The gold standard of explosives is, and has been for years, the nuclear weapon.  Why is fairly obvious.  Between the godlike power to create a small Sun and destroy an entire city, that cool mushroom thing it does (not, contrary to popular belief, unique to nukes), the fact that one pretty much won World War II, and the word “nuke”, it’s no wonder that the nuclear bomb holds a special place in our collective heart.  Or… something.

But nukes have their downsides.  I’m not talking about civilian casualties or the fact that it completely destroys any structure within about ten miles of ground zero (let’s assume total war here), but the fact that after you drop a nuke, you can’t touch anything within a certain radius for decades.  That’s not cool.  So, great, you levelled an area… what are you going to do with it now?  It’s a useless wasteland.  Scratch that actually, it might be useful for a nuclear waste dump.

There’s another type of bomb that’s incredibly powerful for its size technically called a Thermobaric weapon, but more commonly known as a fuel-air explosive.  These are the most powerful weapons we have, short of a nuke.  The largest in the US arsenal is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as MOAB or the “Mother of All Bombs”.

Let me explain why fuel-air explosives are so cool.  Your basic FAE has two conventional explosive charges in it.  The first disperses the primary fuel into the surrounding environment.  The second is a more incendiary type of charge, used to ignite the fuel.  If you’ve ever seen that trick where they throw a cloud of cornstarch or something into the air and ignite it, it’s kind of like that.  Or more accurately, it’s like a grain tower explosion, but bigger.  And using a fuel designed to burn, not flour.

A large FAE essentially sets the air around it on fire.  This first creates a massive shock wave, and hellish heat – enough that a small device launched into a building can flatten it, and a large one can flatten and/or burn out a forested area – and then a backdraft so powerful that it can pick up and throw a man or asphyxiate them.  And when it’s done?  Everything destroyed by it, all the area cleared by it, is perfectly safe.  A bit hot, but give it a couple days.

So, even though the MOAB has only about the yield of a very small nuke, and less than one thousandth the yield of the nuclear weapons used in Japan, I’d rather use one of them than a nuke.  At least you can use the area you just blew the shit out of.