“Hotter than the Sun” is one of those phrases we reach for when we have run out of ways to describe something extreme. It sits alongside “faster than a speeding bullet”. A figure of speech, not a measurement.But the centre of the Sun sits at around 15 million degrees Celsius, …
How Pershing II Changed Nukes Forever
Sometime in 1988, at a test range called Kapustin Yar deep inside the Soviet Union, a team of engineers took the most powerful weapon their country had ever built, packed it with the better part of a ton of high explosive, and blew it to pieces. And then they did …
What Is a Neutron Bomb?
Although I’ve covered quite a few nuclear technologies over past few years there is one which I haven’t touched upon but he’s regarded as one of the most insidious forms of nuclear weapon, One which was parodied by the mad magazine with the slogan “save buildings, not lives” and on …
DeadHand – Russia’s Doomsday Weapon From Beyond the Grave.
How do you stop a nuclear armed opponent with better, more accurate weapons from launching a first strike that would decapitate the command structure of your country before you had a chance to launch your weapons in retaliation. This was the question that the leaders of the Soviet Union faced …
How Does a Nuclear Missile Find its Target?
Have you ever wondered how a nuclear missile can find its way half way across the world and to be within less than 100 meters of it’s target and not use GPS?. In fact, as the accuracy of intercontinental ballistic missiles or ICBM’s, increased, the size of the warheads decreased, …
Tomahawk Missile – How is it Nearly 50 Years Old and Still Going Strong?
It’s not the fastest, it hasn’t got the biggest payload and its now 49 years since the prototypes first flew, but in a world of hypersonics and AI, the Tomahawk cruise missile is still a weapon that keeps leaders of countries that might be on the receiving end of these, …
How Small Can You Make a Nuclear Weapon?
When we think of a nuclear weapon, the image that comes to mind is the vast mushroom clouds of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or the Cold War tests in the Pacific and Russia. The destructive force of these weapons was measured in thousands or millions of tons of TNT equivalent. These were …
America’s First Guided Missile and How it Changed Warfare
On the 6th of June 1944 Operation Overlord, more commonly known as D-Day took place, the largest amphibious invasion in military history. A week later on the 13th of June, the first vengeance weapon, the German V-1 flying bomb, also known as a buzz bomb or doodlebug landed on the …
DARPA’s Little Secrets That Changed The World
When many people hear the name DARPA which stands for the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, most think of secret military development work, the sort of place it would come up with a Terminator-style robot and the Skynet control system that would allow it to try and take over the …
The Device that Won WW2 – The Cavity Magnetron
It was called “the most valuable cargo ever brought to the US shores” and in many ways brought about many technological aspects of the world we live in today and yet this device had a chequered beginning and appears to have been independently invented several times in different countries. A …