The Thermobaric Age
by Clay Risen

Check out any far-right website these days and you're bound to find someone pressing the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. Such opinions may never make it onto Hardball, or even the O'Reilly Factor, but it's a moot point — we've got something just as good. It's the BLU-82, our premier thermobaric weapon. And at a fraction of the cost and a cinch to build, thermobarics may just define the next era of warfare.

"Thermobaric" denotes any weapon that creates massive amounts of destructive overpressure. Although there are several types, the U.S. military's thermobaric of choice is the BLU-82, our top of the line. Also known as the "daisy cutter," "Big Blue" or the "commando vault," the BLU-82 is a 15,000 pound bomb that bears a striking resemblance to a 1960s-vintage spacecraft. It is rolled out the back of MC-130s and drifts to earth on a parachute. The parachute is important because the plane needs to put a lot of distance between it and the blast site, which will soon be shaken by a 4-mile-radius shockwave. As the bomb descends it blows a primary charge that releases an aerosol mixture; when it reaches the ground, a secondary explosive goes off, creating a massive fireball and overpressure. Everything — buldings, trees, small hills — is flattened. Anyone not in a hermetically sealed bunker is killed, either by the blast, the flames, the vacuum or flying debris.

The Air Force dropped 11 daisy cutters in the Gulf Conflict, and British SAS troops who saw one of the explosions from miles away thought it was a tactical nuclear weapon. Indeed, there is no practical difference between nuclear and thermobaric weapons. Both weapons create similar overpressures, about 10,000 pounds per square foot at ground zero. They destroy indiscriminately over a wide area, ruin farmland and pose an enormous threat to civilian populations. And while thermobarics do not create residual radiation, they do leave behind sizeable amounts of toxic chemicals not burned off in the blast, which poison civilians and farmland.

Nevertheless, the military has been more than candid about its use of the daisy cutter in the current conflict, tossing its name out as if it were just one more toy in our dazzlingly sophisticated arsenal. In a clear attempt to win the understatement of the week award, deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Peter Pace told The New York Times that "they make a heck of a bang when they go off."

Clearly, there are some advantages to using thermobarics in Afghanistan. As they are essentially explosive clouds of gas, they are very effective against caves and tunnels and other hard-to-reach places, which abound in the Afghan mountains. And when used against Iraqi troop formations, the weapons were more than enough to convince thousands to defect.

But putting aside the threat to civilian populations, there are severe disadvantages to using thermobarics. The Soviets used them in their own disastrous foray into the region 15 years ago; that, combined with the weapons' unfortunately mushroom-cloud-shaped explosion, risk creating all sorts of negative impressions among the civilian populations we are so eager to convince of our good-guyness. Our weapons, in effect, could backfire, propaganda-wise.

Even more frightening is the possibility of thermobaric proliferation among terrorists and rogue nations. One of the central checks on the use of nuclear weapons is the fear that every time one goes off the threshold for the next is lowered, that nukes will become normalized and more attractive to would-be proliferators.

But nuclear development is difficult because of the technical knowledge and resources necessary; such a barrier does not exist with thermobarics. The BLU-82 uses an aqueous mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder and polystyrene soap as a binder — simple materials that are fairly stable until put through an atomizer and ignited. Thermobaric weapons are already being used in Sri Lanka and a few other Third-World nations; how long before a terrorist sees thermobarics being used and decides they would be a good weapon to cart into the center of Jerusalem?

Worse yet, unlike with other unconventional weapons — or most weapon types, for that matter — there exists no international restriction on thermobarics. Any country can manufacture them, and their continued use by the United States will only make them more attractive among countries looking to do a lot of damage for a minimal investment. To put it bluntly, without an international agreement against their use, it is only a matter of time before a thermobaric weapon falls into the hands of anti-American terrorists eager to pay us back for our use of those very weapons against Iraqi and Afghan populations.

In any case, the more we use thermobaric weapons, the harder it will be for us to convince other nations not to use them down the road. Without recognizing it, the U.S. military is introducing the world to a cheap, ridiculously powerful weapon that could make future warfare an even messier, dangerous affair than it is now. Welcome to the Thermobaric Age.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.