RIA Novosti reports:
The U.S. has a 14-ton super bomb more destructive than the vacuum bomb just tested by Russia, a U.S. general said Wednesday. The statement was made by retired Lt. General McInerney, chairman of the Iran Policy Committee, and former Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. McInerney said the U.S. has “a new massive ordnance penetrator that’s 30,000 pounds, that really penetrates … Ahmadinejad has nothing in Iran that we can’t penetrate.” He also said the new Russian bomb was not a “penetrator.” On Tuesday, the Fox News television channel said: “A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime.”. Commenting on the report, McInerney said: “Since Germany has backed out of helping economically, we do not have any other choice. … They’ve forced us into the military option.”
McInerney then gets a bit into the specifics of how the United States might go about an air campaign against Iran–something he elaborated on further in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in April 2006 in a piece that also made mention of a ’14 ton super bomb’:
This coalition air campaign would hit more than 1,500 aim points. Among the weapons would be the new 28,000-pound bunker busters, 5,000-pound bunker penetrators, 2,000-pound bunker busters, 1,000-pound general purpose bombs, and 500-pound GP bombs. A B-2 bomber, to give one example, can drop 80 of these 500-pound bombs independently targeted at 80 different aim points.
But the Danger Room isn’t so sure we’ve got the Russians beat–at least no in the realm of thermobarics:
This is an area in which Russia has been leading for many years, and as I have previously mentioned, US efforts have been mainly a matter of playing catch up. With a fuel-air explosive, it is critical that the cloud of fuel mixes as efficiently as possible with the air. Uneven mixing will not produce an effective blast. And the fuel has to burn completely, which requires very small, evenly-sized particles. The technical challenge is greater the bigger the device involved, and the Russians seem to have found ways of tackling this at the very largest scale.
