This book is about weapons, but not only - it reveals a bizarre mosaic of phenomena of the physical world: chemical and nuclear explosions, isotope separation and magnetic hydrodynamics, ion kinetics in dense gases and shock waves in solids, neutron physics and high-current electronics, magnetic cumulation and electrodynamics. The author talks about all this without resorting to the complex apparatus of higher mathematics. For those who wish to familiarize themselves with these phenomena in detail, he also wrote a textbook for universities and military academies, Explosions and Waves, designed for a trained reader. In the book that the reader holds in his hands, he will also find historical excursions, permeated with irony, discussions about politics and politicians, as well as about characters in the closed world of military science.