[piytar]

Ah, now I get your point. Gotcha.

[muawiyah]

Russians tend not to develop weapons systems without some objective in mind ~ even a stupid objective. Recall their enormously large tanks ~ they could not have invaded Western Europe with them since they'd sunk into the ground in Poland before they got very far. So, what was their purpose?

I think it was little more than the very stupid idea of looking good on the May Day parade ~ the "newsies" ate it up anyway.

Here they've developed something just a bit bigger than a MOAB for some reason ~ sucking oxygen out of a qanat system (and thereby destroying its bio or chemical contents) could be a very good reason, which means the real question is why did they make their qanat buster bigger.

No doubt the Russians have found some ancient "qanat" somewhere in their territory and have computed what they need to do the job.