Mother Russia, father bomb...

After last month's resumption of regular patrols of strategic bombers, which were suspended after the 1991 Soviet Union breakup, Red Army* flexes its muscles yet again, this time by testing of Father Of All Bombs, an air delivered fuel-air bomb, yielding the equivalent of 44 tons of TNT. That makes it approximately four times as powerful as US Army's MOAB. (Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or Mother Of All Bombs.) It's not the bomb I want to talk about, though, it's the propaganda and attitude of Russian officials that caught me breathless.
"The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability,"' says Col.-Gen. Alexander Rukshin, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces. Gotta love that guy. This statement is misleading at the very least, because most nuclear bombs have way more power than that. For example, Fat Man, one of the first atomic bombs ever used, that was dropped on Nagasaki, had a yield of cca. 21 kilotons of TNT. That gives the mighty FOAB credit to merely 0.2 % of Fat Man's destructive power, which, while comparable, is nowhere close.

See the Russian report video for yourself:


But Alex is just awesome, he doesn't stop there. Sharing his wisdom, (estimated to be at least 23, ;-)) with the world, he claims, that the bomb is "environmentally friendly". Excuse me? Okay, maybe it does not have nuclear fallout with long half-life, but calling a bomb worth of 44 tons of TNT, that leaves "lunar landscape" in its wake, "environmentally friendly" is just outright funny.

Tu-160, the bomber that dropped daddy of all bombs earlier this week.

However, funny turns to insanely idiotic. As bloomberg.com reports:
The new weapon disperses a cloud of explosive material that is set off by a charge and produces "an ultrasonic shockwave and an incredibly high temperature," Perviy Kanal said on its Web site. After the blast, "the soil looks like a lunar landscape," according to the report.

The new bomb carries fewer explosives than the U.S. device, while the temperature at the center of its blast is twice as high and the area of damage much greater, Perviy Kanal said.

"This has made it possible to reduce the accuracy requirements and made it cheaper, which is necessary in the current situation," Yuri Balyko, head of the Defense Ministry's 30th Central Research Institute, told the channel.

The new weapon will allow Russia "to ensure the nation's security and at the same time battle international terrorism in any situation and in any region," Rukshin said.

Oh my. I feel dumber just for having read this exhibition of pure wisdom. So we have a weapon that turns an enormous area to lunar landscape, which, in turn, allows us to reduce the accuracy requirements, and, therefore, we can use it to battle international terrorism in any situation and in any region! Holy zombie Jesus, Russian military brains are just precious! :-D Now, if I were a Chechnyan partisan, that would be all I needed to hear to capture a building in the middle of Moscow, and wait for the brave Red Army to level their capital city with one of these babies.

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* I know it's not called Red Army anymore. But hey, it seems that not many things have changed apart from the name...