Only in the land of the free would a woman be given the opportunity to
make the newest super-duper weapon�the thermobaric bomb!
Anh Duong, who fled Saigon for the U.S. in 1975, wished to serve her
adopted country against tyranny. And in doing so she became the lead
bomb-maker at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indian Head, Maryland,
where she is the designer behind the bunker-buster custom-crafted to
atomize Osama bin Laden's underground lairs.
Duong and her team of bombing boffins worked out the explosive kinks at
an accelerated pace, taking only two months to devise the ultra-powerful
munition after the Defense Threat Reduction Agency sent out an order for
a new fire in the hole. The first was sicced on a Nevada tunnel in
December 2001.
The test brought the house down�turning a regular-looking mine into a
really trashed-looking one.
The thermobaric bomb's magic ingredient is aluminum dust, also the secret
component of another legendary weapon in the arsenal, the behemoth Daisy
Cutter. Aluminum, handy foil in your kitchen drawer, is a highly
dangerous explosive hazard when powdered. Duong's design duplicates
conditions in a mine saturated with the flammable dust�and then strikes a
match, unleashing a twisting inferno and metal-shredding concussion.
Ten thermobaric bombs were commissioned for the war in Afghanistan. One
is known to have been used, according to The Baltimore Sun. That
round missed, proving that even techno-wizard bangs are useless if one
can't aim.
Despite publicly reported failure, the legend of the thermobaric bomb is
great. Introduced as a wonder weapon by mainstream-media lapdogs, it has
also been denounced as a weapon of mass destruction akin to a massive and
sinister Russian fuel-air explosive used in Chechnya. One publication
dubbed it an anti-Muslim bomb.
Not so, said an air force general assigned to spin control. The
thermobaric incinerator was vetted by the Pentagon, and, in Kafkaesque
wordage, "found consistent with all international legal obligations
of the United States, including the law of armed conflict."
Straight with the law of armed conflict or not, it is certain the
thermobaric bomb is now being eyed for use in Iraq. In Gulf War I,
Baghdad bunker-busting backfired when civilians were cooked in a bomb
shelter. With the thermobaric bomb, however, one cannot tell if one has
hit Saddam or plain folk, because everything in range is . . . dusted.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0251/smith.php
Aluminium dust was used in the Bali bomb.
