Delivering the Blast: Fire, Bombs, Rockets and Loitering Munitions from the Flamethrower to the Warmate

The flamethrower projects a controllable jet of fire. The Byzantine Empire used a primitive form in the 7th century, but its modern military use began when Germany used it against French troops outside Verdun on 26 February 1915, and its use grew greatly in the Second World War.

Developed by engineer Max Kramer from 1938, the Fritz X was a German guided anti-ship glide bomb, one of the first precision-guided weapons used in combat. The Luftwaffe III Gruppe of Kampfgeschwader 100 used it against Allied shipping in 1943 and 1944, and roughly 1,400 were produced.

Tallboy was an earthquake bomb designed by the British engineer Barnes Wallis for use against fortified structures that ordinary bombing could not break. It was in service from 8 June 1944 to 25 April 1945 and was dropped only by modified Avro Lancasters of Nos. 9 and 617 Squadrons.

Little Boy was the atomic bomb built by the Manhattan Project and dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 by the B-29 Enola Gay, the first nuclear weapon used in war, with an estimated yield of about 15 kilotons of TNT. At least five were completed by 1950 and all were retired by November 1950.

The BM-21 Grad is a self-propelled 122 mm multiple rocket launcher that entered Soviet Army service in 1963. It was first used in combat in March 1969 during the Sino-Soviet border conflict and has since been used widely by many armed forces.

The M72 LAW is a man-portable, disposable, unguided 66 mm anti-tank weapon adopted by the US Army and Marine Corps in early 1963. It replaced the M31 HEAT rifle grenade and the M20A1 Super Bazooka as the infantryman's main anti-tank weapon, and the US Air Force later adopted it for airbase defense.

The BLU-82, nicknamed the Daisy Cutter, was a 15,000-pound conventional bomb first dropped in action on 22 March 1970 north of Long Tieng, Laos. It was used in Vietnam to clear forest into helicopter landing zones, saw service in the 1991 Gulf War and in Afghanistan from 2001, and the last examples were retired in 2008.

The LAU-127 is not a weapon that explodes but the rail that lets one be fired. Built by Marvin Engineering of Inglewood, California, it lets the F/A-18 Hornet carry the AIM-120 AMRAAM and the L, M and X models of the AIM-9 Sidewinder, and it links each missile to the aircraft's weapon systems. Variants also serve on the F-15, F-16 and Gripen.

The Affordable Weapon System was a US Navy program to build a low-cost, off-the-shelf cruise missile launched from a self-contained unit inside a standard shipping container. Contractors included Titan, BAE Systems and later MBDA, with significant contracts awarded between 2002 and 2008, and BAE pursued turning existing Hydra rockets into precision-guided munitions.

The Warmate is a Polish loitering munition from WB Group that entered initial production in 2016. It circles over a target area and then dives onto the chosen target, combining the roles of a reconnaissance drone and a precision weapon.