Russia Tests World's Largest Non-Nuclear Bomb 632
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."
Enough with the hyperbole (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Mostly useless (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.robert-fisk.com/russian_atrocities.htm [robert-fisk.com] NSFW
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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:So how big is this thing? (Score:4, Informative)
And you're right, large devices are mostly useless, whether they are nuclear or conventional. That's why both the US and USSR stopped making multi-megaton bombs and started creating MIRVed payload ICBMs and SLBMs to deliver multiple smaller devices.
A radial airburst of 6-7 nuclear warheads in the 200-300KT range is *much* more destructive than a single 20MT bomb. That's the nuclear doctrine for both Russia and the US for large counter-population or counter-value targets, and has been for the past thirty years or so. The large bombs went out of style in the late 60s along with the hippies.
Re:Mostly useful (Score:2, Informative)
Putin's a thug. Murdering Russian Journalists [cbsnews.com] and anyone [msn.com] else who dares criticize him are the marks of a mafioso thug, not a statesman. The only reason Russia is resurfacing is the high price of oil. It has very little to do with his leadership.
Communism 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'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.
Re:quite possibly the cruelest weapon made (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Just in time too (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mostly useful (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Nukes are way more reliable (Score:4, Informative)
Chemical weapons are powerful, but very difficult to disperse finely enough to affect a large population. Usually what happens is that a chemical warhead will go off, and deliver a superlethal dose to a particular area and leave the rest of the target pretty much unscathed. These weapons are also more problematic to store over the long term.
Nuclear devices on the other hand destroy with brute force, so you don't have to worry about designing fine dispersion mechanisms - the force of the blast will take care of spreading around radioactive fallout for you. Also, nukes "salt the field" by leaving medium to long term radioactivity in the area. Nukes are also more difficult to defend against, since they combine massive physical damage, EMP and radioactive fallout. Chemical weapons don't offer that kind of "triple threat".
What a LOAD of shit. (Score:1, Informative)
Moderators, do you guys just mod up with NO clue? Heck, use some common sense. Bombers are not designed to attack navy ships. Battle carrier groups are heavily fortified structures. Even back then, they would use small fast aircrafts to hit our ships, not monsters aircrafts that make inviting targets.
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.
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: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.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:INVADE! (Score:3, Informative)
This is not correct; there is no such rule, and you can find words of all genders for inanimate objects (kamen':m, bomba:f, okno:n)
Yes the word for a bomb has feminine gender, this readily disproves your theory.
Re:INVADE! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Enough with the hyperbole (Score:1, Informative)
No, it's the ridiculous need for government to import more colonists every year, and keep our manual labour costs low, and modify the ethnic, and religious make up of the country.
In the long term, Canada will have problems like in the Netherlands, or Britain; large swaths of people who refuse to assimilate, hold alien values, and seek to destroy the nation from within.
Re:What a LOAD of shit. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, the jets may of been able to out run the F-15's of the day, but their maintenance requirements were extraordinary. A high speed run above mach 2 required them to be fully rebuilt. A high speed run above mach 2.8 for more than a few minutes generally resulted in the destruction of the engines.
That, coupled with the Mig-25's short effective combat radius (~180 miles with full load out), poor maneuverability (typical G loading limited to around 3 depending on fuel and load out), doesn't make it an effective interceptor. It makes it a cheap plane to produce with good numbers that really reflect on paper only.
Mig-25's have kills associated with their name, but none have ever intercepted an SR-71 (one task it was designed to handle). In a head on engagement (ie, F-15), their only defense is their speed, which results in massive maintenance or destruction of the engines.
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
Re:Enough with the hyperbole (Score:3, Informative)
What, like the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, or the Great Fire of New York of 1835?
Sure, on a "fraction of citywide structures leveled" scale, Halifax was more significant than Toronto or New York's fires (thought not Chicago's), but I don't think you can pin the blessings or sins of that city on a single explosion.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is Russia still a nuclear power? (Score:3, Informative)
They don't really have anyone left to blow up, now that the muslims in Chechnya have been whipped.
Maybe they'll sell the bomb to the US. Looks like it would be handy for the next Fallujah... the yanks could just coax all the terrists into one city like in Fallujah but instead of air-strikes, artillery and small-arms stuffing around and losing troops, they could just drop one of these babies and take te rest of the day off.
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:3, Informative)
As far as using a Tu 160 to perform in this dick measurement contest, this is sabre rattling.
The bomb is under 10 tons so it can perfectly fit in a TU 95 Bear. The sole reason for using a White Swan to drop it was to show off.
Do we like it or not the cold war is back and sabre rattling is in full swing. This is just one example. Plenty of others - the bomber patrols, BBC exorcising with extreme prejudice any footage and any mentioning of Russian fire fighter planes during the Greek fires this summer and so on.
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:2, Informative)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Informative)
I would. A aircraft that can cruise at mach 2.35 and dash at 2.8 making it immune to most threats. Carries multiple long range missiles coupled with a powerful radar. Can take off and land from a dirt strip while being maintained by semi-skilled conscript labour and flown by relatively unskilled pilots counting on its excellent autopilot. Plus cheap enough to mass produce. And all that in the sixties! The Foxbat is an outstanding success outside of Tom Clancy novels.
Yes, the jets may of been able to out run the F-15's of the day, but their maintenance requirements were extraordinary
Actually they werent. No more than say the F-14. The soviets just had a different maintanence philosophy.
A high speed run above mach 2 required them to be fully rebuilt. A high speed run above mach 2.8 for more than a few minutes generally resulted in the destruction of the engines.
Routine mach 2 flight did not result in the engine having to be being rebuilt.
That, coupled with the Mig-25's short effective combat radius (~180 miles with full load out), poor maneuverability (typical G loading limited to around 3 depending on fuel and load out), doesn't make it an effective interceptor.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers but MiG-25 with four missiles and some supersonic flight (few minutes in combat) had a range of about 600 miles. Range under full load is a meaningless term in real life. At maximum weapons load a F-16 runs out of fuel by the time it taxies for takeoff. It doesn't mean that F-16 is a ineffective aircraft in real life.
And poor maneuverability is a quite acceptable limitation for a interceptor. These aircraft are not intented for dog fights.
Mig-25's have kills associated with their name, but none have ever intercepted an SR-71 (one task it was designed to handle)
Actually it wasn't designed to intercept the SR-71, but the high altitude fast bombers like the B-58 and B-70 which it was more than capable of doing.
In a head on engagement (ie, F-15), their only defense is their speed
You mean other than their longer ranged missiles or their electronic warfare gear?
which results in massive maintenance or destruction of the engines.
Between destroyed engines and engines-destroyed/airframe-destroyed/pilot-dead it would take the former every time. Wouldn't you?
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:3, Informative)
Although it never gets much publicity, the Russian shuttle program was the most expensive space project ever and it was nowhere near a straight copy as the Tu-144 was of Concorde for example. One can only wonder as to what might have been.
Engine not the biggest problem (Score:3, Informative)
Buran had the same problem.
What Buran excelled in, ironically, was avionics. The Buran could be remotely flown from the ground, so that, they could test it without astronauts. In such a mode, you could decrew the space plane, bring them down in a soyuz, and then remotely fly the buran for a landing. Might lose a vehicle but won't lose the crew.
Re:Fighting terrorists with bombs (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The difference is real vs ideal (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure what your point is, other than to further illustrate that idealised communism isn't realistic, a fact I've already admitted.
Capitalism requires perfect information only if you want or need to make a perfect long-term decision every time
BS. Take, for example, drugs. In a pure capitalist world, a company is free to market drugs with long-term side-effects. In this case, you have a combination of asymmetric information (the drug company is aware but chooses not to share the information), combined with externalities (long-term health costs). I'm sure one could come up with many other examples (the insurance industry comes to mind).
Capitalism and free markets are poor at dealing with public goods
No, capitalism is poor in any case where there are negative externalities. These externalities aren't factored into the cost of products, and thus are effectively subsidized. This can be true of both public and private goods (for example, imagine a corporation setting up a factory which pollutes a vast swath of private farm land).
Fear (Score:2, Informative)