Thursday, March 30, 2006

The Big Boom

I am not even sure what to think about this. What the Hell could you possibly need a bomb this big for? It would be 700 times larger than the 2,000 pound bombs used to blast U-Boat pens in WWII. It would be almost 100 times larger than the Daisy Cutter, generally thought to be the largest conventional weapon in the world. It would be 63 times bigger than the Amazon, the superbomb designed to blast through the most heavily reinforced underground facilities built by the Germans in WWII. It would be 33 times bigger than the titanic T-12, which was under development at the end of the war but was eventually replaced by small nuclear weapons.

I mean, jeez, how would you even GET it there? The Daisy Cutter, at a mere 7.5 tons, is already too big to fit in the bomb-bay of any bomber ever built - they have to push the stupid thing out of the back hatch of a C-130, a cargo plane. The C-130 only carries around 23 tons of cargo, so you could get, oh, about 1/30th of this baby into the cargo hold. The fearsome B-52 carries 35 tons of bombs, and itself weighs only about 92 tons, or about 13 percent of the weight of this superbomb.

So what would we do? Drive it to the target in a convoy of trucks? Drop it in pieces and ask the nice folks on the ground to assemble it for us?

I have a better idea: let's just develop a system to attract a meteor to hit enemy installations. That would show 'em good.


Afternoon Update: I guess I am not the only one whose mind boggles.

No comments: