![]() ![]() “It is good at being squashed, not being stretched. “Concrete is inherently brittle,” says Professor Phil Purnell, an expert in concrete technology at the University of Leeds. The bunker-buster arms race is similar, but while the attackers have the advantage of steel, defense is based on concrete, which starts with a built-in disadvantage. When these hit a ceramic plate, the plate breaks up in a process known as brittle failure. This led to special armor-piercing bullets tipped with hard tungsten. These are so hard that steel-jacketed bullets break up on impact. The counter is to make armor harder, by adding ultra-hard ceramic plates made out of materials like boron carbide. Give the bullet a hard steel jacket though, and the Kevlar gives way. Materials scientists distinguish between the two qualities of toughness and hardness, and it is the balance between them that drives arms races between weapons and armor.įor example, when a soft lead bullet strikes a Kevlar vest, the bullet crumples and deforms, losing energy because it lacks hardness. How Cannibal Ants Escaped from a Nuclear Bunker.What We Know About the White House's Secret Bunker.Eglin Steel is the gold standard for bunker-busting munitions, although in recent years it has been supplemented by new USAF-96 steel, which boasts similar performance but is easier to produce and work with. In the early 2000s, the Air Force even developed a special type of steel for the purpose, known as Eglin Steel, in association with steel specialist Ellwood National Forge Company.Įglin Steel is a low-carbon, low-nickel steel with traces of tungsten, chromium, manganese, silicon, and other elements, each contributing a desirable property to the whole. While the same general-purpose bombs are being used as they were in the 90s, bunker busters had to go through several generations of upgrades. ![]() This design concentrates all the weight on a smaller area, making it an ice pick rather than a hammer, so the bomb can smash through concrete or burrow through earth to strike deeply-buried targets. General-purpose bombs have a thin steel casing filled with explosives the bunker buster had a narrower profile, with a thicker casing and less explosives. The USAF introduced its first modern bunker buster in 1985. The development of the GBU-72 and Israel’s urgent desire for it might be signals that in the quiet arms race between concrete and bombs, the concrete is winning. Like the GBU-28, it’s a 5,000-pounder, but with a significant improvement on the earlier weapon-although the Air Force will not give details. Now, Israel is raising the bar again with a request for the United States Air Force’s (USAF) new GBU-72 “Advanced 5K Penetrator” bomb, which is not yet in service and was only tested for the first time last October. Air Force F-15e strike eagle aircraft releases a GBU-28 bunker buster 5,000 pound laser-guided bomb over the Utah test and training range during a weapons evaluation test. ![]()
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