Feeling the heat
This via Ten Percent:
British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with a new “super weapon” to attack Taliban fighters more effectively, defence officials said yesterday.
The “enhanced blast” weapon is based on thermobaric technology used in the powerful bombs dropped by the Russians to obliterate Grozny, the Chechen capital, and in US “bunker busters”.
There are, needless to say, nicer ways to go than being caught in a thermobaric blast:
According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, “The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant…. What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.”
A second DIA study said, “shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue… it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate.”
But it’s all ok:
The MoD said in a statement that it was buying “a small number of enhanced blast munitions for use on operations”. It added: “These have been procured in full accordance with the UK’s obligations under international humanitarian law.
Yay! for humanitarian thermobaric weapons! And, what’s more…
Defence officials insisted yesterday that the British bombs were different. “They are optimised to create blast [rather than heat]“, one said, adding that it would be misleading to call them “thermobaric”.
Sounds familiar. Anybody else remember then Defence Secretary John attempting to argue the moral merits of ‘fire bombs’ over napalm, the last time questionable military tactics were discussed? Afghan civilians must be praying that it’s a nice cool British thermobaric weapon that hits their house as opposed to one of them nasty hot American ones.
Posted on August 24th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Um….it’s a sodding bomb. Such things are well know for causing death and agony, what did you expect?
Um…maybe a politician having the balls to say what you just did rather than treating us all like dickheads?
Fuel-air explosives have been around since the 70s. This article from the Federation of American Scientists discusses the physics and the effects a bit.
Napalm, FAE, clusterbombs, nukes  hey, it’s all good stuff, especially when used against people with brown skin.
Scary part of that FAS article:
“The main destructive force of FAE is high overpressure, useful against soft targets such as minefields, armored vehicles, aircraft parked in the open, and bunkers.”
So what the heck would count as a hard target then?
We must remember though that unlike the Taliban and AQ, the coalition do not have legions of soldiers prepared to be suicide bombers. So the coalition, not having bodies, has to use the only weapons it has available.
I totally agree with the war in Afghanistan. Sometimes they have to use better weapons to take out the Taliban. Like ChrisM said they are fanatics who don’t care how many civilians they kill. America and Britain could wipe out the entire country in one day if they thought and acted like the Taliban, but they don’t and need more sophisticated weapons.