Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 11 - Fire Weapons - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

Fire. The oldest, most feared weapon known to man.

It burns. It blazes. It incinerates.

Napalm. Flamethrowers. Firebombs.

Fire wipes out cities, melts machines, scorches man.

On the battlefield, incendiary weapons cause total flaming carnage.

It kills. It maims. It spreads with a kind of impersonal horror that you just
can't stop.

Get ready to feel the heat as we go back through generations of technology

to find out how Greek fire, incendiary bombs, and flamethrowers became so feared
on the battlefield.

It's time to go ballistic.



Fire. For millennia, the most terrifying, destructive weapon in offense and
defense.

But now, in the 21st century, a lifesaver.

The Dragon Pyrotechnic Torch is the ultimate anti-land mine device.

Throughout the world, over 125,000 square miles of land are currently
contaminated with mines,

maiming or killing someone every 22 minutes.

But now, enter the Dragon.

Fire with fire. This beast doesn't detonate mines to render them safe.

Burning at 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, it causes total utter mine meltdown.

The Dragon penetrates up to a quarter of an inch of metal.

With no explosion, the dangers to mine clearance personnel are greatly reduced.

It's safe to use, safe to transport, but it's totally hot.

At last, fire is being used in a good cause. But it hasn't always been this way.

Now, weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology

to reveal how Greek fire, Molotov cocktails, flamethrowers, and thermobaric
weapons



began to burn so hot and so fierce before evolving into a new generation of
humanitarian incendiary device.

The Dragon.

Since the dawn of time, fire has struck fear into the hearts of men imprinted on
our DNA.

In nature, it's a totally devastating force.

In peace, the ultimate punishment, to die in excruciating pain, toasted at a
burning stake.

In war, the most terrifying weapon on the planet.

It kills, it maims, it spreads, and it does that all with a kind of impersonal
horror that you just can't stop.

Primitive prehistoric man understood the horror of fire and used simple burning
torches to scare off wild animals and attackers.

As man became more civilized, he continued to use fire to deliver the
psychological punch.

Go forward a million years, and the Romans had begun using fire to create fear
and chaos among their foes.

They needed to find ways to send fire in among the enemy.

One solution, the flaming pig.

If you're being attacked by a large body of troops or cavalry, how do you
disrupt them?

What you do is you take a pig and you cover it in pitch or tar or oil, and you
light it.

And you basically point it at the enemy formation.

The effect of squealing, screaming flaming pigs will cause such chaos that it
might just give you the opening you need to be able to drive home your own
attack and defeat them in the field.

Move forward to the 16th century, and bacon had been replaced by boats.

But fire still delivered the fear factor.

July 1588, the Spanish throw a massive 130-strong fleet, the Armada, at the
English.

Although heavily outnumbered, the English managed to rout their enemy using fire
by setting their own ships alight.

The small English navy sends fire ships in amongst the Armada, ships that are
loaded with pitch and other flammables.

All of these are sent in amongst the flammable Spanish ships.

What does the Spanish navy do?

It scatters.

It exposes itself to the open sea.

It goes out and it is in turn scattered by the wind.

The fear of fire had caused the Spanish downfall.

Fire proved to be the ultimate psychological terror weapon in ancient warfare.

It would go forward 400 years to the 20th century, and it remained an equally
terrifying deterrent on the modern battlefield.

Flame is very visible, and there's a very visceral reaction to flame.

During the Second World War, it was frequently enough in the German and the
American experience to simply demonstrate a flamethrower in an area you were
getting ready to attack,

and that would frequently cause the defender to either surrender or withdraw.

The horrific psychological and physical effects of fire has made it the ultimate
defense, an awesome deterrent warding off the strongest enemy invasion.

Go back 1,300 years, and man had already discovered ways to create an
impenetrable flaming defense.

The ultimate blast from the past, Greek fire.

In 670 AD, a Byzantine architect, Koulenikos, experimented with chemicals to
create an awesome new incendiary, Greek fire.

The Byzantines used this superweapon to defend their city walls from attackers.

Not only effective on land, this mysterious composition could also set seas on
fire.

The great thing about Greek fire is it will burn on water, and that's fantastic
because it means wherever your opponents come at you,

you can deploy this weapon, and if you imagine that the ships of that period are
made of wood, this is absolutely devastating.

The precise ingredients were so secret that today's weaponologists can only
speculate about its true composition.

They all agree it contained raw petroleum.

We do know it contains within it liquid petroleum, and it's raw, unrefined form
that you find in puddles in the desert.

Quite how you mix all that together, what else you add to it, we don't know, but
we know it's incredibly effective.

Fast forward to World War II, 1940.

Although the ingredients of Greek fire had been lost, its legend lived on.

As the Nazis conquered Europe, the British feared invasion and experimented with
fire to defend the English Channel.

There was nothing that stood between the British and the potentially invading
Nazis other than the English Channel.

So one of the ways that an invading fleet could be stopped was by setting it on
fire.

So the idea was that if you could pump flammable materials onto an invading
German force,

you could destroy enough of the force to force the Germans to turn back.

The British successfully lit up eight miles of coastline by pouring oil onto the
water and setting it alight.

But in the end, the invasion never came.

Go forward 20 years, Vietnam, and fire was still used as a terrifying defense.

In the jungles of Vietnam, the US troops were constantly under attack from Viet
Cong.

In order to defend their placements, the US fought back with flamed phugas.

Developed in the 16th century, phugas was a small defensive mine.

Armies placed explosives in pits and covered them with stones.

When the phugas was detonated, their attackers were showered with a hailstorm of
rocks.

400 years later in Vietnam, phugas showered attackers with fire.

Flamed phugas, which is what we're going to demonstrate, is whatever you had on
hand.

They might have powder canisters from their cannons.

That would be their tubes. They would bury that back in the ground.

They would take any type of explosive that they had.

They would put that in the bottom of the tube. They would fill the tube up with
thickened fuel.

And then they would use a white phosphorus munition in the front to light it.

So when they set these devices off, it would spread the flame out over the area
that they were trying to defend.

Are you ready?

Fire in the hole!

I'm so twisted.

For thousands of years, fire has been an awesome and terrifying deterrent in
defense.

But use it to attack, and you've got one of the most potent weapons in the
world.

Weapons that can burn through jungle, burn through flesh, burn through metal.

Since the dawn of time, man has used fire as an awesome weapon of war.

Burning down walls, toasting the

enemies, melting machines, and scorching the earth.

In order to create the ultimate incendiary, men needed to develop fuels to feed
his weapons.

Flames that would burn slow enough to hit his target, hard enough to light it,
and hot enough to destroy it.

Go back to the 7th century, and man had already started inventing incendiary
materials.

Greek fire.

It could burn hot enough to destroy fleets of ships.

The mysterious petroleum-based mixture could spread fire over vast areas and
even burn on water.

Move forward to the 20th century, and petroleum was still being used as an
awesome fire starter.

In 1939, at the start of World War II, the Russians invaded Finland.

As the Russian tanks rolled in, the Finns were heavily outnumbered.

Armed with a limited arsenal, they needed to find a simple way to retaliate.

The result, a crude petrol bomb.

Criss on the Molotov cocktail as a jive against the Russian foreign minister,
Vyacheslav Molotov.

The Molotov cocktail was a way of creating a simple, effective incendiary
weapon.

You take a bottle, you fill it up with gasoline, and you tie a flammable oil-
soaked rag

onto the outside of the bottle.

The idea is, when you smash the bottle, the flammable gasoline petrol inside
spreads over your target,

and because that rag on fire is there already, then it all bursts into flame.

A Finnish captain, Eero Kuytinen, believed that this crude incendiary device
might disable the Russian tanks

by igniting their fuel supplies.

It quickly proved to be a devastating tank-slayer.

If you can place fire on the back of the armored vehicle where the engine
compartment is,

and the intakes for that, you can often disable the engine or strike fear in the
hearts of the armored crewmen

who are trapped inside.

But the simple petrol bomb had its limitations.

One of the discoveries early on was that the thinner fuels would disperse and
would fail to carry,

and it would burn very quickly.

It was found that to use a thickened fuel that would stick to the target and
burn longer was more effective.

By mixing in tar, the fuel would stick hard to any tank.

The improvised cocktail proved that thickened fuel was the way ahead.

And in 1943, a Harvard scientist, Louis Fizer, created an even more effective
mixture, napalm.

Fizer experimented with thickening agents to gelify gasoline.

Using a mixture of acids, he created the ultimate incendiary.

Napalm is a chemical that takes a flammable gasoline substance and makes it
gooey and sticky

so that it sticks to surfaces, gets them hot, gets them burning, and causes
damage.

This is gasoline. This is a thickening chemical that we use.

As you can see, it gels pretty quick.

The consistency of the napalm is no less than the consistency of the napalm.

The consistency of the napalm is no longer liquid. It's more of a thickened gel.

It's very slippery, too.

As you can see, it burns very vigorously.

Its effects were devastating.

While water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, napalm could generate up to 2,200
degrees.

Moved forward 20 years, Vietnam and the Viet Cong felt the heat

as the U.S. bombers dropped 400,000 tons of napalm over enemy territory.

Vietnam, one of the reasons for using napalm is because we often injected ground
forces

into an area that was basically controlled by the enemy.

And in an effort to clear the jungle around the landing zone, we'd napalm the
area and burn the area out.

Napalm could burn down the jungle, flush out, and torch the enemy.

But fire wasn't only effective as a weapon against forest and flesh.

Go back 80 years, and another incendiary had been developed that was so hot

that it could even burn through metal, thermite.

Incendiary weapons use a chemical like thermite, which is made of powdered
aluminum and powdered rust.

And they burn really hot, and it's really hard to put them out.

They can burn through metal. They can burn through steel girders.

I've got two bags of thermite, one kilo each, and I'll take some of this.

This is a relatively easy, easily ignited mixture of magnesium and barium oxide.

And it burns at an extremely high temperature.

OK.

There we have the green flame of the ignition compound.

It ignited the thermite, which you can see is now bright yellow to white.

Thermite was discovered in 1893 by German scientist Hans Goldschmidt,

as he was trying to find ways to produce pure metals.

He found that if you mix iron oxide with aluminum, it produced an intensely hot
reaction.

Right. Here we see the oil drum with a hole very evidently burnt in the middle.

Let's see what happens at the bottom.

Oh, the molten iron's actually hit the bottom and burnt its way through here.
You see that?

That's the way it's gone right through, and it has absolutely scorched the
ground immediately underneath.

Initially, thermite was used industrially to weld metal in factories.

But by World War II, its weapons potential was realized. The thermite grenade.

During the Normandy landings, the Americans and British used thermite grenades
to disable enemy tanks and artillery.

Dropped by hand, thermite grenades could render out machines useless.

But delivering fire by hand is dangerous.

Petrol bombs, napalm, thermite.

As man developed fuels that were totally hot, he invented weapons to deliver
them to target with deadly accuracy.

The result, total flaming carnage.

If you're up against a big chunky German pillbox, you just ruck up and you pour
fire into it until everybody's dead.

OK, fire at will.

Fire. The most destructive weapon on the planet.

Over thousands of years, man has created fuels to feed fire and invented awesome
weaponry to put flames on target with devastating accuracy.

Fire weapons cause total flaming carnage, devouring everything in their path.

As soon as man had invented bows and arrows, he found he could send fire dead
onto target.

There's two main ways that you can make a fire arrow.

If you're on an ad hoc basis, you simply get a bit of cloth, wrap it around the
end of your point of your arrow, a normal vodka arrow in this case.

Dip it in something incendiary, tar mixture, something like that, and then
you're ready to shoot it over the walls.

If you're prepared and you think you're going to be in a siege situation, then
you might have prepared up some arrows like this.

Now, this is a cage that actually you can put something like charcoal in.

Now, the idea of charcoal is that once it's alight, as it's flying through the
air, it incandesces, it glows brighter.

So at the time when it hits, hopefully a bit of thatch, it's at its brightest,
it's at its hottest, so it'll set fire to whatever it hits.

Flaming arrows could set light to a target with deadly accuracy from over 150
feet away, both destroying and distracting an enemy force.

If you were in a fortified town or a castle where these were coming down around
you, obviously if these are setting fires, you've got to deal with that
situation very, very quickly.

So the number of defenders inside the castle of a town are going to be taking up
all their time, dealing with these fires, trying to put them out as soon as they
possibly can.

Because of that, obviously you've got less people on the walls shooting back at
you, the attacker, so it's a panic-causing device.

A single flaming arrow could deliver fire on a small scale, but what if you
could launch a whole stream of fire to engulf your target in flames?

Go back to the 7th century, and the Byzantines had invented a means to hose down
a torrent of deadly fire on their enemy, the siphon.

The siphons that they used for delivering Greek fire are a little bit like a
bicycle pump.

Very, very basic syringe. You pull something back, it creates a vacuum, and it
draws the liquid up into the chamber.

Then when the lever's pushed forward, it's ejected out through a nozzle. And
then as it's coming out, you can light it.

This is how they would throw fire or squirt fire towards an enemy vessel.

This is one of the reasons it caused great fear in an enemy, because it looked
like a dragon's breath coming out.

The Byzantine siphon could spray flames across the water, but as the secret of
Greek fire disappeared, so too did the siphon.

Go forward to the 20th century, and a new fire-breathing monster was causing
carnage on the battlefield.

The hand-pumped siphon had been replaced by the flamethrower.

In 1901, a German scientist, Richard Fiedler, invented the modern flamethrower.

14 years later in World War I, it was used in anger.

The flamethrower starts out as a really good anti-personnel weapon for clearing
trenches.

If you pump flaming material into an enemy trench, what's the enemy going to do?
They're going to get out of that trench, and they're going to get out right
away.

And then you can shoot them.

The flamethrowers were ideal weapons to flush out enemy trenches.

Both Allied and Axis powers began developing their own portable flamethrowers,
using the same basic design.

They consisted of two containers, one containing fuel, the other compressed gas
as a propellant.

A hose let off from the fuel canister with two triggers, one to shoot the gun,
the other to light the fuel.

The flame gun has three primary parts. You've got the rear valve.

This releases the napalm or the diesel fuel or the vaporous fuel down through
the wand.

Down through the wand into the front trigger housing and the flame shield.

When you pull the trigger, a pin is pushed through the ignition cartridge,
igniting the incendiary.

When you open the trigger to let the fuel out through the end of the nozzle
where the flame is, you get a huge loud whoosh.

It burns for approximately 10 seconds.

Contrary to what you see in the movies, they don't shoot for hours, they don't
shoot for minutes, they shoot seconds.

In World War I, flamethrowers proved fire could effectively destroy anyone in a
dug-in position.

Move forward to World War II and the Pacific. This concept proved just as
effective.

As the Americans conducted their island-hopping campaign against the Japanese,
they were confounded by the heavily protected bunkers and pillboxes which they
found on most of the islands.

Without access to heavy artillery, the U.S. Army needed a way to flush out and
destroy the enemy. The answer? Flamethrowers.

Basically, you're using a flamethrower against somebody who is in a dug-in
position where they can shoot out, you can't shoot into it, and basically you're
going to be pouring this burning gasoline through the little hole in his pillbox
to burn them out.

Each pillbox had what we called apertures, or at least a slit in that pillbox so
that they could fire out of it. And that's what you tried to roll your flame
through.

The flame would go right through there and was very effective.

February 23, 1945, Iwo Jima. Flamethrower Woody Williams was awarded the
Congressional Medal of Honor after single-handedly taking out seven pillboxes
against the full force of the Japanese.

And I can remember them crawling on my belly. And I remember them coming
charging around the end of that pillbox toward me. There were five or six of
them. And I just opened up the flame and caught them.

It was just like they went from real fast running to real slow motion. But by
getting rid of those seven pillboxes, that opened up a hole. So we got through.

The Japanese were really scared to death of flamethrowers.

The portable flamethrower created tremendous terror. But its fear factor was
both a strength and weakness.

While the enemy might surrender in the face of a flamethrower, they also tried
to take it out as quickly as possible. The flamethrower was a prime target and
very visible.

The average life of a flamethrower was five minutes. Because he was a target
that the Japanese wanted to get rid of very badly.

The flamethrower had other limitations.

The flamethrower is heavy. It doesn't carry a lot of fuel. It's only a few
seconds of burn. It's a tool in the inventory. It's very useful in the situation
where it works well, but it has distinct limitations.

The small portable flamethrower had a limited range of 20 yards, which added to
the risk for the operator. The small tanks also meant that they could carry only
several gallons of fuel.

Since you only had enough fuel to burn for seconds, you needed to be very
precise and very close to your target.

In 1944, one man had an answer to these problems. General Percy Hobart.

Hobart designed a series of specialist tanks for the Normandy invasion. A
floating tank, a bridge building tank, and the flame throwing crocodile.

They were nicknamed the Funnies, but you'd never smile at this crocodile.

The crocodile took the British Churchill tank and replaced its whole machine gun
with a flamethrower. A huge fuel tank was then placed in a trailer behind it so
that the vulnerable fuel supply was kept separate from the tank operators.

The crocodile tank, which was a British modified tank, was designed to go up
against very well dug in German pill boxes on the Normandy coast and pump large
quantities of flammable material into them and light it on fire.

If you're up against a big chunky German pill box, you just rock up in your
crocodile tank and you pour fire into her until, until everybody's dead.

The crocodile's bite proved so effective that the rest of the world's military
began building specialized flame throwing tanks.

And fire breathing T-34s and Shermans entered the battlefield.

With hundreds of gallons of fuel on board, they could rain down fire over rivers
through tree lines and into buildings.

They could shoot anywhere from 200 to 285 yards with a thickened fuel.

They had a lot more capacity. We carry roughly four and a half gallons in these
flamethrowers and they carried hundreds of gallons.

The mechanized Munsters vastly improved the range and destructive power of the
flamethrower.

Shot from a flamethrower, fire could burn out an enemy from the deepest cave,
trench or bunker, but dropped from the air and it could wipe out whole cities.

In World War II, fire became a weapon of mass destruction.

Tokyo, for instance, largely a wooden city, made itself into its own funeral
pyre when it was set alight by American incendiary bombs.

Fire, nature's most devastating force. In the hands of men, an awesome weapon of
mass destruction.

A single bullet can kill a man. One missile can destroy a machine.

Fire can wipe out a whole city.

In the Middle Ages, siege engines could hurl flaming projectiles over the
highest city walls, creating carnage within.

In the 12th century, both the Crusaders and the Saracens repeatedly won and lost
the city of Jerusalem when each side launched great balls of fire against its
walls.

Go forward 800 years and siege engines had been replaced by flying bombers.

Loaded with incendiary bombs, planes could now deliver fire on an unprecedented
scale.

Fire can destroy things. So using incendiary bombs, you could take out and wipe
out large areas with very little effort.

During World War II, both the Allied and Axis powers discovered that fire was
the simplest, most effective way to bring an enemy to its knees.

At the start of the war, the US Army Air Force had attempted to use precision
bombing raids to take out specific military and industrial targets.

By dropping high explosive ordnance on their enemy's nerve centers, they had
hoped to render them powerless.

But the strategy had problems.

In the American Air Force they had a thing called the Nordic bombsighter, and
you could hit the bottom of a pickle barrel at 22,000 feet.

The problem is, they tested that in Arizona. It's very clear in Arizona.

In Europe, most of the time you don't get the weather to use the Nordic
bombsighter.

Flying at 20,000 feet in poor weather conditions made it difficult to put bombs
on target.

To make an accurate hit, raids had to be carried out in broad daylight, and that
proved almost suicidal.

The problem is that it took a lot of bombers, a lot of sorties, and a lot of
dead American airmen to try to carry that out.

So it was a difficult process.

The alternative was nighttime bombing and to do area bombing.

It was less precise. It was aimed at urban centers. If you happened to get
industrial targets, all the better.

And it was designed to terrify the citizenry.

Bombing at night was safer, but rendered targeting systems useless.

The Germans came up with a solution. They began to develop small cluster
incendiary bomblets that would burn vigorously, causing mass destruction without
the need for accurate targeting.

This is a German one kilogram magnesium bomblet from an incendiary bomb. There
would be about 260 of these bundled together.

They'd disperse in the air and fall over a large target area.

They would have been filled with magnesium, which would have ignited the
thermite, which would then burn at an intense temperature.

During the autumn of 1940, Germany launched a sustained firebombing campaign
over London.

More than one million incendiary bombs were dropped in the first two months,
destroying over a million buildings.

The U.S. and British military retaliated and began to fight fire with fire.

This bomb, it was dropped over Calais in 1940. The British recovered it and then
sent it to the United States so that the U.S. military could study it.

And the Americans came up with their own magnesium cluster bomb. This shape was
so that you could bundle hundreds of these together and drop them over a target.

And actually would also have a fin assembly so it wouldn't just tumble in the
air, but also maybe drop a little bit more accurately.

On impact, a spring-loaded fuse ignited the magnesium, which in turn lit the
thermite mixture, creating scorching, melting fire.

The Allies began experimenting with other incendiary materials to destroy man
and machine. The result? White phosphorus.

White phosphorus is a very simple chemical. It's just good old phosphorus, but
once it gets burning, it doesn't stop.

It was initially used to create a thick white smoke on the battlefield. But if
you happen to get a fragment of that white phosphorus on anything,

a piece of wood, a piece of grass, or a piece of human being, it keeps burning
and doesn't stop.

If you've got a piece of white phosphorus burning its way into your buddy's
flesh, the only way to save your buddy is to take your bayonet

and carve that piece of phosphorus out of his body. And you've got to do it
right away before it kills him.

Laid in with white phosphorus and thermite bombs, the US and British Air Forces
began torching German cities.

On February 15, 1945, British and American Air Forces attacked Dresden.

First, dropping regular explosives to blow the roofs off, the Allied planes
rained down 2,000 pounds of incendiary bombs on the city.

Within hours, Dresden was engulfed in a raging firestorm.

A firestorm is a fire that is burning completely out of control, that is feeding
on itself, that is creating such an incredible updraft in the center of the fire

that it's causing the fire to spread further and further across the city.

A firestorm is created as the heat from the original fire draws in the
surrounding air.

This creates an updraft and causes the inflowing winds to change direction
erratically, spreading the fire and feeding its force.

As temperatures reach 2,700 degrees, over 50% of Dresden was destroyed with
around 40,000 casualties.

Fire had revealed its awesome destructive capabilities.

But moved forward just a few weeks, and the flames had risen to new heights as
fire hit Japan's capital.

The entire cities are consumed not just by the incendiary bombs themselves, but
by their very own building materials.

Tokyo, for instance, largely a wooden city, made itself into its own funeral
pyre when it was set alight by American incendiary bombs.

In July 1944, Major General Curtis LeMay was placed in control of the 21st
Bomber Command and given the job of winning the Pacific War at all costs.

Earning the nickname Bombs Away LeMay, he believed that carpet firebombing was
the answer.

LeMay's marching orders win the victory in Japan at all costs, and he did.

Starting in March 1945, LeMay began to rain down a torrent of fire on Tokyo and
other Japanese cities.

6,960 B-29 sorties were flown over Japan, dropping a total bomb load of 41,592
tons.

Tokyo suffered the worst.

In one raid, over 150,000 Japanese civilians were killed or wounded, and 16
square miles of the city was destroyed.

What happened was the bombers were flying down a line and they would drop their
incendiaries down a line and they got a line of fire going and the wind was very
strong that night.

So there was this sweeping effect across the area and there were more people
killed in that raid than there were in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

As incendiary bombing created towering infernos across the globe, both Allied
and Axis powers experimented with ways to deliver mass flaming carnage.

The Japanese manufactured balloon bombs, hoping they'd be blown across the
Pacific by wind currents and set the U.S. on fire.

The Japanese scientists came up with the idea of putting up a bunch of helium-
filled balloons with little bombs on them and they floated them across the
Pacific to blow up pieces of the United States.

And some of them actually got as far as California and some of them even got to
Nevada.

The balloon bombs were 30 feet in diameter, filled with 19,000 cubic feet of
hydrogen.

Each balloon had 30 pounds of incendiary material suspended beneath it.

300 of the 9,000 Japanese balloons landed in the U.S.

The American government were so afraid the bombs would affect morale that they
kept it secret and the Japanese stopped the campaign believing that the mission
had failed completely.

While the Japanese experimented with fire balloons to create mass destruction,
the U.S. were developing their own secret weapon, the Bat Bomb.

Louis Fizer, the inventor of napalm, began working on the possibility of an
incendiary carrying bat.

Fizer came up with another idea in which he would load bats up with incendiary
devices and drop them over Japan and they would fly down and roost in Japanese
homes and burn up Japan.

Unfortunately, the bats didn't play ball. Two million dollars later, the project
was folded.

The big problem with the flaming bat is that a bat with an incendiary device can
go pretty much anywhere and there were a lot of accidents during development
with flaming bats burning barns down all over the countryside in California.

The bat burning research was abandoned when it was discovered that a nuclear
bomb could actually deliver the flaming Japanese city concept way better than
bats could.

In the 20th century, incendiary weapons have caused apocalyptic destruction,
reducing men, machines and entire cities to ash and vapor.

The effects of flamethrowers, napalm and thermite bombs were terrifying.

But go forward to the 1970s and fire got even hotter.

The thermobaric bomb was unleashed and became the ultimate human incinerator.

We've all felt our ears pop when we've been on a plane or driven up and down a
mountain.

Well, thermobaric weapon creates the same effect only much larger and instead of
your ears popping, your whole body pops.

Over the last hundred years, fire has become the ultimate tear weapon, burning
and blazing a trail across modern battlefields.

It has reduced man, machine and metropolis to ash and vapor.

And if the flames didn't burn you to death, fire had another equally deadly
effect, asphyxiation.

Flame weapon not only burns things, but it sucks out oxygen.

So if you put flame into a bunker or a tunnel, then you can't survive in there
for long because it's going to suck out all the oxygen.

In World War II in Vietnam, flamethrowers sucked the air out of cave, trench and
pillbox.

Move forward to the 1970s and a new generation of incendiary bomb had been
passed the torch, the thermobaric bomb.

Thermobaric weapons were introduced by the Soviets in response to specific
combat conditions where they faced inaccessible dug-in forces.

In 1979, the Soviets entered Afghanistan and needed a device to flush out the
Mujahideen from their cave hideouts.

The solution, the thermobaric weapon.

The latest incendiary device is something called a thermobaric bomb.

When this explosive goes off, it creates a tremendous amount of heat and a big
pressure wave

so that it literally can destroy things and suck out all the oxygen and burn
things up.

Thermobaric weapons work by expelling an explosive mist of volatile liquid or
metal powder using a small charge to detonate the mixture.

Seconds later, another charge ignites the mist causing a massive blast wave
which travels at 10,000 feet per second.

It creates a huge pressure increase, flattening anything within 3,000 cubic feet
from impact.

And the human body can accommodate some changes in air pressure.

We've all felt our ears pop when we've been on a plane or driven up and down a
mountain.

Well, a thermobaric weapon creates the same effect, only much larger.

And instead of your ears popping, your whole body pops.

Let's decompose the name, thermo, heat, barrack, overpressure.

This is basically a way of evenly distributing the blast throughout a confined
area like a bunker or an underground tunnel.

Anytime you're trying to go against an enclosed space, thermobaric may be your
weapon of choice.

I've known some pretty hard soldiers who've gone into fighting knowing that it
was possible that the enemy was going to be using this system against them.

And it kept them awake nights.

It's a horrible way to go being killed by a shockwave that you can't see, that
comes and gets you from out of the very air you breathe.

In Afghanistan today, the U.S. Army filled their own 2,000-pound thermobaric
bombs, flushing out the Taliban from the Tora Bora caves.

Over the past 100 years, incendiary weapons have become the ultimate harbingers
of death and are still the weapon of choice for attacking entrenched troops.

They create awesome devastation and have become the most controversial weapon on
the modern battlefield.

If you're going to bomb a city or an area, why then burn all these residential
blocks if the target you're really looking for is at the factory?

In the days of pinpoint accuracy and smart weapons, the idea is to be able to
avoid collateral damage by using pinpoint munitions and not burning an entire
area.

In 1980, international pressure resulted in a Geneva Convention which restricted
the use of incendiary weapons.

Fire used to mean terror, death and destruction.

Now, in the 21st century, the Dragon Pyrotechnic Torch has made fire a friend on
the battlefield.

Fighting fire with fire, it totally incinerates landmines.

This beast breathes fire at over 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit and can burn through a
quarter of an inch of metal.

The intense heat melts the mines with no explosive blast.

For anti-landmine personnel, it's totally safe.

With over 125,000 square miles of the world contaminated with mines, the Dragon
is said to be the hottest lifesaver on the planet.

Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect its unique genesis.

Prehistoric man inspired the use of Greek fire in defense.

From flaming arrows to tank-slaying petrol bombs to napalm, man strove to
develop the ultimate incendiary.

From World War II thermite bombs to thermobaric weapons, fire became the
ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

After spreading so much carnage, fire has now become friendly in the shape of
the Dragon.

Phenologically, it's top of the tree.