Russia Tests ‘Father of All Bombs’

Russia has tested a vacuum bomb as powerful as a nuclear weapon, christening it after an American nuke while insisting it's “not unleashing a new arms race.” Trumpeting the “father of all bombs” in a report on State TV, an army higher-up said that, unlike a nuclear device, this weapon “does not contaminate the environment."

A vacuum bomb works in two phases: First a small blast disperses explosives, and then the resulting cloud is ignited. The US has used similar weapons in their Afghan mountain campaigns. The world’s heaviest combat aircraft pulled the trigger for the test, Reuters reports, as Putin's apparatchiks boasted their weapon was four times as powerful as the US “Mother of All Bombs.” (More Vladimir Putin stories.)