“Channel 4 News has learnt the army also wants Britain’s new Apache helicopters—at use for the first time in Afghanistan—to have their missiles equipped with another form of thermobaric device, called a metal augmented charge.
“Sources in industry and people in the army tell me that an order is a high priority and is coming very soon. That might mean the end of this year or the beginning of next year.”
In June, Channel 4 reported, the MoD had denied it was buying “enhanced blast devices.”
“When they admitted to MPs they had already bought two batches, they then told us these were not thermobaric weapons. They withdrew that claim five hours later and refused to put anyone up for an interview.”
A statement by the MoD stated yhat it was “purchasing a small number of enhanced blast munitions” for use in Afghanistan. The MoD disputes the term “thermobaric”—with good reason. Such weapons are at odds with the Law of Armed Conflict, which “rests on fundamental principles of military necessity, unnecessary suffering, proportionality, and distinction (discrimination) which will apply to targeting decisions.”
Described as “dual action” devices, thermobaric weapons are able to penetrate bunkers and similar shelters. Containing fuel, two explosive charges and a highly inflammable chemical, the weapons activate on impact, releasing the fuel that, when detonated, creates a massive heat and pressure wave.
A report in the August 2000 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette, an official organ of the American army, described their effect in Grozny.
“...a thermobaric strike on a unit in an urban fight is likely to be very bloody. Those personnel caught directly under the aerosol cloud will die from the flame or overpressure. For those on the periphery of the strike, the injuries can be severe. Burns, broken bones, contusions from flying debris and blindness may result. Further, the crushing injuries from the overpressure can create air embolism within blood vessels, concussions, multiple internal hemorrhages in the liver and spleen, collapsed lungs, rupture of the eardrums and displacement of the eyes from their sockets. Displacement and tearing of internal organs can lead to peritonitis.”
“Thermobaric detonations will create three ‘zones’ of injury,” it continued. “The first is the central zone where most will die immediately from blast overpressure and thermal injuries. Casualties in the second zone will survive the initial blast and burns, but will have extensive burns and those internal injuries listed above....
“Injuries to the extremities and eyes will be common in the third zone.”
The US is already deploying such weapons from the BLU-118 “cave buster” to AGM-114N hellfire, the SMAW-NE bazooka and the XM1060 grenade.
The website defencetech.org detailed one “post-action” report on the use of the shoulder mounted assault weapon complete with the new warhead in Iraq. This described how “One unit disintegrated a large one-storey masonry type building with one round from 100 metres.”
Thermobarics also “proved highly effective in the battle for Fallujah,” it states.
The predominantly Sunni city was subject to US attack in 2004, culminating in Operation Phantom Fury, in which three quarters of its 50,000 homes were destroyed and hundreds of civilians—trapped within its confines—were killed. US officers admitted using deadly white phosphorus incendiary bombs against “enemy combatants.”
Marines were also armed with assault weapons containing “about 35% thermobaric novel explosive (NE) and 65% standard high explosive.” Drawing again on the Gazette, defencetech.org cited how in Fallujah, “SMAW gunners became expert at determining which wall to shoot to cause the roof to collapse and crush the insurgents fortified inside interior rooms.”
The MoD is cynically portraying the move towards thermobaric devices as a means of reducing civilian casualties caused by conventional weapons. Hundreds of civilians have been killed in US-led air strikes, supposedly aimed at insurgents. In one air strike alone in July, 108 civilians, including women and children, were killed in the Bala Boluk district of the western province of Farah. But such indiscriminate bombings are the result of a US offensive—supported by NATO—to intimidate and crush all opposition to foreign occupation.
Britain’s move to thermobaric weapons marks an escalation in its own campaign of terror.
HRW has stated that “In urban settings it is very difficult to limit the effect of this weapon to combatants, and the nature of FAE explosions makes it virtually impossible for civilians to take shelter from their destructive effect.”
Reuben Brigety, an arms researcher at HRW said of the thermobaric assault weapons now being sought by Britain, “I’m not aware of any other conventional munitions used by a single person that can have the same destructive power.”
Faced with growing casualities as hostility towards its occupation mounts, thermobarics are increasingly being described as the weapon of choice for military operations in urban areas.
A number of British officials have made recent visits to Afghanistan—from UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Defence Secretary Des Browne and David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party. And, at a press conference last week with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke of the need for coordinated military action in Afghanistan.
All of which underscores the perfidious character of calls for a pull-out from Iraq, in order to strengthen the military offensive in Afghanistan. What is being portrayed in some quarters as a progressive, even “anti-war” demand, represents nothing more than a redeployment of forces so as to more effectively focus Britain’s imperial ambitions.
The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, has been in the forefront of calls for such a redeployment. He described the MoD’s thermobaric order as a “serious step change” for the British army. “If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians,” he continued, this makes “yet more difficult” Britain’s supposed “battle for hearts and minds.”
Yet Campbell has said of Afghanistan that it is “in a different category altogether from Iraq and it is somewhere where we should be putting resources to bring about, as far as we can, a successful conclusion,”—as if a war of colonial-style subjugation can be maintained without the most brutal methods.
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interesting
29.08.2007 14:22
Mike
e-mail:
mikejwells@yahoo.com
More
29.08.2007 17:57
John Byrne
Published: Thursday August 23, 2007
Parliament not told, minister says
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A new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs.
The so-called "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology used in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny.
Such weapons are brutally effective because they first disperse a gas or chemical agent which is lit at a second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave. When the US military deployed a version of these weapons in 2005, DefenseTech wrote an article titled, "Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon."
According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, "The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents."
A second DIA study said, "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue... it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."
"The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense," said a CIA study of the weapons. "Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness."
British defense officials told the UK Guardian that British bombs were "different."
"They are optimized to create blast [rather than heat]", one said, speaking on the standard condition of anonymity in Britain. The official added that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric."
Officials told the Guardian the new weapon was classified as a soldier launched "light anti-structure munition" and that the bombs would be more effective because "even when they hit the damage is limited to a confined area."
"The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds," said Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell in the article. "If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult."
According to Campbell, the deployment of the weapons was not announced to Parliament.
Indiscriminate
Homepage:
http://rawstory.com/news/2007/British_Army_deploys_new_weapon_based_0823.html
International Law
29.08.2007 18:12
Protocol III: Incendiary Weapons
Protocol III on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons prohibits, in all circumstances, making the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat or a combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target.
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
Protocol III
Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons.
Geneva, 10 October 1980
Article 1
Definitions
For the purpose of this Protocol:
1. Incendiary weapon" means any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat, or combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target. (a) Incendiary weapons can take the form of, for example, flame throwers, fougasses, shells, rockets, grenades, mines, bombs and other containers of incendiary substances.
(b) Incendiary weapons do not include:
(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;
(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.
2. Concentration of civilians" means any concentration of civilians, be it permanent or temporary, such as in inhabited parts of cities, or inhabited towns or villages, or as in camps or columns of refugees or evacuees, or groups of nomads.
3. Military objective" means, so far as objects are concerned, any object which by its nature, location, purpose or use makes an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.
4. Civilian objects" are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 3.
5. Feasible precautions" are those precautions which are practicable or practically possible taking into account all circumstances ruling at the time, including humanitarian and military considerations.
Article 2
Protection of civilians and civilian objects
1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.
2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.
3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.
See:
Indiscriminate
Kinder, gentler, thermobarics
30.08.2007 09:24
And here is an article he wrote last year showing the development of 'kinder, gentler, thermobarics' aimed at subduing crowds of demonstrators:
"Or you could have a larger wide-area flash-bang bomb which could subdue a crowd, or at least give them some non-lethal "shock & awe." The stun effect should last long enough to move in and grab the hardcore violent members of the crowd while they are too stunned to resist."
dan
Homepage:
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/08/britains-thermo.html
The usual marketing lies
30.08.2007 10:42
That is assuming that there is nothing there that will be ignited by the aluminium or no one coming into contact with it. Aluminium burns hot enough to start a fire, I know because I have an aluminum based fire lighter for camping.
"The acoustics, he said, reach a level of 170 decibels, but again, cause no permanent damage."
Well with no further data on how that DB sound pressure level reading was arrived at (the distance to source from the reading equpiment, and the duration and nature of the the sound) we'll just have to take their word for it.
"The device could be optimised for flash, or the blast can be of tailored strength and duration to maximise its effectiveness, depending on whether you want to dazzle, deafen or just knock them off their feet."
So, it would be useless for crowd control in the UK as it will obviously have a pressure blast radius and could equally harm innocent bystanders. Or it would be like throwing a big sparkler into a crowd of people. They should maybe ask their local A&E about how harmful a little sparkler can be.
Indiscriminate