Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1150145
of vehicles and their crews on an WMD. For instance – the inside of the turret and the hull of the T-64 (Object 432) was lined with 10 to 50 mm thick anti-radiation lining, with the average thickness being approx. 40 mm. In addition, the tank featured a fan-powered filtering system main- taining a overpressure inside the vehicle (although engaging in combat in the atomic regime meant that the crew compartment would become depressurized, which required taking advantage of personal protection equipment). The application of all those measures meant that the im- pact of ionizing radiation on the vehicle crew was 15 times lower in the case of exposure to an explosion of the yield of 30 kT at a distance of 900–1,000 m away from the site of explosion so that the dose of 200 R (Roentgen, which equals 20 millisievert, i.e. 2 Sv – Sieviert) is not ex- ceeded as it would lead to a chronic and acute radiation sickness (ARS). If operations were carried out in a nuclear fallout zone, the means of pro- tection featured in the T-64A ensured an 18-times decrease of radiation impact on the crew, which made it possible for the crew to operate for 12 hours (with the maximum dose exposed to being 200 R) in an area contaminated with fallout of the radiation level of 300 R. The above pro- tective measures featured in the T-64 were considered of greater value in combat applications than the strength of its armor. So what does the above mean in the context of the "poorly" protected tank sides referred to earlier? Well, to make it easier to imagine – it's rather hard to fight tanks using anti-tank weapons when you're an infantryman dying of ARS. To put it in a nutshell, Soviets assumed that infantry units would be rather little able to attack tank hull sides effectively on an NBC battlefield if they are neutralized either by tactical nukes explosions or by increased radi- ation occurring right after nuclear weapons are used on the battlefield – and this describes the conditions in which NATO's positions were to be broken through. Regardless of how terrible the above vision may look like from today's perspective, it was the real point of view of Russians at the time, and it served as the ground for the design of the protection mea- sures featured in the "great trio" of Soviet tanks. This viewpoint started changing only in the 1980s, when the NBC battlefield concept was not a dogma anymore, and vehicles started benefiting from more comprehen- sive protection features. However, Germans realized that they needed to find a proper successor to the PzF 44 already in the mid-1970s. Immediately after the German army was revived, the American Bazooka – the bedrock for the Panzerschreck, improved as necessary – became the lowest-tier anti-tank weapon. As the weapon featured many flaws and since Germans were still able to use a design from 1945, it was not long before a domestic solution saw the light of day – it was named the PzF 44 2A1 (unofficially referred to also as the Panzerfaust 2). The weapon was constructed in the 1950s by two companies – Dynamit No- bel, who designed the rocket-propelled shaped charge grenade, and H&K, who designed its 44 mm launcher. The new weapon was put into oper- ation in 1963 and used until the end of the Cold War. Initially, it featured a rather specific (and ill-conceived) mechanism of launching shaped charge grenades. Inside the rear grip (with the trigger mechanism) there was a box magazine holding cartridges. After a grenade was loaded, it was necessary to use the sliding-rotating bolt-action to load a cartridge, which alsor tensed the spring of the firing pin. After the butt was pressed LAND FORCES