Fall down, go boom - redux.

Incidentally, I haven't seen it yet, but I'm waiting for some hapless US media scribe to refer to this thing as "the world's biggest conventional weapon ever". I probably won't have to wait long as not only is "The US The Greatest Country The World Has Ever Seen" but "Fifty Years Is A Very Long Time". These statements notwithstanding, the WWII "Grand Slam" designed by Barnes Wallis was not only bigger (and, at 22,000lb, therefore much badderer), but it wasn't even American.

Think about this for a second - this bomb was used 58 years ago. It was so big (over 26 feet long, and almost 4 feet in diameter) it had to be strapped under the belly of a specially-modified Lancaster bomber. Dropped from an altitude of 12,000 feet, this thing would attain almost supersonic velocity before it hit the ground and could penetrate up to 15 feet of reinforced concrete before the eleven-second delay fuze detonated the 9,500 lbs of Torpex inside the chrome-moly steel shell ...

No wonder they called these things "earthquake bombs" ...