T-12 shell at the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Aberdeen, Maryland.

The T-12 demolition bomb was a weapon produced by the United States designed to create an "earthquake effect." It achieved this by having an extremely thick nose section, which was supposed to penetrate deeply into the earth (earth penetrating weapons are often referred to as EPW). It was designed to attack targets invulnerable to conventional "soft" bombs, such as bunkers and viaducts. Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (480x1104, 220 KB)T-12 shell at U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Aberdeen, MD. I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. ... Image File history File linksMetadata Download high resolution version (480x1104, 220 KB)T-12 shell at U.S. Army Ordnance Museum, Aberdeen, MD. I, the creator of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. ... Aberdeen Proving Ground is a United States Army proving ground located in Harford County, Maryland at Aberdeen, Maryland. ... Map Political Statistics Incorporated 1892 County Harford County Mayor Doug Wilson Geographic Statistics Area  - Total  - Land  - Water 16. ... Bunkers in Albania A bunker is a defensive military fortification. ... Torontos Bloor Street Viaduct bridges the Don valley; road traffic uses the upper deck, rail traffic uses the lower deck. ...

The T-12 was a further development of the concept initiated with the United Kingdom's Tallboy and Grand Slam weapons: a hardened, highly aerodynamic bomb of the greatest possible weight designed to be dropped from the highest possible altitude in order to destroy hardened targets. The T-12 weighed 44,000 lb (20 tonnes), which was twice the size of the US previous largest bomb, the American built version of the British Grand Slam, the Bomb, GP, 22,000-lb, M110 (T-14). Only one plane, the Convair B-36 Peacemaker could actually carry the t-12 weapon at the time when it was designed. The T-12 was not a simple scale up of the M110 but incorporated modifications based on testing and calculations. Tallboy bomb The Tallboy was a bomb developed by Barnes Wallis and brought into operation by the British in 1944. ... A British 22,000 lb Grand Slam bomb The Grand Slam (Earthquake) bomb was a very large bomb developed by the British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis in late 1944. ... The Convair (Consolidated Vultee) B-36 was a strategic bomber operated by the United States Air Force, the first to have truly intercontinental range. ...

It is also important to clarify a further nickname imparted to this weapon — the Grand Slam bomb, which more correctly refers to the T-12's 22,000 lb (10,000 kg) predecessor. Additionally, "Grand Slam" was the name of a project to modify B-36 bombers to carry nuclear bombs, creating further confusion.

Weapons of comparable size to the T-12, such as the BLU-82 and Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs, remain in the US inventory of superbombs, but their utility is limited outside the realm of terror weapons and demolition. They are not hardened and so lack the hard target destruction capability of the T-12 and its cousins. Precision-guided munitions (or "smart bombs") have mostly removed the need for gigantic charges in air-dropped bombs. The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ... The Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb (MOAB) (also known as the Mother Of All Bombs) is a large-yield conventional air-to-surface bomb developed by the United States military, touted as the most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever designed. ... BOLT-117 laser guided bomb Precision-guided munitions (smart munitions or smart bombs) are self-guiding weapons intended to maximize damage to the target while minimizing collateral damage. Because the damage effects of an explosive weapon scale as a power law with distance, quite modest improvements in accuracy (and hence...

See also

• Nuclear bunker buster
• Grand Slam bomb
• MOAB
• BLU-82

Subsidence craters left over after underground nuclear (test) explosions Bunker-busting nuclear weapons are a type of nuclear weapon which are designed to penetrate into soil, rock or concrete to deliver a nuclear warhead. ... A British 22,000 lb Grand Slam bomb The Grand Slam (Earthquake) bomb was a very large bomb developed by the British aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis in late 1944. ... Moab (מוֹאָב, Standard Hebrew Moʾav, Tiberian Hebrew Môʾāḇ Greek Μωάβ; Assyrian Muaba, Maba, Maab; Egyptian Muab) is the historical name for a mountainous strip of land in modern-day Jordan running along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. ... The factual accuracy of this article is disputed. ...

External links

• Very Heavy Conventional Aerial Bombs