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."
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:4, Funny)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Interesting)
(yes, I know a joke when I see one).
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Sergei! This was nothing! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Funny)
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-Smiley
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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)
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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 mod
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)
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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 fo
Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is besides the fact that the plane shown in this one was in Bulgaria (which also contained its wildfires) and went to Serbia, not to Greece. Serbia, surprise, surprise managed to contain its fires. Actually not surprising considering that compared to this monster any other firefighting kit out there is a child's toy. Same as with the bomb actually - from the "mine is bigger" series.
As far as the fires this summer - just search the web (and gootube). It is full of pictures and videos.
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.
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Re:Who's your daddy? (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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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), poo
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: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!
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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.
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Defense... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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)
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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.
Re:INVADE! (Score:4, Interesting)
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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.
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Re:INVADE! (Score:4, Informative)
Buzzword compliant (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Buzzword compliant (Score:5, Funny)
*Places all dishes under bomb*
*detonate*
The dishes are done man!
Re:Buzzword compliant (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course you can, very easily. But then you end up with another of those catch phrases: collateral damage.
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
N bomb! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:N bomb! (Score:4, Funny)
I mustn't run away
I mustn't run away
I MUSTN'T RUN AWAY!!!
Mostly useless (Score:5, Insightful)
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http://www.robert-fisk.com/russian_atrocities.htm [robert-fisk.com] NSFW
Mostly useful (Score:3, Interesting)
a) Sell to other countries.
b) Act as a counter-balance to U.S. global hegemony.
No, of course you haven't.
As for Russia being a superpower, they're getting closer to that status everyday, now that they actually have a competent leader.
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.
a small mistake... (Score:3, Insightful)
***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.
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Exceedingly sloppy use of the concept of 'enslave' there. A distinguishing characteristic of that concept is, or at least was, the use of physical force to prevent the victim from disengaging.
If you proceed to lump America and Soviet Union into the same concept ("slave economies"), then that concept will c
Re:a small mistake... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, depends on how many different jobs are available, your chances to get one and how much help you get from the state in the meantime. Remember, majority of people is seldomly the highly educated top industry kind of people. It's usually the "lower class" and for them losing their job can be a sentence to poverty or in some cases death.
So just because I probably won't have as much of a problem doesn't mean most other people won't either.
Re:Mostly useful (Score:5, Funny)
Communism is one man taking advantage of another man.
And Capitalism is the exact opposite of that.
The difference is real vs ideal (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Ohhh, shiny (Score:4, Interesting)
These weapons are nothing more than grandiose show-offs with alleged dubious psychological effects. They're not going to launch one of these on an ICBM any time soon, unless Russia started using Antonovs as ICBMs while I was on vacation.
This is the military equivalent of having a nuclear warhead that has to be set off with a match. Flashy but completely useless.
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.
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.
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Another artifact of Bush's policies (Score:4, Insightful)
Having a President who gleefully revels in anti-intellectualism has its consequences, fellow citizens.
But, hey who cares! Freedom's on the march!
Re:Another artifact of Bush's policies (Score:5, Funny)
-FL
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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.
Oh I get it... (Score:4, Funny)
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)
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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.
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".
Nothing new (Score:5, Funny)
Money Shot? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't tell if that statement is a.) a lie or b.) the result of extreme stupidity.
Clearly if they saw who was in the White House, or I don't know, maybe studied the past 200 years of American history, they'd have a pretty good idea that this would probably trigger an arms race... How often does America like to have its arsenal out-done by foreigners? How often is that translated into leverage used by politicians to justify further military spending?
Well, anyways, kudos Russia! Here's to the apocalypse...
Chuck Norris... (Score:4, 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.
overlordski (Score:3, Funny)
Now George... (Score:5, Funny)
what a waste (Score:3, Insightful)
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"
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: (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.
Great Fire of Chicago? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, Chicago *was* levelled by the Great Fire about a century ago. It's also far, far nicer than NY with (as the OP claimed about Halifax) big city facilities and a small-town feel. Interestingly, it's also a city on a major transport bottleneck (rails from the midwest / ships on the great lakes) which couldn't be abandoned after the disaster.
I guess the moral of this is, if you want a big city that's actually a nice place rather than a big pile of people in boxes, have it blown up a century ago.
Re:Enough with the hyperbole (Score:4, Interesting)
- There are no large swathes of people who refuse to assimilate in Britain, a scattering of small communities is more accurate - look at numbers rather than hysterical tabloid newspapers.
- It is a good thing. Most of the people who refuse to assimilate live in areas where the native culture and values can be summed up as having children (or being a confirmed petty criminal) by the age of 13, and then being a dole scrounger for the rest of your life.
Incidentally, I assume you deliberately not seeing the benefit immigration has brought to Britain. A far more vibrant culture (things like books and music), "alien" values like discipline and hard work (Have you ever met an Asian chav or dole scrounger?), and even better food. Do you know that there are treatments available for paranoia?There are lots of Asians in places like Wimbledon (where I grew up): completely assimilated in a generation or two because a decent culture is something worth assimilating with.
Have you ever seen a 70 year old copy of the Daily Mail (British tabloid newspaper)? At that point they were saying that the Jews would over-run the country and impose their alien values etc. Now its Muslims/Asians. Apart from the irony, the pattern is pretty obvious.
Personally I think mindless xenophobes should be deported (perhaps we would bribe some poor country to take them?) and replaced with decent people from elsewhere.
Pure PC (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Is Russia still a nuclear power? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (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 dr