There is a quote often attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, that it might have “awakened a sleeping giant”. A similar simile is attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, albeit with a few variations: “China is a sleeping giant/ dragon/ lion.”
That the quotes are apocryphal is beside the point. They indicated directions in which the countries were likely to go. In the event, America got there first: it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, becoming the first and only country in the world to have deployed nuclear weapons. China took a half-century more to get to a place where it can use nuclear weapons—but has refrained, as a matter of policy, from even hinting at the possibility of ever using them.
The US went on to design other big bombs: the 6,800-kg ‘daisy cutter’, which it used in Vietnam, the Gulf War and outside the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan in 2001. When it was ‘retired’ in 2008, it was replaced with the 9,850 kg Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, or ‘mother of all bombs’) first used in 2017 in Afghanistan and still in stock. And in 2011, the US made the ‘biggest bomb of them all’—the 12,304-kg Massive Ordnance Penetrator or ‘bunker buster’. After 14 years of aggregating 20 of these gigabombs, the US used them on Iran.
In effect, in order to escape proscriptions in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons or NPT, to which the US is a founder-signatory, America went the way of non-nuclear devices with the explosive output of a small, tactical nuclear bomb.
In her 2007 book, The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945, Nina Tannenwald wrote about the “four critical instances where US leaders considered using nuclear weapons—Japan 1945, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf War 1991”. That they did not was because of the so-called ‘nuclear taboo’, a moral construct that exists and, going by the number of nuclear weapon-owning countries that have not signed the NPT, despite the prevalence in governmentalmilitary quarters of the rationalist deterrence theory (or MAD, mutually assured destruction). But the way around the albatrosses of the ‘nuclear taboo’ and the NPT is building bigger and more destructive non-nuclear bombs. This is the route the US has taken.
America has always been in love with the monumental: the bigger, the better; shock and awe. Since the end of the Second World War, it has built more and more colossal explosive devices. But wars and armamentation run on capital. The potential income from conflicts must outstrip expenditure on weapons manufacturing. Therefore, the bigger these bombs have got, the fewer are being made.
The ‘daisy cutters’, with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tonnes of TNT, numbered 225 before production was shelved. Production of the MOAB, which also has a blast yield of 11 tonnes of TNT but is a far more complex and expensive device, stopped at 15. The MOP, even more high-tech, delivers, according to Scientific American, “800 to 900 megajoules of kinetic energy—comparable to a Boeing 747-400 touching down at 170 mph” with “all that energy concentrated into a tiny area”. Only 20 of these monsters have been built, with 14 of them expended in a single attack on Iran.
China and Russia have also built giant bombs. In 2007, Russia field-tested the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power, which was nicknamed the ‘father of all bombs’ or FOAB, and is reportedly deadlier than the MOAB.
With a blast yield of 44 tonnes of TNT, it is a thermobaric (air-burst) bomb with the destructive potential of a small tactical N-weapon. This year, China tested a non-nuclear hydrogen-based explosive device that weighs just 2 kg and is capable of creating a 1,000°C fireball that can burn through metal.
These are hell’s own weapons and have a multidecadal history of development. But if they have been built at scale after R&D, they have remained unexported. And, most importantly, unused.
No other country but the US has used the megabombs in its armoury. The US has used every single one, in one or other large conflict it has been involved in over the past three-quarters of a century. Neither Russia nor China has ever used them—not to speak of other global movers-and-shakers such as India, Pakistan, Türkiye or Israel, with truculence and exceptionalism pushing their sense of extraordinary military self-worth.
Or even deployed the existence of these bombs diplomatically. Israel used American-made big bombs in Gaza and Iran. The other countries have so far confined out of sight and sound the nonnuclear big bombs in their armouries, if they exist at all in enough numbers, as devices to be mentioned in the course of confrontational diplomacy.
In effect, the US does not do hyper-explosive deterrence. Having used in real life—and as brutal realpolitik— nearly every big bomb it has ever created, it expects the deterrence capability intrinsic to the ownership of megabombs to be the responsibility of other nations.
And therein lies the danger of one of the world’s two hyper-powers—which was, until the first decade of this century, the world’s leading-edge superpower—not taking kindly to its diminution currently under way. If the world should remain anxious about any country using non-nuclear but nuclear-adjacent big bombs in the fractious years to come, it is the US.
Kajal Basu | Veteran Journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)