Ukraine-Russia conflict: What is a vacuum bomb and what takes place if Russia uses it?

 Ukraine-Russia conflict: What is a vacuum bomb and what takes place if Russia uses it?

While war tension between Russia and Ukraine is escalating, the Human Rights Watch and Ukraine ambassador to the United States have accused Russia of using vacuum and cluster bombs — weapons condemned by numerous human rights groups including Amnesty International.

According to a file by news business enterprise Reuters, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both said that Russian forces regarded to have used widely banned cluster munitions, with Amnesty accusing them of attacking a preschool in northeastern Ukraine where harmless civilians were taking shelter.

Oksana Markarova, Ukraine Ambassador to the United States, said after assembly with the members of the US congress, “they used the vacuum bomb today. The devastation that Russia is trying to inflict on Ukraine is large.”

What is a Vacuum bomb?

Also recognized as ‘Thermobaric’, is a weapon that sucks in oxygen from the surroundings and then generates high-temperature explosions. This weapon can produce an explosion of a longer duration than any different traditional explosive. Also, it has the deadly functionality to vapourise human bodies.

It is a two-stage munition — the first charge distributes aerosols which are made up of tiny material of carbon-based fuel, and the 2nd charge ignites creating a shock wave via sucking oxygen and making a vacuum around its target.

According to several media reports, this weapon is known as ‘Father of all bombs’ because these bombs are capable of exploding with the electricity of 44 tonnes of trinitrotoluene (TNT). So basically, if it emits 44 tonnes of TNT of energy, an place of 300 metres and everything inside it can be burnt to ashes.

Reports advocate that Russia had developed this bomb weapon in 2007, which was four years after the United States created a comparable weapon — known as ‘Mother of all bombs’.

What if Russia uses this weapon?

The use of such bombs is prohibited or banned in any army conflict. However, if a country uses any sort of chemical and biological weapons in a war, that country will be held accountable for war crimes and will be prosecuted in the International Court of Law, according to the Geneva Convention — which is a aggregate of four treaties, and three additional protocols, hooked up in in 1928 after the first world war to bring global legal standards for humanitarian cure in war.