" Father of all bombs "

"Father of All Bombs" is the nickname of a Russian-made air-delivered thermobaric weapon that is claimed to be four times more powerful than the U.S. military's GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB or the "mother of all bombs"), making it the most powerful publicly-known conventional (non-nuclear) weapon in the world. It was successfully field-tested in the late evening of September 11, 2007, when it was apparently dropped from a Tupolev Tu-160 heavy bomber with a parachute and exploded. Defense analysts question both the yield of the bomb and whether it could be deployed by a Tupolev bomber. Photos and video of the bomb suggest that it is designed to be deployed out of the back of a slow moving cargo plane, and bomb-test video released by the Russians never shows both the bomb and the Tupolev bomber in the same camera shot.

Russia says the weapon yields the equivalent of 44 tons of TNT using 7.8 tons of a new type of high explosive, claimed to be created applying "nanotechnology". In comparison, the MOAB produces the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT from 8 tons of high explosive. The blast radius of 300 m is twice as large as the MOAB.

Although its effect has been compared to that of a nuclear weapon, it is comparable only to the lowest yield settings of the lowest yield nuclear weapons. The M-388 Davy Crockett, one of the smallest nuclear devices deployed, had a selectable yield between 10-20 tons of TNT (smaller than the FOAB) to up to 500 tons of TNT (over ten times larger than the FOAB). The FOAB only has around 0.3 percent of the power of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima (a yield of 13 kilotons of TNT), which itself is considerably smaller than most modern nuclear weapons (which are usually measured in the hundreds of kilotons range, upwards into the megaton range).