December 29, 2019
Genius Or Insane? The Air Force Is Developing A Rocket Fuel Bomb
Good idea?
by Michael Peck
Key point: As weapons get smaller, this novel concept could be useful.
The military uses explosives to blow things up. The military also uses rockets to carry those explosives to their targets.
So why not combine the two and create a rocket whose fuel also doubles as the warhead?
That’s the idea behind an Air Force research project to develop dual-use rocket fuel that also functions as a munition. The idea has precedent, though accidental and hardly desirable. NASA keeps gawkers miles away from the launch pad when it launches rockets from Cape Kennedy, because boosters powerful enough to send a spacecraft into orbit are also powerful enough to devastate the surrounding area if they explode (the explosion of a prototype Soviet Moon rocket in 1960 killed the head of the Soviet Union’s strategic missile forces). But the most famous demonstration of rocket fuel as a weapon came in the 1982 Falklands War, when the destroyer HMS Sheffield was sunk not just by the warhead of an Exocet missile, but also unignited propellant that set the ship ablaze.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/genius-or-insane-air-force-developing-rocket-fuel-bomb-108721
