Russo-Ukrainian War: Russia unleashes the TOS-1A

Fourteen months into the Russo-Ukrainian War, Russia remains intriguingly parsimonious in deploying its world-class heavy artillery. This might change. On April 3 Russian media made much ado of a ceremony celebrating the transfer of TOS-1As to Airborne Forces. Hitherto TOS-1As were exclusively in the Radiological-Biological-Chemical Forces’ toolkit. Days later a TOS-1A struck Bakhmut.

“Toss-One-Alpha” to NATO, “Sunshine” to Russians, the TOS-1A is an armoured, self-propelled, ground-assault, multiple-launch-rocket-system firing unusually heavy, unusually short-range, unguided rockets with thermobaric warheads.

Thermobaric explosions have two stages. The first disperses a volatile cloud. The second ignites this cloud. Thermobarics go by misnomers like “flamethrowers” and “vacuum bombs.” Some are called “boiling liquid expanding vapour explosives” (BLEVE). Most are best described as “fuel-air explosives” (FAE) with “metal augmented charges” (MAC), as in the USAF’s MAC-Hellfire missile. Russians prefer: “metallized volumetric explosives.”