Thread by @johnismay

Thermobarics, where to start?

First, probably a good idea to read something like this: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

There are a lot of misconceptions out there about this class of explosive, and from what I can tell, this April 25, 1975 article that ran in my own paper offers an early example of one of the biggest incorrect notions out there: nytimes.com/1975/04/25/arc…

In it, a U.S. Army major general says it's possible that an American air-dropped cluster bomb -- the CBU-55, with its three BLU-73 fuel-air explosive submunitions -- might be able to suffocate troops in the vicinity of the exploding bomblets

"The bombs might be capable of using all the air within 20 yards and suffocating troops, he added"

Near as I can tell, this could be where this misconception in the public consciousness came from. Some folks clearly ran with what Gen. Sidle said, which was wrong, skipping over the fact that he hedged with the word "might"

The article also says the CBU-55 is "inaccurate" and these bombs were "ineffective for their designed purpose" of clearing helicopter landing zones -- but hey, if we can somehow make it sound like it suffocates people, that's really bad

[FWIW, USAF records show that the Air Force dropped 986 of these CBU-55's during the Vietnam War. And American warplanes dropped 3,800 CBU-72's -- which also contained three BLU-73 FAE submunitions each -- during Desert Storm in 1991.]

But wait, you may ask, if Uncle Sam knew these things were kind of hot garbage in 1975, why did he use so many of them in combat 16 years later?

Just take a look at the types and quantities of munitions expended in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991 sometime, please. It's a dog's dinner

After 9/11, Uncle Sam went in on thermobarics again when it made the 2,000-lb BLU-118 warhead. It was fitted with a JDAM kit and Navy pilots dropped 'em during Operation Anaconda

For the Tier 1 guys, Uncle Sam even shrunk the concept down to hand-grenade size for the Mk-14 Anti-Structural Munition soldiersystems.net/2019/09/20/mdm…

For some reason, thermobaric weapons have also sometimes been called "flamethrowers" -- like, drum roll please: the Soviet-made 1980s-era RPO-A Shmel shoulder-fired rocket roe.ru/eng/catalog/la…

In more recent times, the Russians built a new multiple launch rocket system -- the TOS-1A -- which they also call a "heavy flamethrower system," even though it fires rockets with thermobaric warheads roe.ru/catalog/sukhop…

So what do thermobarics really do? It's pretty simple: when detonated, they produce a blast wave of longer duration than high explosives like RDX which are commonly used in explosive munitions

image source: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…

Thermobarics aren't new, and even though they're sometimes called flamethrowers by the Russians, they're not incendiary weapons -- and thus not prohibited under Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons geneva-s3.unoda.org/static-unoda-s…

So has anyone ever dropped dead after a thermobaric weapon detonated, yet their body showed no signs of external trauma? Did it ever happen in Vietnam, like that 1975 article said? I don't know, but I guess it's possible

If you want to understand why some people might be puzzled over how blast overpressure could kill without necessarily ripping a human body apart, read @UnderwaterLance's excellent book 'In the Waves' amazon.com/Waves-Quest-So…

My best guess is that it could be these types of casualties, where someone drops dead from an explosion without necessarily showing external trauma, which could be the reason why some folks might think the air had been sucked out of a victim's lungs. But no

So, even if you want to discount all of this, you can still be against a combatant firing weapons like artillery rockets from a TOS-1A against civilians. Some violations of international humanitarian law are really clear cut and simple, like that -- regardless of warhead type