Wampum

Condi Rice and Jack Staw are flogging shapped charges.

Garrett Birkoff and Saunders McLaine wrote Survey of Modern Algebra, which was my first real algebra text. Condi and Jack, being high-class dilettantes, wouldn't appreciate the irony, or the beauty, in this cite: Garret Birkhoff, et al. "Explosives With Lined Cavities". Journal of Applied Physics. June 1948, p. 563-582. This is the "original" treatise on shaped charges.

Giorgio Ferrari. "The Hows and Whys of Armor Penetration" Military Technology, October 1988, p. 81-96. This is described as "simply the best short summary you'll ever find of how both shaped charges and KE penetrators work their magic". I wish I had a copy. With between 100 and 300 .mil readers every month (the 343 Quartermaster posts had rather wider readership), maybe one will land on the steps to my studiously soft, aluminium skinned travel trailer. Hope springs eternal.

On to Iran.

The claim is that Iran is sending shaped charge munitions, the kind usually delivered in HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) payloads on direct-fire weapons -- the primary weapon of tanks, helicopter- and man-packed rockets -- a few kilograms, sufficient to deliver a metal jet capable of blowing a jet of liquid metal and hot gas into the crew or engineering compartment of an armored vehicle. The primary alternative is the kind usually used in steel structure demolition, again, comically small charges. These use high, or very-high brisance explosives, the kind I wrote about here and here discussing the RDX, HMX and PETN inventories abandoned in-place (transfered to the armed opposition's reserve) by US forces in Iraq.

The last time this nonsense was run was in early August, when MSNBC decided to improve on physics and attribute the rotation and displacement of a 37 ton mass object to a shaped charge. Here is an interesting piece on building a moly jet that cut through 3.4 meters of high-strength armor steel at the Nevada Test Site's Big Explosives Experimental Facility, which is seriously cool. Distinguishing between a jet puncture mark and the blast damage needed to rotate and displace a 37 ton mass is an exercise left to CENTCOM media handlers, and blind mice.

This week's nonsense is that there is some significant causal link between Iran and an uptick in the butcher's bill for Brits in Occupied Iraq. There are big explosions going off in Iran, the explosions at a shopping center in Ahvaz, capital of Khuzestan province killed five people this week. Four earlier bombings in June killed at least eight people, also in Ahvaz. Naturally, these are blamed on the British, that's an Iranian cultural tradition, and the UK has responded in kind.

September 5th, two men were travelling in an armoured Land Rover. When the bomb went off, their vehicle was destroyed, consistent with a the blast effect of a unshaped charge, enhanced with a fragmentation jacket, and the two men killed. The men were Fusilier Donal Anthony Meade, 20, from Plumstead in south east London, and Fusilier Stephen Robert Manning, 22, from Erith in Kent. They will be "sorely missed", according to their former CO, but not by Blair, Straw, or Rice, who are going to use their deaths to sell the message Hamas/Iran/IED to anyone who still believes them.

In related news, Captain Ken Masters, 40, commanding officer of 61 Section of the Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch (SIB), who was the military officer in charge of all investigations against British troops serving in Iraq, has just taken his own life. He was in charge of investigating the events surrounding the "rescue" a month ago of two SAS troops who were "engaged in undercover surveillance of several senior Iraqi police officers who were suspected of being behind a series of attacks on British troops."