What they didn’t count on was the U.S. Air Force’s most simple weapon ever: a tungsten rod that could hit a city with the explosive power of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

A hypersonic space weapon concept, nicknamed “rods from God”, which was first dreamed up during the Cold War, might not be as effective as previously thought, according to a new study.

The proposed Hypervelocity Rod Bundles (HRB) concept would have consisted of a bundle of 6-meter-long tungsten rods launched — you guessed it — from a network of satellites in space, and ...

One functions as the targeting and communications platform while the other carries numerous tungsten rods--up to 20 feet in length and a foot in diameter--that it can drop on targets with less ...