Original subtitles

(dramatic music)

Weapons have existed as long as human kind.

For millennia, they have determined

the destiny of generations.

Weapons bring suffering and death.

They show what humans can inflict upon other humans.

But they're also intended to keep the peace

and pave new ways for technology.

When it comes to developing destructive weapons,

the innovativeness of mankind seems to know no limits.

Our international experts reveal

the secrets of weapons technology.

The tank: firepower and speed.

It's like a tight little oven.

The hand grenade turns trench warfare

into a nightmare.

Pull the pin, and we're ready to go.

The first machine gun, the Maxim.

It changed the world of firearms and warfare forever.

Our first weapon shows how killing

became a mechanized process

during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Firearms were introduced in the Middle Ages,

and ever since, the military has kept trying

to shoot faster and more effectively.

The more bullets that hit the enemy on the battlefield,

the more likely you are to win.

But there is one problem.

Reloading the weapons in cumbersome.

In 1866, Hiram Maxim, an American engineer,

tries out a rifle.

It is tedious to have to reload after every shot,

and his shoulder aches from the hard recoil of the weapon.

Maxim, who is actually an electrical

engineering specialist, has an idea.

Could the energy from the recoil be used to reload?

In 1881, he travels to Europe,

where supposedly a friend gave him

a crucial piece of advice.

(foreign language)

And his friend tells him,

"Do you know how you could make some real money?"

And Hiram maxim says, "How?"

And Maxim's friend says, "Invent a weapons system

"that will allow Europeans to kill each other faster."

And unfortunately, Maxim takes this advice.

At that moment, Europe is at peace.

But it seems like only a matter of time

before the next great war breaks out.

Three years later, Maxim debuts his new weapon.

As long as the trigger remains depressed,

the Maxim gun fires without stopping,

without almost any recoil,

since that force is used for the reloading process.

We want to test how this automatic weapon really works.

Karen Machnau is a weapons expert

from Phoenix, Arizona in the U.S.

On the shooting range, she shows us

an original Maxim gun in action.

This gun was also known as the grim reaper,

and the devil's paintbrush.

It changed the world of firearms and warfare forever.

A special component of the weapon

is the water-cooled barrel.

You've got the water jacket.

We have an area that you could unscrew

to put the water inside the gun.

It held about four liters of water.

When the barrel get very hot,

which it does with sustained fire,

that water would boil, steam would come up,

condense through the steam tube, and come out through

the front part of the gun here where we have a hole.

So this would keep the gun cool.

Karen wants to put the machine gun to the test,

using a historical example from 1908.

Her target: 10 paint cans.

Can she hit them all in 10 seconds?

Okay, I'm ready to fire.

(rapid gunfire)

(dramatic music)

In just 10 seconds,

Karen fired around 100 shots.

But how does the weapon really work?

The key principle behind the mechanism:

the recoil slides a carriage,

which ejects the empty cartridge case downwards,

while at the same time putting

a new cartridge into position.

As long as he barrel stays cool

and the shooter keeps the trigger depressed,

the former nuisance of the recoil

now provides the momentum for automatic reloading.

Hiram Maxim has created the first automatic machine gun.

A cartridge belt with 250 rounds of ammunition

is attached to the heavy weapon.

And with belt changes, it is possible to shoot

up to 600 shots per minute.

Another interesting component about the gun

is that it had a rate of fire

of about 892 meters per second,

quite a devastating weapon.

It didn't involve a crank mechanism;

it was fully automatic.

And again, that's what makes this gun

so completely devastating, and so revolutionary,

and so far ahead of its time.

As an advertising demo,

Maxim uses bullets to cut down a tree,

as seen here in 1890, accompanied by Chinese emissaries.

But is this photo evidence trustworthy?

To check it out, we'll begin our next experiment.

An assistant buries a tree trunk in the ground.

And I'm not sure how long it's gonna take

to actually cut this tree down, so let's see what happens.

(rapid gunfire)

Karen Machnau fires away

at the tree trunk with the Maxim gun.

The mechanism jams, something that happened

in isolated incidents in the past,

and happens to the historical weapon even more now,

after 100 years of operation.

It's not going back.

This is what happens with 100-year-old pieces of equipment.

Right, but let's go an take a look at what it did do.

What kind of damage

did the Maxim gun do to the tree trunk?

Well, if you come back here,

it's actually pretty impressive.

You can see just how much it's cleared out

the back of the tree.

But round here there's still a ways to go.

So, had we been successful, this would have gone down,

but old piece of equipment, unfortunately.

Would have been fun to see this happen.

Didn't work out this time.

Our conclusion: the Maxim gun

would actually have been able to penetrate

and destroy a tree trunk.

And the weapon also convinces the British military.

So it took that kind of fire into new spaces

and became a key tool in the late 19th century

in the pacification of areas outside western Europe.

Omdurman, Sudan, 1898,

one of the first missions to use the Maxim gun in combat.

Followers of the Islamic Mahdi movement

rebel against Egyptian foreign rule.

When they meet on the Nile,

the Mahdists far outnumber the Egyptian British army.

But the British also have 20 new Maxim machine guns.

The bloody toll of the battle:

48 dead on the British-Egyptian side,

and an estimated 10,000 Mahdi fighters are killed.

In the summer of 1914, World War I breaks out.

The machine gun gives those on the defensive front

a huge advantage over their attackers during combat.

It is man-portable.

If you separate the barrel and the firing mechanism

from the mounting and the ammunition,

you can carry it, one mount at a time.

The machine gung becomes

standard issue equipment for every European army.

In the First World War, everybody has Maxim guns.

The German, Russian, Australian, and British Maxim gun

are all based on the same patents.

They all look essentially the same,

and they all do the same job in the same way.

And Hiram Maxim and his company got the patent for that,

and they took royalties on every single one of them.

So they made a fortune out of everybody else

having Maxim guns.

With a machine gun,

a single soldier can kill hundreds of the enemy

with just one finger on the trigger.

The new weapons of World War I also bring with them

unimaginable psychological stress.

What does it mean to constantly look death in the eye?

And what is triggered by killing dozens

or even hundreds of other men?

In war, one question has always pushed man to his limits.

If commanded, will I be capable of killing?

Evolution has turned us into social beings

with deep-rooted inhibitions when it comes to killing.

And that's a problem for the military.

Studies show that many soldiers are afraid to kill

even when they themselves are in danger.

Many men go through battle without firing their weapons

effectively, some without firing them at all.

This has been the case for as long as men have had

the choice of whether to fire their weapons or not.

One soldier does not equal one result.

You need to know the soldier

before you know what he's going to do.

To tackle this issue, training for new recruits

includes a strong psychological component.

Repetitive drills are designed

to overcome fears and inhibitions.

Don't think about it; just shoot.

It's about immersing people within that training

to respond automatically to a situation

to not have that hesitation,

which is the frontal part of our brain rationalizing,

saying, "This is not a good thing to do.

"I'm not supposed to be doing this."

If you can make that automatic,

if you make that almost an animal reaction:

"This occurs, I respond in this way."

But even when pulling the trigger

becomes automatic, killing takes its toll on soldiers,

including those apparently unharmed.

In World War I, doctors diagnose the symptoms of shell shock

as a merely physical reaction

to the noises of constant fire.

At the time, it is thought that loud sounds

trigger minor concussions.

Today, it is clear that war

can cause serious mental disorders.

After the Second World War, an entire generation deals

with the psychological consequences of their experiences.

After World War II, we had men

who didn't know what was happening to them.

The fell to pieces if they survived the war and came home.

Their families suffered, their relationships suffered,

their health suffered, and it was not recognized.

And if they showed weakness, they were considered weak,

so people kept it within themselves.

Over decades, research into

the psychological effects of war is sorely neglected.

Well-founded studies do not take place until the 1960s.

In 1980, the medical diagnosis of post-traumatic

stress disorder is finally added to textbooks.

Once post-traumatic stress disorder

began being recognized, men would realize

that it wasn't them being weak, it wasn't them having

an adverse reaction that none of their colleagues had.

It was a completely normal reaction

to witnessing such traumatic events.

And once that was recognized,

and then therefore treatment could follow,

we now have a situation where families

understand what their husbands, sons, daughters now

are going through and recognize that they need that help.

With the introduction of the machine gun,

mechanized warfare and the fear of being killed

reaches a new level.

The weapon dramatically alters the psychology of war.

Engineer Hiram Maxim's invention

forever changes the way that the world fights.

And it also paves the way for another modern weapon:

the hand grenade.

(dramatic music)

The introduction of new weapons technology

frequently results in fatal errors and avoidable massacres,

especially at the beginning of World War I.

When the First World War broke out in 1914,

the great armies of Europe thought

that they would maneuver in classical form,

using cavalry and infantry.

They would set a set piece battles

in which whole armies engaged on a broad front.

Rapidly became clear that firepower,

both artillery firepower, infantry firepower

and particularly the machine gun,

made it impossible for me to operate

as they had even 50 years before.

Machine guns and improved artillery

claim high losses on both sides.

Attacks without cover ultimately end as a bloodbath.

After the devastating Battle of the Marne,

both sides start digging.

By the end of November,

a continuous line of trenches runs all the way

from the North Sea to Switzerland.

Mobile warfare has turned into trench warfare.

But what is the best way to effectively attack

the enemy's narrow and hard-to-see trenches and bunkers?

Artillery becomes a key weapon.

The only way to defeat an enemy down in a trench

is with ballistic fire.

On both sides, a dense row of guns

is positioned far behind the trenches.

William Mills, an engineer in Birmingham,

develops a new weapon for the trench soldiers.

In 1915, the Mills bomb

makes its way onto European battlefields.

Mills' invention is no new idea.

In the 16th century, transporting cannons is a problem.

The soldiers need a lightweight weapon

that can wreak havoc without too much effort.

And the hand grenade is born.

(foreign language)

The shape of these very early grenades

resembles a pomegranate, hence the name.

The round, hard-skinned and many-seed fruit

becomes the namesake for the new weapon in the 17th century.

A hollow clay jar is filled

with gunpowder and metal slivers.

A fuse ignites the explosive,

and the sharp metal and clay fragments

make their destructive impact.

17th and 18th century armies

had elite soldiers called grenadiers

who were generally big, tall fellows

who could throw a grenade a long way.

(foreign language)

They also changed their uniforms.

These typical pointed Prussian hats, the grenadier hats,

were made to look like this because of course

if you were wearing a two-pointed hat,

it would be a lot more difficult for you to throw a grenade.

With their hand grenades,

the grenadiers stand at the ready on the front lines.

But the weapon also has its pitfalls.

The grenade had to be lit.

If the fuse went too quickly,

the grenade will blow up before it was thrown.

If it got dropped or anything like that,

things could go wrong.

And of course, if it was raining, it probably wouldn't work.

So it was a rather temperamental weapon.

During the American Civil War,

the next generation of hand grenades

reaches the battlefields.

An invention from William Ketchum

eliminates the need to manually ignite the weapon.

The grenade only needs to hit the impact fuse

in the nose of the weapon in order to explode.

(foreign language)

If the bomb lands on its side

and doesn't detonate, then it stays relatively safe

for a period of time.

So of course the opponent can then take the grenade

and throw it back to where it came from.

The latest hand grenade in 1915

is supposed to solve this problem.

With historian Stephen Bull,

we take a closer look at William Mills' invention.

It has considerable advantages over its predecessors.

It does not need to be manually ignited,

and there is no unreliable impact fuse.

The grenade is constructed using a perforated

cast iron shell and filled with explosives.

The hand grenade was an old idea.

But it received a new lease of life

in the trenches of the First World War.

The effect of an explosion in a confined space

could be devastating.

The functioning principle of the hand grenade

is that in the middle there's a fuse

connected to the explosive charge.

If the safety pin is pulled and the lever is released,

then the tension of the spring

hits the striker to ignite the fuse.

Seven seconds later, it explodes.

(explosion)

Combining portability with destructiveness,

the hand grenade becomes a standard weapon

during World War I.

(explosions)

On the fronts of Flanders in France,

an ingenious trench system is developed.

A support trench is dug behind the main trench,

connected to another passage

known as a communication trench.

The enemy is anywhere from 30 to a few hundred meters away,

and the soldiers cal the area separating

the two sides no man's land.

(anxious music)

Hand grenades that land in a trench are terrifying,

but changes to trench construction

alleviate their devastating effects.

If a trench is straight,

then shrapnel can fly far in one direction

and potentially hit soldiers.

So they thought if they dug the trenches in a zigzag shape,

there would always be a corner nearby

where a solider could hide,

and then shrapnel would only fly to the next corner

and get stuck in the wall,

and hopefully it wouldn't hit anyone.

Soldiers that are hit by fragments

of a hand grenade often suffer life-threatening injuries.

An effective drug to prevent gangrene

has not yet been invented.

One of the key problems in trench warfare

is the secondary infection following wounds

because of the contaminated and dangerous nature

of the ground that you're fighting over.

Stodgy ground, overflowing latrines,

unwashed bodies, and decomposing corpses.

Everyday life in the trenches

is yet another burden for soldiers during the war.

(foreign language)

They had to wear their clothes all the time.

And worse still, they also had to keep their boots on.

That meant the conditions were ideal for fungus to grow,

and bacteria also grew, and their skin

became really macerated and stayed moist

and was quite fragile and very vulnerable.

The lack of hygiene

makes it virtually impossible

to treat hand grenade injuries in the trenches.

(foreign language)

These fragments often had

very small particles, so that meant,

even if you had a tiny wound, it could easily

become inflamed because of unhygienic conditions.

And if you didn't have the right medication,

then you could go from barely having a wound at all

to having a serious injury that gets infected,

and the infection can then spread to lymph vessels,

to blood vessels, and can even lead to blood poisoning.

If a shrapnel wound does heal,

it's only a matter of time before the next attack.

In 1917, the British Mills bomb goes into mass production.

The Germans are also developing their own

completely different hand grenade.

While Mills grenades look like an egg,

the German version is at the end of a wooden stick.

And it functions differently.

The British hand grenade is a fragmentation weapon,

but the Germans have created an explosive weapon.

(explosions)

With historian Stephen Bull, we want to explore

the differences between these two types of grenade.

The head of the stick grenade holds over 100 grams

more explosive material than the egg version.

The difference is the force of the explosion,

not the radius of the projectile fragments.

But it needs to have pinpoint accuracy.

The German grenade's wooden stick

is supposed to help with the aim.

So these are the two grenades that we'll be testing.

Their both time-fused models.

This one is the Soviet F1, a similar design to the Mills.

This one is the German M24

Stielhandgranate or stick grenade.

Different philosophies.

But is one better than the other, and why?

Which grenade will Stephen Bull

be able to land closer to his target in just one throw?

He tries out the Mills bomb first.

Quite small in the hand, like a large egg, really.

Pull the pin, and we're ready to go.

The grenade lands about

five meters from the target.

Not bad, a reasonable throw,

but it's a little short of the target.

The main effect from this of course

would be the fragmentation.

Does throwing the stick grenade

give a better result?

It lands directly on our target.

So that was a good long throw, all the way to the target.

It seems that that long stick gives you

a bit of extra leverage for a long throw.

The explosion would have dangerous consequences

for the enemy, but the sharp fragments

of the egg hand grenade would also be devastating.

The M24 gave me a longer throw,

because its handle gave me greater leverage.

But this was a weapon for blast,

essentially a weapon for use in the open.

The Soviet F1 is perhaps a little handier,

but not quite such a long throw.

Its main effect was fragmentation,

and preferably in enclosed areas.

So these are both good grenades,

but they're designed for different purposes.

Both types of hand grenade

make their mark in World War I.

To a lesser extent, they continued

to be used during World War II.

The Second World War is not such a great war

for the hand grenade, because wars tend to be now

much more mobile, much more fluid.

There are still trenches and bunkers to be cleared,

but they're only part of, rather than the whole of, the war.

During World War I, 300 million hand grenades

are produced by the German side alone,

followed by 70 million in World War II.

But the repercussions of their use remain the same.

Those who survive a shrapnel wound

often must resort to amputation to avoid death by gangrene.

For decades, researchers have sought in vain

to find a cure for gangrene.

In 1928, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming

accidentally discovers that pathogens no longer multiply

when in close vicinity to a mold fungus.

Fleming, together with biochemist Ernst Chain

and pathologist Howard Florey, over the ensuing years

worked to finally develop the first antibiotic, penicillin.

The active ingredient prevents growing bacteria

from completing their cells walls,

effectively stopping them from spreading.

Testing proves that the new drug is effective,

but the British government is not ready

to start the cost of production.

After joining the war, the United States

step in and start mass production in 1942.

(foreign language)

The need for penicillin at the front

led to it becoming a top priority

for the pharmaceutical industry,

and they actively pushed this research,

because it was also a huge market for them.

The antibiotic is America's

second-most important project after the atomic bomb.

Large advertisements proclaim,

"Thanks to penicillin, he will come home."

The Germans and Russians don't have access to the drug yet,

and as a result, high numbers of their men die

from infection, a strategic advantage for the Allies.

People don't die of disease; they get killed in battle.

Whether that's morally uplifting

or morally bankrupt I don't know, really.

It does change the war's look.

Wars are now about men dying in battle,

and that's slightly easier to sell,

because it's heroic to die in battle;

it's not heroic to die of diptheria.

After the war, the expensive research

also benefits the civilian population,

and the advancement soon reaches the entire world.

It's one case in which progress is accelerated by war.

What we're looking at is advancing on twin tracks.

We're finding new ways of killing people in confined spaces

and giving them horrific injuries

which may become contaminated.

At the same time, we're finding ways of dealing

with those contaminations and healing people.

And for all armies, the hand grenade

continues to be standard issue equipment.

After 1945, it is used in practically every armed conflict.

(explosion)

Continues to be a very useful means

of doing a job that nothing else does.

You have a system of fighting

in which you're going into individual buildings

and clearing individual rooms, and the hand grenade

is still the weapon of choice to clear the room.

The hand grenade is also developed for police

without the fatal fragments.

With a loud band, blinding light, and dense smoke,

stun or smoke grenades are hurled at criminals

and even demonstrators.

Their use is controversial.

A legendary version of the thrown weapon

owes its name to Soviet Foreign Minister

Vyacheslav Molotov.

During the Russo-Finnish War of 1939,

Finnish soldiers used gas-filled bottles

against their Soviet attackers,

calling them Molotov cocktails,

as an allusion to their opponent's propaganda.

The original hand grenade was a homemade bomb,

and the Molotov cocktail is a later version

of the homemade bomb, and it's a classic solution

to the problem of resistance against armed force

when you have no weapons.

You have to make a weapon

out of something that isn't a weapon.

And throughout history, human ingenuity

has resulted in the conversion of perfectly ordinary things

into weapons in times of need.

Throwing something at the enemy:

a reflex as old as mankind.

The only thing that has changed is what we throw.

In the trenches of World War I,

the defensive side always has the advantage,

and the result is years of bloodshed

with barely any change to the lines of the front.

But that will soon all change

with the next great development

in weapons technology: the tank.

(dramatic music)

In ancient times and the Middle Ages,

armor and speed already played

a crucial role in weapons development,

an example such as a chariot of powerful battering rams

that could be used to attack a fortress.

But the problem is drive.

In the second half of the 19th century,

the invention of the combustion engine

opens up completely new directions for military technology.

In 1906, in Austria, Hungary, the first tank is introduced

with a rotating turret intended for both attack and defense.

But its four-wheel drive proves to be

not a match for the battlefields.

(foreign language)

The wheel only rests on one point,

which is a good thing, because that minimizes friction

and allows you to drive over the road

with as little resistance as possible.

But if your car ever got stuck in the mud,

then you know that this is also a disadvantage,

because, with low friction, it's much harder to get a grip.

A spark of inspiration comes from agriculture.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

tractors with rotating tracks arrive on the fields,

a method that the military quickly

puts to use for themselves.

(foreign language)

Tanks were constructed with a wide track

that was like a wide belt, and that made

the surface contact area significantly larger,

so you could get through mud,

and you could also drive over holes much more easily.

When World War I breaks out,

Winston Churchill, the British naval secretary,

advocates the construction of tanks.

On September the 15th, 1916 they're ready.

In northern France, during the Battle of the Somme,

the first British tanks are put into action.

The hulking beasts can only move at a walking pace.

The Mark I weighs close to 28 tons.

Depending on the design, its eight-man crew

operates either two cannons or four to six machine guns.

At full throttle, the six-cylinder petrol engine

manages a speed of just six kilometers per hour.

49 of the world's first battle tanks

are supposed to be deployed in battle.

But on the first mission, there's already problems.

It has a relatively low-powered gasoline engine

which gives off fumes inside the vehicle.

The machine itself is unbelievably unreliable,

so less than half the vehicles

are gonna make it to the start line

and actually get going on the day of battle.

It really is only suitable for going a short distance

at walking pace over to the enemy's trenches.

That's all it's ever going to do.

The loud and massive vehicle

still nevertheless terrifies the enemy.

German soldiers were absolutely flabbergasted

by this mechanical thing crawling towards them

which seemed to be bulletproof.

The first time you saw one they were terrifying,

the second time they were frightening,

and the third time they were slightly predictable.

(foreign language)

The armor itself isn't think enough

to provide too much protection

against direct artillery fire.

And the Germans quickly realized that,

if they moved close enough to the tanks,

they could fire through the observation slits,

and they could set the fuel tanks on fire.

The tank's debut isn't enough

to decide the war, but it is a convincing idea.

Now every army in the world wants tanks, even the Germans,

who are forbidden to do so by the 1919 peace treaty.

They proceed anyway, and before long, Hitler's

German Wehrmacht is equipped with entire armies of tanks.

September the 1st, 1939.

German tanks invade Poland, and World War II begins.

And with it comes the era of the so-called blitz wars,

during which tanks become a decisive weapon.

(dramatic music)

With tank invasions, the Germans

quickly conquer half of Europe.

By the end of June in 1940, Hitler has conquered Paris.

Just 20 years earlier, the French and the Germans

had waged war in the trenches for years.

Now the western campaign takes only six weeks.

The enemy couldn't respond,

because every time they responded,

the Germans had already moved.

So slow, lumbering responses from the British

and the French in particular mean that,

by the time they realized what had happened,

it was over and they were already retreating.

One year later, German troops invade the Soviet Union.

Hitler believes that, just like in the West,

victory will be swift thanks to

the lightening speed of his tank attacks.

At first, it seems as if all is going according to plan.

But Soviet leadership recovers from the initial shock.

Their country is huge, and a counterattack

is already being prepared, and it comes in the form

of groundbreaking weapons technology.

(dramatic drumming)

Almost six meters long, three meters wide,

and weighing 26 tons, with wide tracks

that make the Soviet T-34 mobile even in difficult terrain.

The three-meter-long cannon provides firepower

superior to the German models, and, at full speed,

the steel colossus can travel up to 55 km/h.

Weapons expert Stephen Bull

wants to take a closer look at the T-34.

In 1941, the efficiency of the armor

took the Germans completely by surprise.

Around the front here, the armor was 45 millimeters thick.

But because it was so well sloped,

a shell had to pass through 60 millimeters of armor.

How does it feel to drive a T-34?

With an experienced tank crew,

Stephen tests it out on the terrain.

So the T-34 had a crew of four men.

There goes the driver,

now the gunner,

the loader, and last but not least, the commander.

This post-war version of the T-34

is still completely road ready.

From the outside, the tank seems huge,

but inside, space is actually limited.

It's like a tight little oven.

A noisy, tight little oven.

And the reason I'm wearing this

is because I'm expecting that my skull

will be banging against the inside of the armor any moment.

In my left hand I have a lanyard

to pull the mechanism of the main gun,

and there should be a machine gun

over my left-hand shoulder.

Tasks inside the T-34 are clearly distributed.

In real combat, everyone knows what they need to do.

You're now down in the forward gunner seat,

looking back up at me from the position next to the driver.

Just below you is the escape hatch,

so if it gets bad, you can drop out through the floor.

Hopefully we won't need to do that.

Now it heads onto the terrain.

Can the T-34 handle the course and overcome the obstacles?

The commander supervises the exercise.

(dramatic music)

No problem for a steel colossus.

In World War II, the Soviet Union

manufactures more than 50,000 T-34 tanks,

double the amount of every type of German tank put together.

Hitler's Wehrmacht attempts to make up

for what they lack in tank numbers

through a technically superior model.

In 1942, a new tank called Tiger goes into mass production.

At 26 tons, the T-34 runs at a speed of more than 50 km/h

and is extremely maneuverable.

The Tiger is more than twice as heavy

and can only go 30 km/h,

but it comes with much stronger weaponry.

In a one-on-one battle, this would have advantages.

Summer 1943.

The Germans prepare for a major attack

on the front in Kursk,

roughly 500 kilometers south of Moscow.

The Soviets get intelligence of this operation

and prepare for it, and they use mine fields,

anti-tank traps, and a whole series of systems

to channel the German attack into predefined killing grounds

where they can mass their own tanks.

July the 12th, 1943.

The climax of the Battle of Kursk.

More than 7,000 tanks and two million soldiers

take part in the biggest tank battle of World War II.

The German tanks have an advantage

in long-range firepower.

The Russians have an advantage in mobility

and close-quarters fighting.

So they set up battles that suit their tanks

rather than the German tanks.

It is Hitler's last great attempt

to defeat the Soviet army in a pivotal battle.

The largest tank battle in history is over,

and so is the German offensive against the Soviet Union.

This is the last battle where the Germans attack.

From now on, the Soviets will attack

and the Germans will defend.

The era of victories

won by tank attacks has ended.

Constant improvements in anti-tank weapons and air attacks

have turned the hunters into the hunted.

The successes of the World War II tanks

take these developments into account.

T-84 Oplot.

The latest generation of Russian tanks.

Since 2009, they've been part

of the Ukrainian army's arsenal.

On behalf of the Malyshev weapons factory,

former military personnel carry out various tests

at a training site in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine.

So this is the Oplot, the latest successor to the T-84,

and it's got some amazing features.

It's got explosive reactive armor,

and it's got 125 mm gun, a smooth bore,

so they can actually fire missiles.

But perhaps most amazingly, it's a flying tank.

It moves at 70 km/h on the road.

(dramatic music)

Stephen Bull wants to test

whether the 50 ton tank can really pull this off.

A military truck goes full throttle over the terrain,

but it soon becomes clear that the T-84 Oplot

can not only catch up with the truck;

it can also effortlessly pass it.

With its wide tracks on uneven ground,

the tank will always be superior to a wheeled vehicle.

But how destructive is this kind of modern tank?

Stephen Bull and our team are there for the tank's test.

Their front in the current conflict in eastern Ukraine

is about 300 kilometers away.

So they guys have just bombed up the tank,

and they've put in three rounds,

and these are two-part rounds.

The projectile is fin-stabilized.

And behind it is the main charge of explosive.

The target is a solid stone wall.

The team also sets up explosive gasoline drums behind it.

The T-84's gun aims to destroy the target

from a distance of 1.6 kilometers.

(booming)

From a distance of 1,650 meters,

the tank reliably hits its target.

Well that was a gut-shaking shot.

You could see the flash.

I could certainly feel the pressure going through my head.

I'm glad they warned me to keep my mouth open,

'cause otherwise I'm quite sure

something will pop inside there.

So this wreckage here is what's left of the target.

And you can see it's still burning,

so I'm not gonna go any closer than this.

Because if that goes off,

this could be pretty serious.

But how does the modern tank

handle uneven terrain?

Stephen Bull goes along for the ride.

The obstacle: two car wrecks.

(dramatic music)

The 51 ton T-84 slides effortlessly over the vehicles.

In the next test, the tank faces a burning roadblock.

(dramatic music)

The tank seems to make it through the flames

without effort as well.

But in reality, it can only withstand a strong fire

for a short amount of time.

I won't be doing that again in a hurry.

When you are inside, some of the smoke

and a few of the embers were being sucked in

through some of the filtration system,

and I could feel it getting very smoky in there.

I'm very glad that he got the lid open when he did.

It certainly wasn't pleasant.

A tank that protects against any circumstance

is only an illusion.

The crews are actually no safer than the infantry.

Tanks are as powerful as their myth

only when they are used against civilians,

whether in 1953 in East Berlin, 1968 in Prague,

or in other places where dictatorships

take actions against their own people.

Today, as a tool of suppression,

tanks are still the ideal weapon.

It's a powerful mechanical beast

which threatens your security.

It also makes you look big and strong.

It's the war elephant of the modern world.

Symbols of power as well as being powerful.

On modern battlefields,

airplanes and missiles determine the victor.

During the Cold War, the average estimated survival time

of a tank crew was only a few minutes.

And the role of large and powerful military equipment

as a deterring symbol has long since shifted

to other types of weapons.

In 2002, American weapons engineers

developed what is known as the Mother of All Bombs,

a nine-meter-long bomb with an explosive charge

of 11 tons of TNT.

The idea is, of course, that nuclear weapons

can do it bigger and better than anything conventional,

but you're not allowed to use them

without starting a world war,

so let's build the biggest bomb we can

short of a nuclear weapon.

15 years after its development,

under President Trump the Mother Of All Bombs

is used for the first time.

On April the 13th, 2017,

it hits a site of the terrorist militia

of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.

Every building with a 150 meter radius is destroyed.

The impact of the attack's media message

takes the foreground, but the actual

military gain is controversial.

What does it add to the arsenal of the world?

Very little.

There is a sense in which military organizations

competing with each other, that's not a competition

with anyone else; that's internal,

and that's about their share of the budget

voted through in Washington.

So having that bomb makes them look good in Washington,

and I suspect that's largely what's behind this.

This rivalry also plays out internationally.

Russia's military debuts a male counterpart,

the Father of All Bombs.

In 2007, Russian state television

broadcasts an alleged test of the vacuum bomb.

But in this case as well,

the bomb has a greater symbolic use as a propaganda

than as an actually military tool.

(foreign language)

During the explosion,

the oxygen in the air burns to create an immense vacuum,

and the pressure in the surrounding area drops abruptly.

So if I've already inhaled, and the air in my lungs

is at normal atmospheric pressure,

then it suddenly expands, and my lungs burst.

For thousands of years,

arms races have been a dangerous aspect of war.

And despite any assurances that new weapons

are only intended to deter an opponent,

they are often still used,

unleashing their full power of destruction.