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How heavy is a 500-pound bomb?
American fighter jets dropped a pair of 500-pound bombs on terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Wednesday. Does a 500-pound bomb really weigh 500 pounds?
No. Zarqawi got hit with two different weapons—a laser-guided bomb called the GBU-12 and a satellite-guided bomb called the GBU-38. They weigh 606 pounds and 552 pounds, respectively.
Both weapons are considered “500-pound” munitions because they’re based on a standard 500-pound bomb known as the Mk 82. The body of an Mk 82 is augmented with a fuze, a guidance system, and other accessories like wings and tail fins; all of these add to its total weight.
But the Mk 82 itself packs only about 200 pounds of explosives. It gets the rest of its weight from a steel case, about half an inch thick, that helps to penetrate targets and provides material for fragmentation.
The “500-pound” designation doesn’t give you much information about how powerful a given weapon might be. It’s more useful for figuring out how many bombs will fit onto your aircraft. That’s because different types of 500-pound bombs have different amounts of explosive inside–one might be designed for bunker-busting and another for fragmentation. (The Mk 82 is an example of “general purpose” ordnance.) You can get a better sense of a weapon’s destructive potential by looking at its “explosive yield.” That tells you how strong an explosion the bomb will make, in terms of equivalent pounds of TNT. In other words, a bomb with a yield of 500 pounds will blow up with the same intensity as 500 pounds of TNT.
The “500-pound bombs” that fell on al-Zarqawi each had about 200 pounds of explosives. But their explosive yield would be 200 pounds only if they were filled with TNT. In fact, the Mk 82 makes use of a more advanced, TNT-based compound that produces a bit more energy when it blows up. Two hundred pounds of the fancy stuff might yield the equivalent of, say, 240 pounds of TNT.
Explosive yields come in handy when you’re talking about nuclear weapons. A nuke that weighs about 1,200 pounds–or twice as much as the GBU-12 that was used the other day–can have an explosive yield of 14 kilotons. That’s the equivalent of 14,000 metric tons of TNT, or almost 31 million pounds.
There’s a line by Sancho from the, ” The Man of La Mancha”, that I’ll paraphrase:
It doesn’t matter whether the rock hits the pitcher, or the pitcher hits the rock, either way it’s bad for the pitcher.
I’m too slow this morning to look up the exact line.
There is no way to tell whether Zarqawi was a major terrorist leader or whether the man killed was him. As in Vietnam, America has no victories to brag about, so they’ve resorted to counting body bags.
Actually, they have dental records and dna samples from when he was in prison in Jordan years ago to test against. As for him not dying instantly, it could be he was behind a concrete wall or something steel. Something protected him from being torn apart. And if he wasn’t torn apart, he could have survived a while. We don’t know yet where everyone was found in the building. There are stories of people walking away from things that you can’t imagine they even survived. Pure luck.
“Pure luck.”
As brief as it was!
I would hazard a guess that any safe house for Zarqawi would have a fortified shelter, even if it was a makeshift one made of cylinder blocks or a hole in the ground.
Heck, even Hitler only suffered minor injuries when an assassination attempt blew up a bomb within feet of him under a conference table back in 1944.
We may never know how Zarqawi survived as long as he did. He obviously sustained enough injuries that he didn’t live for very long.
good riddence, if you ask me, the man was a brutal killer and nothing more.
and the Bush administration is finally learning the lesson of not trumpeting every operational success as a big step towards victory.
One cannot help but note that the US’s strategic goal is to enable the Iraqis to maintain their own security, but Zarqawi was killed by US forces, not Iraqis. If the Iraqi army or police had been able to react quickly enough that the US was confident they could successfully raid the house and capture or kill him, presumably they would have been allowed to do so.
Normal bombs (such as those used here) do not explode in the air correct?
“Normal bombs (such as those used here) do not explode in the air correct?”
It depends on the fuse used on the bomb. Fuses can be set to explode on impact, explode above ground (via altimeter), or have a delay to allow the projectile to penetrate and enter the lower levels of a building/bunker/etc. before detonating (a so called “bunker buster”). They have specialized bombs for bunkers, but an general purpose bomb with a 1/2 inch steel casing can penetrate several levels of a reinforced concrete without slowing down. By exploding inside a structure the explosive is more effective than an air burst. Most casualties from bombs are caused by the concussive force of the the explosion rather than shapnel.
well Milo….I think we got the right guy…..since Al-Jezeera network called it a war crime by the U.S.
The Commander at the scene said they thought he may have been outside of the building when the bombs hit, since everyone else was killed outright. Since most of the houses in that area don’t have plumbing, he may have been in the *john* outback. Even terror leaders have to tinkle….
Also….it seems that Iraqi troops were first on the scene….which was planned, they had been involved in the operation from the get go, since it was one of their intel guys the tipster contacted.
I rewatchd that video… that house blew to high heaven. It was a massive explosion. Now they are saying that Zarqawi lived for about an hour.
I suppose it could have been a fortified bunker but I doubt it.
It looked just like a regular house from the pictures. I think the neghbors would have noticed if they had built a bunker there.
It still is a big question mark for me. As I say, I’m not trying to spin a conspiracy theory here but this one makes me wonder.