Been longing for that Cold War of ours to heat up? Not content to just play World in Conflict? Then boy, do I and scotsman.com have good news for you!

RUSSIA has tested the world’s most powerful “vacuum bomb”, which unleashes a destructive shockwave with the power of a nuclear blast, the military said, dubbing it the “father of all bombs”.

And yes, that is a direct diss to America’s own Mother Of All Bombs. Probably also a diss to us that they tested the bomb on Sept. 11, but let’s not get into that right now.

“Test results of the new airborne weapon have shown that its efficiency and power is commensurate with a nuclear weapon,” Alexander Rukshin, Russia’s deputy armed forces chief of staff, told Russia’s state ORT First Channel television.

The channel showed a Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber dropping the bomb over a testing ground. A large explosion followed. Pictures showed what looked like a flattened multi-storey block of flats surrounded by scorched soil and boulders.

OK, that’s horrible. Yet another weapon of mass destruction. But here’s the good part!

Known as a vacuum bomb, it uses a fuel-air explosive and can create overpressures equal to an atomic bomb, said Alexander Rukshin, deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

“It is environmentally friendly, compared to a nuclear bomb, and it will enable us to ensure national security and at the same time stand up to international terrorism in any part of the globe and in any situation,” he said.

That’s right folks. We Got us a Green Bomb. All the death and catastrophe of a nuclear device, with none of the radiation! So maybe after we all kill ourselves in WW III, there will be more than just cockroaches left over to inherit the earth.

But according to the Father’s Wikipedia entry, the bomb may not be the best bang for Russia’s buck:

Although its effect has been compared to that of a nuclear weapon, it amounts to only about 0.3% (three-tenths of a percent) of the power of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima: the equivalent of around 44 tons of TNT, whereas the Hiroshima blast was equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT while Tsar Bomba, the most powerful explosive device deployed was equivalent to 50,000,000 tons of TNT. The M-388 Davy Crockett, one of the smallest nuclear devices ever deployed, has a selectable lower yield equivalent to 20 tons of TNT, though that energy is released mostly as radiation rather than a blast wave.

So wait. The Vacuum Bomb…. sucks?