Defense Focus: Wonder weapons -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- Russia is not just using its windfall energy profits to beef up its existing nuclear and conventional armed forces, it is also seeking to develop sophisticated conventional submarine and systems and bombs that while non-nuclear, are in their own ways as formidable as nuclear systems could be.

In the past month RIA Novosti has reported Russia's announcement that it has successfully tested a thermobaric, or fuel bomb, a devastating non-nuclear weapon first developed by the United States and used in Vietnam some 40 years ago. The Russians said their new thermobaric bomb was more powerful than any previous one ever used.

Then, the Moscow newspaper Kommersant on Sept. 12 reported that Russia was developing a new so-called Project 20120 submarine that may have followed German and Swedish designs and further developed them in creating a new diesel-electric drive with hydrogen fuel cells that would allow diesel-powered subs to stay submerged while recharging their batteries.

The Russian navy promptly denied the story, but Stratfor Forecasting gave it serious credence and assessment in a published analysis.

The first question that both these reports raised the following day is why the Russians are bothering to develop conventional weapons systems that only appear to replicate capabilities they already have in abundance in their nuclear weapons and submarines?

After all, Russia has the second-largest nuclear armament force in the world, and the second largest nuclear submarine one as well behind the United States. And Russian military leaders and planners today, as at the height of the Cold War, are entirely uninhibited about developing or reviving their nuclear weapons complex.

Nor does cost-effectiveness appear to be the driving force behind either the admitted thermobaric bomb program or the still speculative, but extremely feasible, diesel-electric/hydrogen cell sub program.

It is true that China's conventional diesel submarines are vastly cheaper and easier to build than nuclear ones. Last year the United States built a single new submarine and it was, like all U.S. Navy subs, a nuclear-powered one. China, by contrast, is years, perhaps still even decades behind U.S. submarine nuclear technology, especially in their lack of ability to build stealth nuclear submarines. But they built 14 new subs to America's one.

Of course, all the new Chinese submarines were non-nuclear diesel-powered ones.

However, while it is very cheap to build a conventional diesel submarine, developing a new improved technology one as the prototype for an entire class of them is prohibitively more expensive. And the unconfirmed -- indeed, denied -- Kommersant report indicates that this is the route the Russians have chosen. Why?

It will hardly be because the new technology is absolutely cutting edge and sexy. On the contrary, diesel-powered submarines capable of impressively long periods of endurance underwater and with formidably long ranges had already been developed by the Nazi Kriegsmarine and were operationally deployed in 1945 -- the Type XXI and Type XXII classes.

The same argument can be made against developing the fuel bomb. It isn't original. It's been around for decades. And Russia already has weapons of the same or vastly more destructive power.

However, developing both weapons, in fact, would make a great deal of strategic sense for Russia because, while on paper neither the thermobaric bomb nor the diesel electric/hydrogen cell submarine give the Russian armed forces capabilities they do not already possess in abundance, both weapons have a lot more flexibility than meets the eye.

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(Next: Conventional weapon advantages)