There are several popular anecdotes about the rubber bomb, but there is some truth in every joke …
Back in 2008, on "popular mechanics" there was an article about the development of the US rubber bomb:
According to reports, such a bomb is perceived by the US military as an elastic hollow sphere filled with fuel. In the course of burning, it literally jumps around the room in a random direction and at high speed, smashing doors and walls on its way and turning the whole building into a pile of rubble.
The creators call this weapon "kinetic fireball incendiaries" and although no official reports have been made about it, reports about it have leaked on the Internet, and the corresponding patent was registered last year.
Today, there is a whole arsenal of bombs and missiles created specifically for the destruction of deeply fortified bunkers. However, if a chemical or bacteriological weapon of mass destruction is stored in such a structure, an explosion can spread it over a large area - and the effect of destruction will not be at all what one would expect.
For such tasks in the arsenal of the Pentagon there are a couple of suitable bombs - for example, Crash PAD (BLU-119 / B). The warhead of such things consists of a mixture of explosive material and incendiary mixture. It is the latter that ensures the neutralization of hazardous substances, although without an explosion it cannot be properly distributed. At the same time, the explosion will inevitably lead to the release of some of the potentially dangerous agents.
This disadvantage and should be deprived of the "rubber bomb". Each of its "working elements" consists of a hollow sphere filled with rocket fuel with a hole, which, when burning, works in the manner of a rocket nozzle, giving the bomb acceleration. At the same time, a flaming combustible substance is thrown out of it, heating and burning everything around in a matter of seconds. Moving chaotically, the bomb quickly covers the entire room with its impact.
Promotional video:
The mastermind behind the project is Kevin Mahaffy, creator and head of the rocket company Exquadrum, which has already received an order from the military to continue development.
The idea of a bomb, jumping on water, like a pebble, came to the mind of the English engineer and aircraft designer Sir Barnes Wallis during the Second World War, in 1942-1943. To crush Germany's military power, the Allies needed to destroy her heavy industry, which worked mainly for the army. The main weapons workshop of the Nazis was the Ruhr industrial region. Military factories were supplied with water and electricity from several reservoirs. And if their dams are destroyed, the factories will stop, since, for example, seven tons of water are needed to smelt a ton of steel. In addition, flooding caused by dam breaks will inundate settlements downstream, wash out roads and bridges, damage communication lines and cause significant damage to agriculture.
The dams were more than 10 meters thick earth embankments reinforced with concrete. To destroy such a structure, you need to spend 30 tons of explosives. No bomber of that time could lift a bomb of this weight. However, calculations have shown that if a charge is placed on the pressure side of the dam at a certain depth, its value can be reduced to 5 tons (a shock wave in water will increase the effect of an explosion several times). But how do you get the charge to the right place? Conventional bombs were not suitable because of the low accuracy of bombing, and the dams were reliably protected from torpedoes by anti-torpedo nets.
It was then that it dawned on Wallis: it was necessary to force the bomb to reach the desired point of the dam on the surface of the water on its own, that is, by ricochet. Perhaps this idea came to his mind while throwing "pancakes" - they say he had fun with this more than once with his grandchildren. Whether he studied the phenomenon of "pancakes" from a scientific point of view, we do not know - his work is still classified by the British military department. Wallis's project was as follows: to hang a cylindrical bomb under the plane across the fuselage, spin the cylinder around its axis to a certain speed, and then drop the bomb from a low altitude at a certain distance from the target so that the bomb would jump up to it on its own. Having hit the dam, the bomb was supposed to roll along its wall under the water to the required depth, where the hydrostatic fuse would work. The rotation of the bomb ensured its stability after dropping due to the gyroscopic effect. The direction of rotation was chosen so that, firstly, to reduce the friction of the bomb on the water, and secondly, so that in the event of a bomb flying out onto the parapet of the dam, it would roll back to its pressure side.
At first, the Wallis project did not arouse enthusiasm among the British leadership, but after a series of experiments, the attitude towards it changed dramatically, and by the spring of 1943, the rotary bomb entered service with the 617th Special Squadron. It was a cylinder with a diameter of 124 centimeters, a length of about one and a half meters and a total weight of 4200 kilograms (the explosives weighed about 3 tons). The cylinder spun up to about 500 rpm. The hit of two such bombs should have been enough to break the dam.
Preliminary calculations showed that the bomb must be dropped at a speed of 345 km / h from a height of 18.5 meters at a distance of 390 meters to the target. It seemed almost impossible to comply with such harsh conditions. The usual means - barometric or radio altimeters, as well as bomb sights - were not suitable: the flight altitude was too low. However, a solution was found, and a simple and witty one. To control the altitude, two searchlights were installed on the plane. The first searchlight, mounted on the nose of the aircraft, shone vertically downward, the second, on its tail, at an angle to the vertical. The beams of the searchlights crossed at a distance of 18.5 meters. The pilot had to steer the plane so that the spots from the floodlights on the surface of the water merged. The distance to the dam was determined using the simplest rangefinder, and two turrets were used as a reference point,located on the crest of the dam just in the middle (the distance between them was measured from aerial photographs). The rangefinder was a plywood triangle, in one of the vertices of which a peephole was installed, and in the other two carnations were driven in so that when looking through the peephole, the turrets and carnations coincided exactly in the place where the bomb should be dropped.
The attack was carried out on the night of May 16, 1943. As a result of the bombing, two large dams were broken through, two more were seriously damaged. As a result of the devastation of reservoirs and devastating floods, industrial production in the Ruhr fell by a third for several months, and rationed water consumption was introduced. The German economy suffered serious damage, which affected the results of the Wehrmacht's hostilities. True, the losses of the British during the bombing turned out to be enormous: of 19 aircraft, 9 did not return, and 56 of the crew members died. But on the whole, the operation was recognized as successful.
The jumping bomb was created to solve a specific problem - the destruction of dams, for anything else it simply was not suitable. This is why in the literature it is most often called Dam Buster (Dam Buster). In addition, Wallis actually created a "disposable" weapon, the re-use of which was very problematic: knowing about the threat, the enemy could reduce its effectiveness to zero by the simplest measures (for example, put barrage balloons or add anti-aircraft machine guns). Nevertheless, the destruction of dams using bouncing bombs went down in history as one of the most original and ingenious operations carried out by the British army during the Second World War.
And a little about other strange bombs
During World War II, the Germans, exhausted by the British air raids, began to build a fake airfield with wooden planes in Holland. A few days later, only one British plane flew in and dropped only one bomb on the "airfield". The Germans immediately stopped building a fake airfield, because the bomb turned out to be wooden.
There is a mythical continuation of this story. Allegedly after the British "bombing" the Germans, again thinking to deceive the British, decided to deploy real aircraft at this airfield. But this time British bombers flew in with real bombs … At the end of the rout, a pennant was dropped on the blazing airfield with the inscription: "But that's another matter!"
Unfortunately, in reality, the continuation of the story was not so exciting: after the "wooden" bombing, the Germans figured out an English spy at their headquarters and hanged him.
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, when Western Europe was awaiting the invasion of communist hordes with horror, grim bourgeois geniuses dreamed up ingenious projects to counter the alleged offensive of the "commies" and their friends from Eastern Europe. British scientists were already in those days distinguished by their intelligence and ingenuity, it was they who developed perhaps the most extravagant project. He was named "Blue Peacock" (Blue Peacock). In fact, these were ordinary nuclear bombs, only they were not intended to be thrown from planes, but to be installed underground, like mines.
The British planned to bury a dozen of these mines near strategically important objects in West Germany and detonate them in the event of an invasion by the USSR and its satellites. It was assumed that when all charges were detonated, a zone of radioactive contamination and total destruction would be created, which would delay the advance of Soviet troops by as much as several days.
The mines were equipped with an anti-mine clearance system and were to detonate eight days after activating the built-in timer. There was only one problem: the electronic systems of the bomb worked unstable in low temperatures, that is, in winter. Then British scientists came up with the idea of planting live chickens in nuclear bombs: their heat was supposed to warm the imperfect electronics of the bombs for eight days before the explosion.
Fortunately, the USSR never invaded Western Europe. Not a single mine was detonated and not a single chicken was injured.
In the 1990s, very shocking weapons projects were developed for the US Army, a distinctive feature of which was its non-lethality. The Cold War was over, the United States was the only world leader, the era of confrontation between powerful coalitions and superpowers seemed to be a thing of the past, and the American military comfortably believed that they could now afford to smash the enemy without physically destroying it.
But the strangest project was the so-called "gay bomb". It was supposed to stuff the bombs with a powerful aphrodisiac and drop them on enemy troops. Such a bombardment was supposed to cause strong sexual arousal among the enemy soldiers. It just so happened that there are not so many women in the armies of the world, or there are none at all, and it is clear how all this was supposed to end: instead of fighting, enemy soldiers would begin to strenuously and unconventionally harass each other.
For the creation of such a bomb, the US Air Force laboratory requested $ 7.5 million. But information about the project was leaked to the press, sparked a scandal over a possible US violation of the chemical weapons non-proliferation conventions, and angered many communities.