50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  Long-range missiles, even without nuclear warheads have changed modern warfare considerably.

  Chapter 48

  Straight Up: The Helicopter

  National Archives from Navy

  Marine infantry attack from a helicopter in Korea, September 20, 1951, one of the first times a helicopter was used as an offensive weapon.

  “The helicopter,” said the famous pioneer, “does with great labor only what a balloon does without labor.” He concluded: “The helicopter is much easier to design than the aeroplane but it is worthless when done.” That was Wilbur Wright in 1906.

  Mr. Wright had a point. People had been trying to build helicopters for centuries, and their efforts had produced hardly any results. In 1935, airplanes had reached the altitude of 47,352 feet, attained the speed of 440 miles per hour and had flown non-stop for 5,657 miles. At the same time, the helicopter altitude record was 518 feet, a chopper had reached the speed of 60 miles per hour and another had flown 27 miles.

  This was in spite of the fact that Europeans had been making toy helicopters since the 12th century, and the Chinese had been making them even earlier. The toy helicopter was a stick with rotor blades. The stick fitted into a cylinder that was wound up with a string. The operator pulled the string, and the little ’copter flew straight up. Powering the rotor was an early problem. One bright soul in renaissance times suggested that the helicopter pilot pull a rope wound around the rotor the way a child pulled the string of the toy. Aside from the fact that Superman, or his ancestors, was still on the planet Krypton and rope-pulling propulsion awaited his coming, the author of this idea could not explain how the pilot would rewind the rope to continue his flight. Leonardo da Vinci, who did so much futurist thinking, took a shot at helicopter design. His machine had two counter-rotating rotors and was powered by clockwork. Clockwork appeared in many inventions of the 15th and 16th centuries — everything from clocks to wheel lock rifles.

  About the only power source available in the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, other than muscle power, was steam. And nobody was able to design a steam engine with a high enough power-to-weight ratio. In 1842, an Englishman named W.H. Phillips flew a jet-powered helicopter, perhaps the first man-carrying jet aircraft in history. Phillips’s machine had jet nozzles on the tips of his rotors. The fuel he burned was an alarming mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and gypsum. Substitute sulfur for gypsum, change the proportions a bit, and you have gunpowder. That early jet carried Phillips several hundred yards, but it was a technological dead end.

  Until the internal combustion engine appeared, powered flight in either helicopter or airplane appeared hopeless. But, after the Wright brothers showed the way, the development of airplanes was phenomenally fast, although helicopters were barely able to get off the ground. The trouble was that helicopters had some problems that never occur in airplanes.

  One was torque. The huge rotor blades spinning above the helicopter had a tendency to twist the whole ship and drive it off course. If this tendency could not be cured, the helicopter could only fly in a giant circle. The chopper pioneers tried two methods to neutralize torque. One method was to have counter-rotating rotors (like Leonardo’s plan), another was to put a small propeller on the tale. The rotors could also cause another type of twisting — one considerably more dangerous.

  Each rotor blade is a kind of wing, generating lift the same way a wing does.

  The faster air passes over a wing, the greater the lift it generates. On a helicopter, the blades moving forward generate more lift, because the speed of the air over the blade equals the speed of the blade plus the speed of the craft’s forward motion. The speed of the air over the retreating blade equals the speed of the blade minus the speed of the helicopter’s forward motion. As a result, the helicopter without compensation would roll over. So helicopter progress depended on finding a way to vary the pitch of the rotor blades depending on their direction of motion.

  While engineers were working on that problem, a Spaniard named Juan de Cierva invented a new type of rotor plane: the autogyro. The rotors were attached with flapping hinges that let them automatically change their pitch. The rotors were unpowered. The autogyro was propelled by an ordinary aircraft engine and propeller. As the plane gained speed, the rotors turned freely and provided the lift. Some autogyros had a clutch that let the engine supply power to the rotors for a brief time, making possible a straight-up takeoff. Autogyro air mail planes were actually flown from the roofs of large post offices. Several air forces adopted them, and the Soviet Union’s autogyros strafed the German invaders during World War II.

  While de Cierva was working on his autogyro, an Argentine, Marquis de Petraras Pescara, invented cyclic pitch control on a helicopter with powered rotors spinning around a tilting rotor head, which made possible a practical helicopter. That was in 1924 — 21 years after the Wright brothers’ flight, which made possible a practical airplane. From there, progress was rapid. In 1936, Heinrich Focke of Germany produced a twin rotor helicopter that flew successfully. Two years later, it traveled 143 miles, reached a speed of 76 miles per hour and climbed to 11,243 feet.

  Also in 1938, a Russian immigrant, Igor Sikorsky, who had earlier designed and flown groundbreaking large passenger and military planes in Russia, settled in the United States and started designing helicopters. In 1941, his single rotor ’copter smashed all records and became the basis of all modern helicopters.

  The Germans had a few helicopters in World War II, but too few to accomplish anything noteworthy. In the Korean War, the small helicopters of the time were used extensively for reconnaissance, transporting generals, and, especially, evacuating wounded. Almost 80 percent of all the wounded airlifted to field hospitals got there by helicopter. Helicopters grew in size during that war, and in the next war, Vietnam, they were big enough to carry significant numbers of troops and artillery. They were used for reconnaissance; directing battles from the air; and taking part in battles with machine guns, automatic cannons, and rockets. They were still used for medical evacuation, and were the basis for all the tactics of the First Cavalry Division, the U.S. Army’s first “air mobile” division.

  A deal between the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force gave all fixed-wing planes to the Air Force and all helicopters to the Army. Today, every U.S.

  Army division includes helicopters. Helicopters have replaced all airborne divisions’ gliders and usurped most of the functions of their parachutes. Equipped with the wire-guided TOW rockets, they fight tanks; with the six-barreled modern Gatling guns, they mow down infantry; with other special equipment, they lay mines. In Iraq, they have taken part in street fighting. In Israel, and to a lesser extent in Iraq, they have been used to assassinate suspected terrorists.

  Most helicopter successes have been against foes lacking effective antiaircraft fire. Even in Vietnam, where neither the Viet Cong nor the North Vietnamese Army was strong in antiaircraft weapons, helicopter losses were heavy.

  A weapon like the Carl Gustaf recoilless gun (see Chapter 44) would be deadly against a hovering helicopter. A shell from a recoilless gun has far more velocity than a rocket, especially one of the guided rockets now used for antitank work. The chances of the helicopter evading the shot after it’s been fired are virtually nil.

  Nevertheless, the “chopper’s” ability to take off and land on a postage stamp, to hover at will, to hide behind hills and other terrain features, to climb beyond the range of most ground fire, and to travel faster than any other vehicle except an airplane insures that it will continue to influence warfare for a long time.

  Chapter 49

  The Ultimate Weapon? Nuclear Weapons

  National Archives from Office of War Information Atomic bomb explodes over Nagasaki

  August 8, 1945.

  At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, an American B 29 bomber flew over the city of Hiroshima, Japan and released something on a parachute. Hiroshima was a medium-size city, largely untouched by the war because it
contained no military objectives worth touching. The object floating earthward under the parachute was the first nuclear weapon to be used in war. When the bomber was far away, but the parachute still above the ground, the bomb exploded.

  Between 70,000 and 80,000 people in the city below died instantly or almost instantly. As many as 125,000 more died later as a result of injuries incurred by the blast. Three days later, a similar bomb exploded over Nagasaki, killing from 40,000 to 70,000 more people at once and 50,000 to 100,000 later from radiation sickness, cancer, or other illnesses caused by the explosion. Six days later, Japan surrendered.

  The possibility of nuclear weapons had been known in the scientific community for years. All matter is composed of atoms, which have a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons around which electrons orbit. The number of atomic particles in the nucleus of an element’s atom determines its atomic weight, which is expressed in numbers that have bedeviled generations of high school chemistry students. When neutrons, protons, deuterons, and other particles strike a nucleus of high atomic weight, they are absorbed and the nucleus splits into two, forming two lighter atoms. The process releases a million volts of energy per atom. This process goes on continually in radioactive material but causes no trouble, because the released energy simply bypasses the other atoms in a block of material and passes into space.

  However, by forming certain radioactive materials in a large enough and dense enough block, you have so many atoms in such limited space that a released neutron simply has to strike another nucleus, and particles released by that splitting of that atom will strike another nucleus. Then you have a chain reaction, with the energy in those trillions and trillions of atoms released all at once. Of the kinetic energy released in the chain reaction, about 50 percent forms a shock wave that flattens buildings, trees, and so on, the way a conventional explosion would. The main difference from conventional explosives is in the strength of the shock wave. The power of atomic bombs is measured in kilotons, each the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT, or megatons, the equivalent of a million tons of TNT. Thirty-five percent of the kinetic energy appears as heat, light, and ultraviolet radiation. The heat is radiated heat — infrared radiation — and travels at the speed of light. At the center of the explosion, the heat reaches 10,000,000 degrees centigrade. Conventional explosives may produce 5,000 degrees. The remaining 15 percent of the kinetic energy forms various nuclear radiations such as neutron rays and gamma rays, which are extremely destructive to living tissue. Some of this radiation kills or injures people in the initial spurt. More of it — about two thirds — is in radioactive dust that falls to earth. Some of this “fallout” may appear a few hours after the explosion, but fallout from a single explosion may continue falling for months or years, depending on how high it was blown into the atmosphere. It may be carried by the wind for thousands of miles.

  Weapons using this “fission” reaction are commonly called “atomic bombs.”

  There’s another process — fusion — that can produce even more powerful bombs.

  This consists of combining the nuclei of two light elements. That forms an element that is lighter than the sum of the two elements that were combined.

  The difference in mass is released as energy. The fusion of two light elements may release less energy than the fission of a heavy element such as uranium 235, but a chain reaction is different. Because light atoms are much smaller, there are far more of them in a given volume of material. A fusion bomb may release four times as much energy and six times more neutron rays than a fission bomb of the same size.

  Fission bombs were the first kind developed. The most common fissionable materials are U-235 and U-233, unstable isotopes of uranium, and plutonium — a man-made element created by bombarding neptunium by deuterons or by performing other atomic hocus-pocus on uranium 238.

  To reach a critical mass of plutonium 239, you need a lump of about 15 kilograms; for uranium 235, the critical mass is about 50 kilograms. There are two ways to make a critical mass in a bomb. One uses two pieces of the fissionable material, machined to extremely close tolerances to fit tightly together.

  These are driven together in the bomb by explosive charges. When they meet, they form a critical mass and a nuclear explosion occurs. The second method uses a spongy ball of the fissionable material — full of holes so a fair proportion of the atoms are not in contact with other atoms. In this kind of bomb, explosives outside the fissionable material squeeze it together to form a critical mass.

  Fusion bombs use light elements that fuse only when subjected to enormous heat. Hence they are called thermonuclear bombs. In these bombs, the heat is supplied by a fission explosion.

  Much research on nuclear explosions has been directed at miniaturization.

  The United States developed an enormous 280 mm howitzer, nicknamed the

  “atomic cannon,” to shoot nuclear shells. It was just barely road-transportable.

  But it was hardly out of its testing before the U.S. had a shell that could be fired from an ordinary 8-inch gun or howitzer. Then there was a still smaller atomic shell that fit the 155 mm cannons. Innumerable rockets, bombs, and shells have been designed for nuclear explosions. There are even nuclear depth charges.

  One that seemed to arouse particular horror was a weapon the news media called the “neutron bomb” and the U.S. military called an “enhanced radiation device.” The neutron bomb will explode, but the explosion is, for a nuclear weapon, nothing much. What it does is project massive amounts of neutron rays that would kill everyone and everything in an area while leaving buildings, vehicles, and all man-made property unscathed and uncontaminated with radiation. It was probably this single effect — killing without destroying property — that led the public to view the neutron bomb with such horror.

  None of these weapons have ever been used, and everyone in the world devoutly hopes that they never will be. One reason is that even use of the small “tactical” nuclear weapons might induce an enemy to respond with something bigger, like an ICBM. The other is the largely unknown danger of the fallout from a number of tactical nukes.

  Although they have been used only twice in history, nuclear weapons have decisively influenced both warfare and all international relations.

  Chapter 50

  High Tech and Low: The Future of Warfare?

  National Archives from U.S. Information Agency

  Sky Crane helicopter, capable of lifting enormous loads, was one of the many high-tech devices the enemy could not match in Vietnam.

  In 2003, U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq with an array of weapons that the troops of World War II would have considered miraculous. There were planes that couldn’t be seen, even with radar; bombs that could see a dot of laser light and steer themselves into it; and bombs that could fly hundreds of miles without a pilot and — more amazing — land right on the building they were aimed at. There were planes that needed no pilots and could send television pictures of what a pilot would have seen, making themselves the eyes of people in a headquarters hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. Those Remotely Piloted Vehicles, or “drones,” could act as well as see. One of them in Yemen identified a terrorist suspect and killed him with a rocket.

  Individual grunts in Iraq could see in the dark, using night vision goggles that enormously amplify any ambient light. Thermal imaging equipment let them see would-be ambushers from inside tanks and other vehicles in the darkest dark. Sensors picking up vibrations in the ground let them locate any enemy attempting to sneak up on an encampment.

  There are a host of guided antitank missiles — some guided by wire or fiber optic, others that fly towards reflected laser light. One type has its own laser in its nose that searches an area of 328 square yards for a tank, locates it, and steers toward it. This particular system, the British MERLIN, is not a rocket, but a mortar shell. Most of the wire-guided missiles merely require the operator to keep the target in his sights: the missile automatically steers itself into the targe
t. Others, though, once fixed on the target, follow it like a bloodhound while the operator takes cover. One rocket, the Swedish BILL system, flies above a tank and dives into the vehicle’s thin top armor at the appropriate time.

  The American Javelin does that, too. The javelin is carried and fired by one man, and it’s a “shoot and scoot” type. The operator puts the tank in his sights, fires the rocket and the missile does the rest, following the tank if it tries to take evasive action. Then there’s the French antitank weapon that picks a target and fires itself. It’s really a modern version of the “trap guns” that 18th-century landowners used to discourage poachers. The weapon is set up to cover a gap in a minefield, a bridge, or some other key point. When a vehicle of the proper bulk enters the space being covered, it fires an antitank rocket.

  Antitank weapons do not rely entirely on the shaped charge, which has been made less effective by laminated armor. The ancient solid shot is back, but with improvements. There’s discarding sabot shot: a dart-shaped piece of very sharp depleted uranium (DU) that is much smaller than the bore of the gun that shoots it. It is encased in a “sabot” of the proper diameter for the gun. The shot, therefore is much lighter than a regular shell of the proper diameter.

  Because it is so light, it leaves the gun with a terrific muzzle velocity. As soon as it leaves the muzzle, the sabot drops off so wind resistance does not hinder the flight of the DU shot. In some versions, the sabot, traveling through a rifled barrel, imparts its stabilizing spin to the shot. In others, fired from smoothbore guns that also fire shaped charge shells, the shot is fin-stabilized. Depleted uranium, the metal American solid shot is made of, is harder than tungsten and so heavy a piece the size of a golf ball weighs 2 pounds. When it strikes something hard, it throws off extremely hot sparks that have an incendiary effect.