Anti-runway penetration bombs are systems involving bombs or bomblets which are designed to disrupt the surface of an airfield runway (or tarmac) and make it unusable for flight operations.
One early system was the Matra Durandal, a single 450 lb bomb with rocket booster and two warheads. The device worked by first igniting a large warhead to create a crater, then subsequently using a smaller charge that had penetrated the crater to displace adjacent concrete slabs. The slabs, once displaced, were far harder to deal with than a simple hole that could be patched: the defenders would either have to pulverize the slab (for which tools might not be ready) or take the risk that a protruding slab would flip a landing airframe (quite possible considering the velocities at which a jet aircraft lands).
Another, now withdrawn from service, was the JP233, a submunitions system in which an aircraft would fly over the target runway and a mixture of penetrating and anti-personnel submunitions would be dispensed to both crater the runway and impede repair work. These submunitions could be armed with delayed-fuses, meaning that workcrews run the risk of death or bodily injury as they worked on runway repair. After the UK signed an international accord banning cluster mines, the JP233 was retired.
Famous quotes containing the word bomb:
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
—John Hersey (b. 1914)