>> NARRATOR: They're designed
for a single purpose-- to kill with maximum efficiency.
From flying shrapnel to rapid- fire flying bullets... from
irradiation to incineration to a microscopic drop of a lethal
chemical agent, these weapons all have one thing in common--
if you're in their crosshairs, there's nowhere to hide.
Now, "Deadliest Weapons" on <i>Modern Marvels.</i><font color="#FFFF00">
Captioning sponsored by</font> <font color="#FFFF00">A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS
On a cloudy fall day, a Soviet</font> tU-95 bomber flies over the
island Novaya Zemlya, located in the Arctic Sea.
Reaching a height of 35,000 feet, the pilot drops his
ordnance-- the "Tsar Bomba," a 50-megaton nuclear bomb.
Within moments, the fusion device detonates, shooting a
flash of light through the atmosphere, visible from 600
miles away. It was, and remains, the largest
nuclear detonation in history. >> BRUCE T. GOODWIN: It was
originally designed to be 100 megatons.
It very nearly killed the senior officer who was piloting the
aircraft that dropped the test article.
>> NARRATOR: Capable of destroying everything within a
15-mile radius, and delivering third-degree burns within a 64-
mile radius, the Tsar Bomba remains the final word in total
annihilation of an enemy target. Today, the Tsar Bomba is but a
reminder of the Cold War arms race and the danger of an all-
out nuclear war that would have likely caused the destruction of
both the U.S. and Soviet Union, if not the world.
Yet, the threat of nuclear attack from our former adversary
remains. >> IVAN OELRICH: The risk of
accidental attack is more serious, I think, than most
people realize. The Russians maintain a large
nuclear arsenal. Since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, they've had a huge economic setback.
Their warning system has deteriorated terribly.
There are gaps in their radars. Their satellites have broken
down. The Russians, of course,
reassure us that, no, we have nothing to worry about.
But the consequences would be so grave that we should take it
very, very seriously, even if it has a minuscule chance of
happening at all. >> NARRATOR: The threat of a
nuclear attack from a rogue nation or a well-organized
stateless group is also cause for grave concern.
>> GOODWIN: Whether North Korea has nuclear weapons is very much
in the press today. Should terrorists get their
hands on sufficient nuclear materials-- either to make a
non-nuclear weapon or radiological weapon, or to
actually get a nuclear detonation, however small--
would be a horrendous attack. >> NARRATOR: The evolution of
precision guidance systems has eliminated the need for large-
yield nuclear weapons like the Tsar Bomba.
But make no mistake, the detonation of a one-megaton
nuclear bomb would yield more destructive power than any
weapon the world has ever seen. >> Weapon: thermonuclear
warhead. >> NARRATOR: To comprehend the
true lethality of a thermonuclear explosion requires
an understanding of the massive amount of energy that's released
upon detonation. When a thermonuclear bomb
detonates, an instantaneous fission reaction creates a
secondary fusion reaction, fusing hydrogen and its isotopes
together to form helium, releasing enormous amounts of
energy. >> GOODWIN: And it occurs in a
very small volume. Therefore, the total energy
divided by the volume is very large.
And that means the temperatures are stupendously high--
temperatures that are higher than the center of the sun.
>> NARRATOR: Upon detonation, a thermonuclear bomb emits a
stream of X-rays, infrared rays and gamma rays.
This is referred to as "thermal radiation," and is visible to
the naked eye in the form of a brilliant flash of light lasting
from one to ten seconds. >> OELRICH: It emits all of this
X radiation that's absorbed by the air around it.
The outside of the air is burning, it's forming,
basically, smog. The nitrogen and the oxygen are
reacting. It turns brown, and so the light
coming in actually goes down until that burns off, and then
it goes up again. >> NARRATOR: The heat from the
infrared rays will set people and buildings on fire.
The X rays will irradiate those closest to the explosion.
>> OELRICH: The X rays don't get very far.
They're absorbed by the air. The air is then heated up by
these X rays to millions of degrees.
>> NARRATOR: The immense heat expands the air around the point
of impact, creating a spherical shock wave, and winds that can
reach hundreds of miles per hour.
>> GOODWIN: And if it were a humid day, you would be able to
see that shock wave running along the ground and through the
air, because it would cause instant condensation of moisture
in the atmosphere, and you'd see sort of a white ghost of a shock
wave traveling through the air. >> NARRATOR: The wind from the
shock wave extinguishes the fires caused by the thermal
radiation, but will flatten everything in its path within a
radius of two miles. >> GOODWIN: You get the
expansion out, but then the thermal plume of the bomb is
rising. A mushroom cloud is forming.
And so you'll get a counter flow which, when air flows up, it
sucks things in, and so you get a reversal of the flow as things
flow back toward the detonation center and rise.
>> NARRATOR: A one-megaton surface explosion will lift tons
of soil up into the mushroom cloud, which will become
irradiated and return as fallout.
The heaviest fallout particles will rain down closest to Ground
Zero. People exposed to this fallout
will die in a matter of hours from acute radiation sickness.
The smaller particles may travel thousands of miles, depending on
wind velocity. >> GOODWIN: If you ingest the
material and it stays in your body, the long-term impact is
that it can produce significant access cancer of various sorts.
>> NARRATOR: The combination of thermal radiation... shock
wave... and fallout could potentially kill millions,
making the thermonuclear bomb easily the world's deadliest
weapon. By 2004, the nuclear fraternity
consisted of seven countries that had all detonated nuclear
devices. Other countries were desperately
working toward joining the family.
Thus, there appears to be no end in sight to nuclear
proliferation, and no end to the threat of attack from the
world's deadliest weapon. It's one of the deadliest
chemical agents ever created. Within seconds of exposure,
symptoms of nausea and convulsions take over.
Without emergency treatment, paralysis, respiratory failure
and death can occur within minutes.
This deadly killer is the nerve agent VX.
Weapon: VX. >> DR. HARRY SALEM: The
organophosphate type of chemicals are considered nerve
agents because they attack the nervous system.
The nervous system controls all of the functions of the body,
and so, by interrupting or stimulating that, you get all
these various effects. >> NARRATOR: VX, in its normal
state, is a tasteless, odorless liquid that can be absorbed
through the skin in seconds. When heated, it turns into a
lingering vapor that, if inhaled, is even more deadly.
>> SALEM: VX is a persistent agent, which means it's less
volatile than the other nerve agents.
This means that when it's exposed to the air, the material
doesn't go up into the air, and it lasts much longer.
>> JIM ZARZYCKI: To give you an idea of how toxic the chemical
is, if you pulled a penny out of your pocket, and if you looked
at the penny and you looked at Lincoln's eye, it only takes a
drop the size of Lincoln's eye to cause lethality.
>> NARRATOR: There are no confirmed cases of VX being used
on people, but it's widely believed that during Saddam
Hussein's chemical attack against the Kurds in 1988, VX
was dispersed with deadly results.
The attack on the Kurds killed over 5,000.
VX is the most potent nerve agent today, but the path to its
discovery dates back to before World War I.
>> JEFFERY SMART: Chemists knew that many of the chemicals used
in the dye industry and other industries could be very deadly.
During World War I, the Germans began to weaponize chemicals by
putting them in artillery shells and portable chemical cylinders
and releasing them on the battlefield.
And they used them very effectively.
>> NARRATOR: Although chemical agents were effective in causing
casualties, they were not always lethal.
But that would change in the 1930s, when German scientists
created the first nerve agent named Tabun.
Between 1942 and 1945, they produced 12,000 tons of Tabun,
as well as several thousand variations, including Sarin.
>> SMART: The nerve agents were definitely unique compared to
the earlier World War I chemical warfare agents.
They had very little smell to them.
They began affecting the person very quickly, and were much more
lethal. >> NARRATOR: When Germany fell
to the Allies in 1945, its chemical stockpile was seized,
and the United States began producing its own variation
of the German nerve agents, which became classified as "G-
agents." The most widely produced was a
far more lethal version of Sarin nerve gas.
But by the early 1950s, an even deadlier nerve agent was
discovered. >> SMART: A British company was
investigating some insecticides, and came across a particularly
potent one. They looked at it, and then
referred it to the United States in about 1953, '54 time frame.
And the United States looked at it and realized that it was a
whole new series of very potent nerve agents that had been
discovered. They looked at all of them, and
then decided that probably VX was the one that they would like
to go with. >> NARRATOR: From 1961 to 1968,
the United States produced approximately 4,400 tons of VX--
enough to kill every human being on the planet.
The U.S. stockpile served as a deterrent against the Soviet
Union, which had begun producing even larger supplies of chemical
agents, including the nerve agents Soman, Sarin and VX.
>> SMART: In 1960 and '61, we standardized a, uh, artillery
projectile, and we came up with a newly-designed land mine, and
also loaded VX in a rocket warhead.
>> NARRATOR: Fortunately, neither country ever used the
lethal nerve agent against the other.
In 1969, Richard Nixon agreed to ban the U.S. manufacturing of
chemical weapons. Production of VX ceased, and the
stockpile was placed in storage. Today, only the United States
and Russia claim to have stockpiles of VX.
Yet, some suspect that Iraq may have produced large quantities
of the deadly nerve agent. At the onset of "Operation Iraqi
Freedom," U.S. forces prepared for the worst.
>> ZARZYCKI: We felt that it was very likely that our adversaries
would use chemical weapons against us.
And we felt that they had VX in their arsenal.
VX is often used as a terrain denial weapon-- kind of the way
you would use land mines. And one of the things we are
very concerned about is not having our forces stumble into
land that's been contaminated with VX.
>> NARRATOR: The main goal at Edgewood Chemical and Biological
Center in Maryland is to provide protection and detection for the
U.S. troops in Iraq. >> ZARZYCKI: We have the best-
protected force in the world. And each war fighter has all the
protective equipment that he or she needs-- the protective
clothing and the protective mask.
The masks will totally protect you against inhaling VX, and the
chemical protective clothing is specially designed so that the
VX can't penetrate it. >> NARRATOR: In January of 2005,
the United States ended its hunt for weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq. No VX was found.
But the threat of VX doesn't end in Iraq.
Other countries are suspected to be attempting to produce the
deadly agent, and there is enough VX in the U.S. and
Russian stockpiles to kill millions.
So the threat of attack from one of the world's deadliest weapons
remains. The machine gun...
it's not just a weapon; it's a cultural icon.
For some, it's even a nickname. But in its essence, it's a
lethal killing machine. With the ability to fire
hundreds of rounds of ammunition in seconds, the machine gun has
remained a constant on the battlefield since the Civil War.
But of all the wars in which it's been used, it's the Maxim
machine gun of World War I that brought the weapon to the
apex of its lethality. >> Weapon: Maxim Heavy Machine
Gun. >> NARRATOR: The first
functional rapid fire weapon was the Gatling gun, invented
by physician Richard Jordan Gatling in 1862.
But the rapid-fire killing potential of Gatling's weapon
was limited by its rather impractical design.
>> DORAN CART: The Gatling gun was heavy.
It was prone to malfunction with the cranking-- the cartridges
getting stuck. >> PIERRE SPREY: It wasn't
exactly the kind of handy thing that you move across the
battlefield at a good clip. And in fact, all the early
Gatling guns were horse drawn, so that certainly limited their
mobility. >> NARRATOR: The Gatling gun was
largely abandoned by 1883, when another American, Hiram Maxim,
invented the first completely automatic weapon.
>> MALCOLM MUIR: He was a man with a very fertile mind.
And in 1881, he went to London. While there, one of his friends
reportedly said to him, "Hiram, why don't you develop a new way
for Europeans to kill each other?
They're always at each other's throats.
You can make a lot of money." >> SPREY: And he kind of said,
"Oh, okay. I'll invent some guns."
And, within a couple of years-- I mean, it took that little
time-- he had invented the machine gun.
>> NARRATOR: The automatic firing system of the Maxim
machine gun consisted of an action, a reaction, and an
action. When a round fired, it produced
a recoil force that loaded the next round in place while
simultaneously ejecting the spent cartridge.
Maxim licensed his design to the British company Vickers, which
quickly produced the Vickers- Maxim machine gun.
Allowed to keep the rights to his invention, Maxim proceeded
to license his weapon to Russia and Germany.
Germany immediately saw the potential for a rapid-fire
weapon, and by 1908 they were mass-producing the Maxim machine
gun under the name <i>Maschinengewehr,</i> or M.G.08.
Unbeknownst to Maxim, he had sold his rapid-fire killing
machine to countries that would soon be enemies in the first
World War. >> CART: This is the Maxim
machine gun. It's the German model, 1908, and
this was<i> the</i> standard machine gun of the German Army in World
War I. This large thing-- that people
at first thought it was the actual barrel-- but this is
actually a water jacket that goes around the barrel.
The barrel gets so hot during the firing, the water cools it
and keeps it from warping. The ammunition would come in
belts of 250 cartridges. It would be steered into the
feed here. And then, cock it like this.
Pull the belt in another time, and cock it again.
Now you're ready to go. Push both thumbs on the
trigger, and you're firing. And if all the conditions are
right, you can fire 500 rounds in a minute.
>> NARRATOR: World War I created an arena in which the Vickers
and M.G.08 were pitted against one another.
And although they were identical in design, the numbers available
at the onset of the war were completely lopsided.
>> SPREY: The most organized and disciplined and clear-thinking
force in the European theater were the Germans.
And they had seen the importance of the machine gun.
They already had 12,500 Maxims. And it took the British forever
to get them organized and flowing at the rate that the
Germans had organized them and produced them.
>> NARRATOR: In September 1914, the German offensive into France
was stopped at the Battle of the Marne.
The Germans, now in a defensive mode, demonstrated the tactical
importance of the Maxim machine gun.
>> MUIR: The homeland is to their rear, and dug in, the
machine gun proves to be the ideal weapon against enemy
attackers. >> SPREY: The role of the
machine gun was to lay down tremendous direct firepower.
That-- until you could learn how to outflank it, and to beat it
by maneuver-- drove everybody into trenches and stagnated the
war. >> CART: A machine gun could
wipe out an entire group of men very quickly.
Thousands and thousands of men in a very short time.
>> NARRATOR: Although field commanders knew the dangers of
facing machine gun fire in the heavily barbed-wired "No Man's
Land," it did little to change their steadfast tactics.
>> CART: The mentality of "stand up and face your enemy and
fight" was still in the minds of commanders during World War I.
>> SPREY: It was madness to think that the infantry were
still the prime way of, of carrying a position simply by
walking into the face of machine guns.
It's exactly the tactics that the British espoused.
>> NARRATOR: In no other battle of the war did the Maxim machine
gun spill more blood than at the Battle of the Somme in July of
1916. >> MUIR: The British commander,
Sir Douglas Haig, calculated that by bombarding the German
positions with enough artillery fire, he could cut the German
defensive wire, force the Germans underground, and that
the British infantry then could charge through the cuts in the
wire and get through the German lines before the day's survivors
could pop up from their shelters underground.
Sir Douglas Haig was wrong. The bombardment did not cut
enough of the wire. The Germans had prepared, in
advance, positions 50 feet or more underground, so that they
could survive this terrific bombardment.
>> NARRATOR: After eight days of constant shelling, British
Commander Douglas Haig sent his troops out of their trenches to
attack the German front. >> CART: The cue to the Germans<i>
was</i> the break when the artillery barrage stopped.
They've been in this war for almost two years already.
They knew what was coming. It was not a hard thing for the
Germans to figure out. >> NARRATOR: Armed and ready,
German machine-gunners mowed down the attacking British
infantry, killing thousands in just the first minutes.
At day's end, 57,000 British soldiers were either wounded or
killed... ...a dark one-day record in
British warfare that still stands today.
For the next four months, the Battle of the Somme raged.
Eventually, the Allies declared victory, but the carnage left
behind amounted to nearly one million British, French and
German soldiers dead... many falling to their deaths
under a hail of bullets from one of the deadliest weapons ever
created: the Maxim machine gun. Since the dawn of organized
warfare, fire has been employed on the battlefield with deadly
results, but in World War II, fire, in the form of incendiary
bombs, reached a new level of lethality by literally
transforming cities into hell on earth.
>> RICHARD FRANK: General Sherman gave us the aphorism,
"War is hell," but it wasn't until decades after his death
that war reached levels of hell that he could not begin to
fathom. >> NARRATOR: In the Second World
War, Air Force commanders had a wide range of specialized bombs
at their disposal. However, if the strategic goal
was to destroy an entire city, the preferred bomb was the
incendiary. >> FRANK: An incendiary bomb
typically is composed of a lot of very small devices, weighing
only a few pounds. They're designed to start a
fire, and more importantly, to start a fire that turns into a
much bigger fire. >> Weapon: Incendiary bomb.
>> NARRATOR: The World War II incendiary bomb resembled a long
stick, filled with fuel, which was weighted down at one end to
provide somewhat accurate delivery.
The bomb was either dropped as a single projectile, or packed
inside a casing, which would break apart before impact,
dispersing hundreds of incendiary sticks in a cluster.
Upon impact, a heat-producing chemical activated the
incendiary fuel. One large bomber could carry
over 3,000 four-pound incendiary sticks, capable of starting
thousands of fires. Under ideal conditions, these
fires would join together and create a firestorm.
In the early months of 1945, Nazi Germany was on the verge of
collapse. Russian troops coming from the
east, coupled with their allies coming from the west, planned to
squeeze Germany into submission. >> FRANK: However, the Germans
have just launched the Ardennes Offensive, which shocked the
socks off of all the Allied leaders.
It was that shock which prompted the change in the bombing
campaigns, particularly the one that led to Dresden.
Britain had two strategic goals in attacking the city of
Dresden, Germany. One was to aid the Russian
invasion by disarming the city's communications.
The second was to destroy German morale, by killing large numbers
of civilians. >> FRANK: The British shifted,
fundamentally, to a policy of what they called area or morale
bombing. As one British writer put it,
the campaign of morale bombing was really a cosmetic term for
"massacre." >> NARRATOR: Winston Churchill's
command to use incendiaries against Germany was carried out
with great success by Royal Air Force Commander Arthur "Bomber"
Harris. >> MUIR: Harris was the true
believer. Harris felt that attacking
German cities would not just inconvenience the Germans, it
would bring them down. >> NARRATOR: On the night of
February 13, 1945, 250 British Lancasters flying at low
altitude attacked Dresden with the intent of creating a
firestorm. >> FRANK: The British really
perfected the recipe for incendiary attack.
They would first send in a small group of planes as pathfinders
to mark the aiming point. Behind those planes came the
main force, which were aircraft loaded with high explosive
bombs which were designed to blow the roofs off of buildings
and otherwise shatter the structure to make them kindling
for the large bundles of incendiaries that followed.
And this worked to perfection in creating large fires.
>> NARRATOR: During the first raid, which lasted 15 minutes,
over 300 tons of thermite incendiaries were dropped on
Dresden. Minutes after the bombardment
stopped, thousands of fires came together to form a massive
firestorm. >> FRANK: That fire thrusts up a
fountain column of incandescent gasses and burning debris, which
spread the fire, but more importantly, it acts like a
bellows. It sucks in air and oxygen into
the fire, at winds of gale force, which frequently will
suck individuals back into the fire.
>> NARRATOR: Temperatures inside the core of the firestorm
reached upwards of 1,500 degrees Celsius.
>> SPREY: You had the most horrific scenes of, you know,
thousands of women, babies, trapped in these infernos, with
these superheated 100-mile-an- hour winds burning them up.
>> NARRATOR: Ten square miles of Dresden were completely
destroyed. The number of people killed is
unknown, but estimates range from 25,000 to 40,000.
As horrific as the burning of Dresden was, it was only a taste
of what was to come. Less than a month later, the
United States began firebombing Japanese cities utilizing a new
incendiary fuel called napalm. >> FRANK: The Army Air Force
realized early in the war that their two incendiary bombs
relied upon either rubber or magnesium, both of which were in
terribly short supply. They came up with a compound of
napthenic and palmitic acids, which were contracted to be
called "napalm," which was mixed with gasoline and produced by
far the most effective incendiary device of World War
II. >> NARRATOR: Napalm burns with
extreme intensity, and its stringy and sticky consistency
allows it to spread more effectively than other
incendiaries. By March of 1945, Curtis LeMay,
in charge of the 21st Bomber Command, concluded that high-
altitude daytime bombing was simply not accurate enough to be
effective against Japanese targets.
>> MUIR: Curtis LeMay directed his crewmen to fly not in the
daytime, but at night. Much of Japanese industry was
cottage industries, scattered out in the cities, and so LeMay
aimed at the cities themselves. Burn the cities down, and you
would destroy Japanese war industry and at the same time,
you might so horrify the Japanese leadership that it
would give up. >> NARRATOR: On March 9, 330 B-
29 bombers took off from the Marianna Islands headed for
Tokyo, Japan. After two hours of the
bombardment, the wooden city of Tokyo was engulfed in a
firestorm. >> FRANK: These fires were so
hot that they would literally ignite the clothing of
individuals as they were fleeing.
What was particularly horrifying was a lot of the women wore what
they called "air-raid turbans" around their heads, and the heat
would ignite those turbans, like igniting the wick on a candle,
to start consuming them with flame.
>> NARRATOR: The aftermath of the incendiary bombings on the
evenings of March 9 and 10 led to an estimated 100,000 Japanese
killed. >> MUIR: The night raid against
Tokyo was the most devastating single raid ever carried out by
aircraft, in any war, to include the nuclear bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. >> FRANK: Once the success of
that campaign became clear, the Army Air Force then simply got
out a list of the 180 largest Japanese cities and began
firebombing every single city on that list to produce an end to
the war. >> NARRATOR: At the end of the
firebombing campaign, 64 Japanese cities and nearly 200
square miles were burned to the ground.
The final death toll was estimated at 200,000.
Technological advancements in precision-guided missiles
eventually put an end to incendiary carpet-bombing.
But the legacy of the Allied firebombing campaigns against
Germany and Japan-- and the tremendous loss of life
associated with them-- firmly established the incendiary bomb
as one of the deadliest weapons ever used in battle.
In World War II, the United States and Japan engaged in a
series of carrier battles that would play a crucial role in
deciding the battle for the Pacific.
With the outcome in doubt, the U.S. Navy unleashed a secret
weapon called the "VT fuze," which devastated Japanese
aircraft with unmatched lethality.
>> FRANK: If you were making a list of<i> the</i> most important
technological breakthroughs that came out of World War II, just
below the atomic bomb and radar in general, you would list the
VT fuze, which absolutely transformed the effectiveness of
antiaircraft fire. >> NARRATOR: Before the U.S.
became involved in the Second World War, the Navy realized
that a revolutionary advance in antiaircraft fuses would be
necessary to combat the growing effectiveness of the airplane.
>> MUIR: To shoot down an airplane required an average of
2,400 rounds of ammunition early in the war.
>> FRANK: Hitting an aircraft moving at high speed in three
dimensions with a gun on a ship is one of the most
difficult feats in warfare. There's simply too many
variables to be accurately predicted.
>> NARRATOR: The difficulty in shooting down enemy aircraft was
largely due to the inadequacies associated with antiaircraft
fuses. A fuse is either a mechanical
or electronic detonating device designed to set off the bursting
charge of a projectile, bomb, or torpedo.
Although all fuses serve the same function, the triggering
mechanism varies. >> MUIR: Two different types of
fuses were available to the major navies.
One type of fuse was the contact fuse.
That is, the projectile actually had to hit the aircraft for the
fuse to detonate the projectile. The chances of hitting an
aircraft were slender. A better fuse was a fuse
activated by time. The gunners would set the fuse
as the projectile was loaded into the gun.
The fuse would detonate after a predetermined time.
If your "guesstimate" is off by even a couple of seconds, the
projectile will be hopelessly out of range of the aircraft.
>> NARRATOR: The remedy was to create a fuse that used a high-
frequency signal to detonate within proximity of the target.
Weapon: Proximity fuse. >> NARRATOR: The task of finding
a high-frequency mechanism small enough to fit on an artillery
shell and durable enough to withstand the 20,000 G-forces
associated with being shot out of a gun were believed to be too
difficult to overcome. But at the Applied Physics
Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, physicist Merle Tuve
and a group of scientists, engineers, and ham radio experts
embraced the challenge. >> RALPH BALDWIN: Merle was a
genius. He was a rough, tough, slightly
profane individual. I hated the man, but hate and
love are very close. >> NARRATOR: Early in the
program, Tuve determined that using radio frequencies would be
the most practical way to create an effective proximity fuse.
A radio proximity fuse works by emitting radio frequencies from
an oscillator, which bounce off the reflective surface of an
object, such as an enemy aircraft.
The reflected pulse then returns amplified, triggering the fuse
detonator and exploding the projectile.
If detonation occurs close enough to the target, fragments
from the exploding shell will destroy it.
>> TOM SHEPPARD: The problems that were faced in the
development of a proximity fuse were, first, to choose the
mechanism, the type of fuse. We did not have transistors, and
therefore were dependent upon vacuum tubes.
The vacuum tubes were not intended for this class of
environment. However, early experimentation
found that there was at least the potential for making the
commercial sub-miniature vacuum tubes withstand that
environment. >> NARRATOR: In 1941, miniature
commercial vacuum tubes engineered by Sylvania and
others were sent to the Applied Physics Laboratory.
There, they were incorporated into the first test fuses named
the Mark 32 VT Fuze. >> SHEPPARD: Every day, we would
build perhaps 30 fuse units that would be driven to a test field
and fired the following day. Meanwhile, we would be building
another group of fuses according to a new prescription.
>> NARRATOR: Under a veil of secrecy, the Applied Physics
Laboratory worked on perfecting the radio proximity fuse for the
next 18 months. In January 1942, the VT fuze
reached a success rate of 50% when within proximity of its
target. Deemed more effective than the
saturation shelling needed for contact and time fuses, the U.S.
Ordnance Committee fully endorsed the VT fuze project.
Mass production began immediately.
>> BALDWIN: We didn't work eight-hour days.
We worked whatever the job called for.
On one occasion I worked for 48 hours straight.
And everybody else desperately wanted to contribute toward the
winning of that war. The pressures were huge.
>> NARRATOR: In January of 1943, a naval antiaircraft gun
equipped with the first batch of proximity-fused projectiles shot
down an attacking Japanese plane.
One target, one kill. The proximity fuse had arrived.
>> MUIR: Earlier, it took 2,400 shells to bring down an
aircraft. The number now was 400.
So you have a six-fold increase in antiaircraft effectiveness
with this fuse. >> NARRATOR: Proximity fuses
were quickly sent to the Naval fleet in the Pacific.
In the battle for the Philippine Sea, the fuse decimated Japanese
aircraft. >> BALDWIN: Every one of the
American ships was loaded with radio proximity fuses.
They shot down Japanese planes by the hundreds.
395 planes were lost by the Japanese, which was 92% of the
planes they brought to the event.
The battle was<i> the</i> culminating battle of the Pacific.
>> NARRATOR: But concerns about America's secret weapon falling
into enemy hands led the Navy to disallow its use over land until
December of 1944. At the Battle of the Bulge, VT-
fuzed artillery shells laid waste to the Germans.
>> BALDWIN: The first time it was used, it stopped a German
push about 50 miles into the Bulge.
And about 400 Germans were killed.
>> SHEPPARD: Projectiles would come in, and they would burst at
a relatively uniform height, in synchronization, and you'd have
this immense barrage of exploding shells just above the
ground, spraying a hail of shrapnel that was deadly.
>> NARRATOR: The lethal impact of America's secret weapon was
perhaps summed up best by a letter from General George S.
Patton, who wrote: "The new shell with the funny fuse is
devastating... I think that when all armies get
this shell, we will have to devise some new method of
warfare." Patton's formal testimony
officially solidified the VT fuze as one of World War II's
deadliest weapons. The violent century that gave
rise to the deadliest weapons the world has ever seen has also
left behind a surplus of lesser weapons available on the black
market that may prove to be just as deadly.
>> MATT SCHROEDER: Small arms and light weapons take the lives
of hundreds of thousands of people each year.
In ordinary crime, and also in conflict zones, they perpetuate
conflict. There's 630 million of these
weapons in circulation today. Now that's in government
stockpiles as well as on the black market.
>> NARRATOR: In 1993, Somalian insurgents demonstrated what a
well-funded and well-armed militia is capable of achieving.
>> SCHROEDER: Somali militiamen, using<i> only</i> small
arms and light weapons, forced the United States and its
billion dollars worth of sophisticated military
technology from Somalia. The decisive weapon?
The rocket-propelled grenade. 40-year-old Soviet military
technology that can be acquired on the black market often for
less than $1,000. >> NARRATOR: The proliferation
of the small-arms black market has paved the way for well-
funded terrorist groups and rogue nations to kill
indiscriminately and without consequence.
But what will the consequences be if they get access to the
world's deadliest weapon? >> OELRICH: If uranium
enrichment becomes very easy, lots of countries can build
nuclear weapons. And what will the world look
like when anybody can kill everybody?
>> NARRATOR: The result may be an even deadlier world, where
nuclear weapons may no longer deter, and all it takes to kill
hundreds of thousands is a cause and currency.<font color="#FFFF00"> Captioning sponsored by
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by<font color="#00FFFF">
Media Access Group at WGBH</font> access.wgbh.org
