The new 'super-weapon', which the British soldiers in Afghanistan are being supplied with, uses technology based on the "thermobaric" principle. The principle uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs. The "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology that is seen in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny. These deadly weapons are effective because they first diffuse a gas or chemical agent, which ignites in the second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave; thus ensuring that everyone's dead. According to Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, the deployment of the weapons was not announced to Parliament.
According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, "The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents."