South China Morning Post September 28, 2004
Dispensing carnage without the rubble
By David Wilson
I have always had a soft spot for the notion of non-lethal weapons. Why can't we fight wars with "malodorants" and Kevlar nets and simply embarrass our enemies into submission?
But the killer chimp in us refuses to relent. We still get the urge to terminate those who look different or talk funny. Worse, we have yet to develop methods that do the job as smoothly as killing a program. Hi-tech weapons with fancy names can actually be spectacularly savage. Just look at the "thermobaric" bomb.
If that word baffles you, bear in mind that the search engine I habitually enlist, alltheweb, proved clueless too. It suggested I investigate Yahoo! shopping so I could compare thermobaric products and prices from thousands of my favourite stores then look at ratings.
I am reluctant to take that path in case Echelon sucks everything out of my hard drive and shuts me down once and for all. But I can reveal the name is a mix of the Greek for heat, therme, and for pressure, baros.
And the name is telling. A thermobaric bomb ignites the air itself, sucking the oxygen from an enclosed zone and creating a pressure wave which crushes the life out of anyone who was not incinerated. Those who are unlucky enough to survive even this will suffocate quickly because there is no more oxygen.
The secret of this device, which critics construe as the new napalm, is aluminium dust. When I learned that, I thought my source must have made a mistake and meant something more flammable, such as magnesium perhaps. After all, I use aluminium foil all the time for cooking and have yet to blow up my kitchen.
However, it transpires that aluminium possesses ferocious explosive potential in powder form.
The United States military's preferred method of harnessing that power is the BLU-82, also known as the daisy-cutter, which is so big it has to be parachuted from a cargo plane. The target is typically something known by one of the most surreal acronyms this column has publicised: an HDBT (hard and/or deeply buried target). That usually translates as Taleban fighters hidden in a bunker or within the recesses of a cave complex in Afghanistan.
One difference between the thermobaric and the standard-issue bomb is it does not destroy an interior. It just clears it, allowing attacking troops to breeze in when the air has cooled.
You might assume the person credited with developing a weapon even more horrific than napalm is a mean, white geek with a buzz cut. In fact it was Anh Duong - a Vietnamese woman who fled Saigon for the US in 1975 and wound up as head bomb-maker at the Naval Surface Warfare Centre in Maryland, according to The Village Voice.
Her darling was tested in a zone which, handily, attracts few visitors aside from aliens - the Nevada Desert. Dropped by an F-15E attack aircraft, the bomb "skipped" into a tunnel. The explosion produced a "significant growth in overpressure and temperature in the tunnel", according to globalsecurity.org. The use of the word significant has to be one of the greatest understatements since the word daisy-cutter entered the military lexicon in 2001.
You may wonder whether the military tried out its significant weapon during the thunder run known as Operation Iraqi Freedom.
US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld last year said thermobaric Hellfire missiles were indeed unleashed. Omitting details of any strikes, he raved about how the technology could "take out the first floor of a building without damaging the floors above, and is capable of reaching around corners".
He made it sound so intelligent, so surgical. But that impression, to use a final euphemism, is misleading.
Seen from a distance, thermobaric explosions reportedly resemble the blast from a tactical nuclear weapon and presumably entail the same carnage.
© Copyright 2004, South China Morning Post Ltd.
