Matching response

Russias new thermobaric bomb, tested in early September, has sent shock waves through the West.

President Putin at

FOUR years after the United States tested its most powerful non-nuclear bomb nicknamed The Mother of All Bombs, Russia has responded by building a still more potent one, pointedly christened The Father of All Bombs.

The bomb, which was successfully tested in early September, belongs to the thermobaric type of munitions, such as the U.S. Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB). While in conventional bombs the explosive is detonated inside the container, air-fuel bombs first disperse a cloud of explosive material in the air and then set it off by a charge. The fine-mist spray penetrates inside caves, bunkers and tunnels, and upon ignition creates a huge expanding fireball that burns out everything within its range.

Thermobaric munitions have been in the arsenals of the U.S., Russian and other armies for decades, so they only get in the news when high-end technology is developed to achieve higher energy output. This is where Russia has upped the U.S. The Russian bomb is four times more powerful though it uses fewer explosives. It carries 7.1 tonnes of explosive load, against 8.2 tonnes carried by the MOAB, and generates a blast equivalent to that generated by 44 tonnes of TNT compared with 11 tonnes of TNT in the U.S. device. The temperature at the centre of the Russian blast is twice as high and the area of damage is also much greater. The Russian bomb owes its higher efficiency to a new secret explosive developed with the use of nanotechnology.

The tests have shown that the new air-delivered ordnance is comparable to a nuclear weapon in its efficiency and capability, a deputy chief of Russias General Staff, Colonel General Alexander Rukshin, said. It would allow Russia to ensure the nations security and at the same time battle international terrorism in any situation and in any region, he said.

The Russian bomb test sent shock waves across the Western world. It provided fresh evidence of Russias re-emergence, not only as an economic power but also as a military power. The fact that the superbomb was dropped from a T-160 Blackjack strategic bomber gave the West added jitters: it is these Russian supersonic bombers that began flying regular missions over the Atlantic, Pacific and the Arctic Oceans in August for the first time since the break-up of the Soviet Union.

In recent years, President Vladimir Putin has mounted an unprecedented effort to rebuild the Russian armed forces, which weakened dangerously under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin. The defence budget has grown fourfold over the past five years to more than $30 billion, even though it still amounts to a fraction of the U.S. war chest.

Last December, Russia began deploying the new version of Topol-M nuclear missiles capable of penetrating multi-layered missile defences. Earlier this year, Russia launched the worlds first fourth-generation nuclear submarine, Yury Dolgoruky. Three more Borei-class submarines are in the pipeline. They will be armed with the new 10-warhead missile Bulava. By 2010, the Russian Army will induct a new land-based mobile strategic missile, RS-24, armed with multiple warheads. In August, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov announced that the armed forces had received 36 new types of arms and equipment as part of a long-term re-armament programme.

Western media have accused Putin of turning back the clock and returning to the bombast and bluster of the Cold War. Russians, however, think they have merely shed post-Soviet illusions that the end of the Cold War would bring harmony to international relations and an end to rivalries and conflict. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, believed that the East-West confrontation had ideological roots, and once the Soviet Union dropped the communist ideology and embraced democracy there would be no basis for conflict. He was naive enough to take the Western leaders word for it that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) would not expand into Eastern Europe after the Soviet Army was gone. Today, Gorbachev admits he was deceived.

After the break-up of the Soviet Union the U.S. decided they had their hands free, he told a press conference in July. They thought they finally had their chance to build an empire. They suffer from a victors complex and this is the main reason why the world is in disarray.

It is hard to imagine any Russian leader today with illusions about the West, at a time when NATO is poised to make deeper inroads into the former Soviet Union by inducting Georgia and Ukraine and winning access to energy resources of Central Asia; when the U.S. is planning to deploy missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic targeting Russian strategic missiles and is proceeding to build military bases in Bulgaria and Romania; when the George W. Bush administration is refusing to negotiate a new nuclear arms reduction treaty to replace the expiring START pact in the hope of gaining ultimate strategic supremacy.

In his hard-hitting speech in Munich earlier this year, Putin accused the U.S. of almost unrestrained hyper-use of force in international relations, which is breeding conflict after conflict and fuelling an arms race.

The Russian leader knows that force can only be countered by force. For years, the West ignored Russian complaints that the admission of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO put Russia at a disadvantage under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. It was only after Russia suspended compliance with Europes most important arms control pact earlier this year that the West agreed to discuss the issue. Similarly, it was the Russian threat to deploy new missiles along its Western borders and to target defence installations in Europe that made Europeans question U.S. plans to build missile defences near Russian borders and forced Washington to open talks with Moscow.

As Russia embarked on a 10-year programme of modernisation of the armed forces, Putin told a meeting of the countrys top military commanders in 2005 that Russia must have a strong army to uphold its interests: Our armed forces must be ready to ensure global stability and protect Russia from any attempts to exert military and political pressure or to blackmail us using force. Unfortunately, we see that such means of pursuing foreign policy do still exist in this world today In this context we must not for an instant lessen the attention we give to key aspects of military development and to state defence and security policy in general.

Russia inherited the bulk of the Soviet defence industry after 1991 and despite the economic crisis of the 1990s has retained the manufacturing potential in critical areas of military technology. Many Russian defence factories have survived, largely thanks to arms exports. Over the past seven years arms exports have nearly doubled and Russia has emerged as the second largest arms exporter after the U.S. India alone has ongoing defence contracts with Russia worth $14 billion.

Now that Russia is flush with oil export revenues, the government has earmarked over $150 billion for the re-armament of the military until 2015. Commenting on the testing of the Father of All Bombs, Putin said that the defence industry had moved forward since the days of the Soviet Union. We have developed many new military technologies in aviation, space and conventional armaments, he said.

As Putin prepares to step down next year after completing two terms in office, he is making sure the defence industry remains among the top priorities for the countrys leadership. New Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov pledged to bolster national defences further. Our strategic goal is to help uplift the defence industry complex, Zubkov told Parliament at his confirmation hearings.