Vacuum bomb

Russia has been accused of planning to use thermobaric weapons – sometimes known as vacuum bombs – in its 2022 attack of Ukraine. This article examines what ...

The scientists found that those areas where a long ‘positive pulse’ added to a reflected ‘positive pulse’, but where they also found areas where the long ‘negative pulse’ added to a reflected ‘negative pulse’. What happened in between these long positive pulses and long negative pulses was of particular note – because it could cause a vacuum effect that was as devastating as the initial blast. If they are used against civilian populations in populated areas, this could be construed as a war crime under the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. Two-phase initiation with FAE adds complexity and the attraction of a thermobaric system is that it requires no separate secondary means of initiation. The full heat of explosion of a fuel is only realised when it is mixed with its chemical equivalent (stoichiometric) quantity of air. In contrast, a fuel-air explosion is a large cloud, which cannot be regarded as a point source and therefore the decay in peak overpressure falls much less rapidly with distance from the edge of the cloud. It is theorized that a multitude of handheld thermobaric weapons were used by the Russian Armed Forces in their efforts to retake the school during the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis. As above, large air-launched versions have been made, specifically to target armed actors hiding in caves and tunnels – the use of this weapon in enclosed spaces is devastating. For many years, manufacturers of traditional explosive munitions sought a weapon design that aimed to increase the peak pressure – the so-called blast wave. In the mid 1990s Russia used a series of thermobaric weapons dropped by planes against Chechen separatists such as the TOS-1 Buratino against the capital of Grozny [4], to international condemnation. The US has also said a variety of thermobaric weapons have been ‘‘highly effective in Iraq [10]’’. In 2007, Russia followed suit and tested their own giant thermobaric weapon calling it the ‘Father of All Bombs [11]’. A government strike in 2012 in Azaz, Syria that killed more than 40 civilians was linked to an ODAB-500 PM, a 500kg fuel-air explosive bomb of Russian origin [15], and on September 29, 2013, a thermobaric weapon was dropped on a secondary school in Raqqa, killing at least fourteen people. This is in large part because they withdraw oxygen from the air around them to create an explosion with a longer blast wave that burns at a much higher temperature.