Bomba Cardoen: el arma que nadie creyó que Chile usaría en 1978

The Cardoen Bomb: The Weapon No One Thought Chile Would Use in 1978 In 1978, Chilean engineer Carlos Cardoen designed the PJ1 cluster bomb in just fifteen days, the improvised weapon the Chilean Air Force prepared to defend itself during the Beagle Channel crisis with Argentina. Mounted under the wings of Hawker Hunter fighter-bombers, this weapon, born in the midst of the Cold War, became the last line of defense for a country isolated by the US arms embargo. While two military dictatorships prepared for a war that seemed inevitable, an engineer who until then had only manufactured explosives for mining received an order that no arms manufacturer in the world would have accepted. In the barracks of northern and southern Chile, pilots and reservists lived through weeks of total alert, not knowing if the next order would be a drill or the real start of war. Thousands of kilometers away, an entire fleet was advancing toward a target that no one on the Chilean side was entirely sure they could stop. What happened in the next seventy-two hours would change the fate of two countries, and that of a strange weapon that almost no one remembers today. Music: Eyes of Glory - Aakash Gandhi, Duty Calls - Rod Kim. Public domain photographs.