The Russian FOAB is purportedly 400% more powerful than our American MOAB of similar size. Why can’t we keep up?
The Russians have a history of building giant and impressive but impractical weapons. The US tends to place more usefulness on actual battlefield practicality.
Edit: I don’t mean in general, across all military equipmnt. I just mean Russia tends to do more PR dickwaving Tsar Bomba type stuff.
One answer that I’ve heard is that the Russian missile delivery system was much less accurate than the American missile technology of the time. In order to take out their tactical targets, the Russians would need a comparatively larger yield so that they could miss by a little bit and still hit their target. The Americans could afford to use smaller bombs and guide them closer to the target and so had less of a need for the humongous yields.
The FOAB is actually smaller than the MOAB plus we’ve stolen their bomb guidance fin technology. Are we really all that military tech wise anymore compared to other modern industrialized countries?
Yeah, the Russians one upped us on lots of things. The largest submarine, the biggest nuclear bomb, and other things were all a response to what we built.
They use different technology. The MOAB is a casing filled with a powerful but unremarkable detonating explosive. The FOAB is thermobaric - it uses a smaller charge to distribute a cloud of fuel particles (probably aluminium powder) to create an explosive cloud, somewhat like a fuel-air explosive. You get a lot of energy from a small package but you need a big open space to light it off in.
Arms races are amazingly dumb in any event, but there’s no way you’re going to stay “ahead” of your competitors in every area, because of secrecy and differences in philosophy.
I thought this thread was going to be about Russian and English linguistic traditions…
astro, did you read your own link?
Weapons are designed to be used. The goal is a better weapon. Bigness is not necessarily the same thing.
Military history is littered with big weapons that either never left the test grounds (which is also true of the MOAB) or failed in battle.
I think you’re asking the wrong question. A better question would be: is this as stupid as it sounds?
Agreed. In fact, if I may Godwinize the thread - you do know who else was obsessed with superweapons, right? Nazi Germany built the first cruise missile, first ballistic missile, some remarkably long-ranged artillery pieces, the finest submarines the world had seen at that time, and invented the jet fighter. None of them saved their swastika-clad asses.
The thing that makes the American military machine so incredibly, irresistably powerful isn’t any individual gun design, or tank, or artillery piece. More than anything else, it is our mastery of logistics that makes us a power to be reckoned with anywhere we wish to be so. Our transports, our supply-basing arrangements, and so on allow us to field powerful fighting forces all over the world on short notice - no one else can do it nearly as well as us.
Let the Russians play with their superbombs, if it makes them feel better about themselves. We can drop our non-super-bombs almost anywhere it suits us to do so - and the Russians can’t. 
Russia never lies about this kind of thing. 
This kind of thing in particular? Rarely, and for good reason. To an extent, all weapons development is about deterrence, not just nukes. You want other nations to see that you have the capacity to bloody their noses if they try anything - so they shouldn’t do that.
Deterrence is only workable if you’re trustworthy - you want the other guy to believe you when you say “I have a city-busting nuke”, and you also want him to believe you when you say “I have a bunker-busting conventional bomb” or “I have a missile that’ll cut through your tanks like a hot knife through butter.”
Not all regimes are that smart, of course - it now seems that Iraq played the game of “maybe we’ve got WMD, maybe we don’t” for far too long. But Russia has a long tradition of being reasonably honest when it describes a new weapon. (Though they’re sometimes exagerrated the numbers of their weapons.)
And that Sputnik thing; let’s not forget that one.
Ahem. Monkey model.
Actually, their superior military technology served them excedingly well. Politics, overconfidence and stupidity killed the cat in that one. (What would have happened in Europe sans Operation Barbarossa is of course an open and endless question, but it would at least have looked significantly different.)
ETA: Regarding the OP, Russia has always been in an one-up competition with the US. While formally closed when the Soviet Union closed, it’s obviously still going strong. The benefit with things like the FOAB is that prototypes are relatively simple and inexpensive to supersize and throw out to a camera crew. It’s an easy and cheap way to build confidence in the military, back home. And keep in mind that the US isn’t the only country in the world - something like the FOAB is a lot scarier to a country that isn’t half the globe away. If Russia was to get in a sudden fistfight with, say, Finland, they’d get the necessary air superiority to deploy that bomb wherever they’d like in a matter of days.
Yeah, I was going to post that the usual Americanism would be “the granddaddy of all bombs”. I guess I just did 
Not true. They developed all kinds of things, but were rarely able to put their technologies into rpactical effect. In fact, it severely hurt them in many areas by diverting critical resources in very bad ways. It hurt their tank corp, their air corp, and pretty much everything related to them. Sure, they produced a few really nice items, but they weren’t able to use their technological advantage effectively. When they were riding high, their critical advantage was not “superior” technology (there is no such thign) but ratehr that they were able to use their technology tactically and strategically to exploit their opponents’ weaknesses.
This is exactly what we do today. To contradtoct another poster, logistics is NOT the critical advantage of the U.S., though it is an important pillar of all military success. Rather, control over information is what gives us our armed might. We know where the enemy is at all times, and therefore know exactly what forces to hit him with to defeat him. Furthermore, that information means that we work expotentially more effectively the more of our troops we have available. That is, one American tank or soldier might be equal, or even inferior* to the enemy, but the more we have working in tandem the more dangerous we become. This is why American forces routinely achieve kill ratios above 10 to 1, or sometimes avoid casualties altogether, even against larger enemy forces.
*I doubt very much this is the case commonly, though. A few countries have a better tank for their conditions or train their soldiers even harder than we, but overall it’s not an issue.
It’s probably apochryphal, but I read of a Luftwaffe pilot captured after D-day who was grumbling. “Your aircraft are terrible! Why, it takes ten of yours to equal one of ours! Ten! But you always have eleven.”
Nazi Type VII and IX boats were decidedly inferior to US fleet boats through most of the war. Late in the war the experimental Type XXI boats came out, plagued by quality problems, and only two went on patrol and neither sank anything…and they still launched fewer torpedoes in a full salvo than an American fleet boat.
The Walther hydrogen peroxide boats were experimental and did not participate in the war except for being scuttled.
“Most exotic technology” I would grant you, “finest” is subjective (and by some measures not true, as in the example of torpedo salvo size).
True enough, though I doubt the Russians would enjoy the bit where they actually send in ground troops. That went badly last time they tried it.
I’d say that it’s probably both logistics and information that let us kick military ass. Logistics gives us our strategic edge, while our information resources give us (broadly speaking) a formidable tactical edge.
Concur.
On-topic:
Well, little astro, when a mommy bomb and a daddy bomb love each other very much, there’s something that happens…