THIS PAST WEEK during a massive nighttime aerial bombardment near Kabul, the Al Jazeera network caught on video an enormous, fiery-red mushroom cloud with flames reaching 1,000 feet into the air.

Had the United States, in its determination to win the war, decided to go nuclear? Hardly. But what everyone did see on the screen was the dropping of the world’s largest non-nuclear weapon, the BLU-82. This bomb, popularly known as the “Daisy Cutter,” but also bearing monikers like the “Commando Vault,” “Big Blue,” and the “Cheeseburger,” costs $27,000, is about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and weighs 15,000 pounds. Its manufacturer is classified–as is the number of Daisy Cutters in the U.S. inventory. But we do know how it works: