of all bombs: only targets children.
Crack whore daughter of all bombs: readily detonates for anyone at any time, but very cheap.
Emo-kid of all bombs: ill-fitting black casing, sits in the bomb bay sulking, threatens to go off in an overly dramatic manner "to make everyone sorry" without realising that's why the other bombs won't talk to it in the first place. When one actually does go off (which is rare), nobody notices or cares except the over-protective MOAB.
Third cousin twice removed of all bombs: everybody has one but nobody can ever recall it's name, only explodes at weddings and funerals.
Grandfather of all bombs: guarantees lawn-area supremacy.
Re:Father of All Bombs? (Score:5, Funny)
... And Canada will contribute to the project by creating the Stern Maiden Aunt of All Detonators.
Buzzword compliant (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Buzzword compliant (Score:5, Funny)
*Places all dishes under bomb*
*detonate*
The dishes are done man!
big bombs vs terrorists/freedom-fighters/whatever (Score:5, Informative)
The Russians seem to think so. [wikipedia.org]
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 [globalsecurity.org]. 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) [miamiherald.com], 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
Fighting terrorists with bombs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Fighting terrorists with bombs (Score:5, Insightful)
And the US sure minds "a few" casualties, eh? Ever looked at the number of civilian casualties in Iraq war? A war which was invoked using 9/11 and terrorists as one of the excuses.
Mostly useless (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mostly useful (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Mostly useful (Score:5, Funny)
Communism is one man taking advantage of another man.
And Capitalism is the exact opposite of that.
So how big is this thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Link to FOAB's explosion video (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.1tv.ru/news/n108915 [1tv.ru]
To play, click on a bomb's image in the right upper corner shown after flash loading.
Mexico tests La Abuelita de Todas las Bombas (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Environmentally Freindly? (Score:5, Funny)
quite possibly the cruelest weapon made (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A "vacuum bomb"? (Score:5, Interesting)
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...)
It's nothing like a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
America going in opposite direction (Score:5, Insightful)
As others have noted, you generally get much more militarily useful effect with multiple small weapons rather than one large one.
Now George... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Enough with the hyperbole (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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 [wikipedia.org] Halifax, and caused over 10,000 casualties.Re:Enough with the hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Another artifact of Bush's policies (Score:5, Funny)
-FL