Some stupidities never di.
The NYT "reports":
Shortly before Mr. Maliki’s speech, a loud blast could be heard from the other side of the Tigris River. There were at least three other bombings in the capital as well on Thursday, including an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of roadside bomb made with Iranian technology.
What was the Iranian technology involved here? The hammer to form copper liner into a certain shape?
Charles Edward Munroe was the inventor of "The Monroe Effect" in explosives in 1885. He noted that a high explosive with a cavity facing a target left an indentation. The earliest known reference to the effect appears to be 1792, and there is some indication that mining engineers may have exploited the phenomenon over 150 years ago. The Monroe Effect was rediscovered by Von Neumann in 1911, but no practical applications were developed.
…
The "shaped charge" was introduced to warfare as an anti-tank device in World War II after its re-discovery in the late 1930s. In 1935, Henry Mohaupt, a chemical engineer [and a machine gunner in the Swiss Army] established a laboratory in Zurich to develop an effective anti-tank weapon that could be used by infantry soldiers. Henry Mohaupt was the inventor of the lined shaped charge. Other accounts mention earlier work by R.W. Wood of the John Hopkins University Physics Department as the discoverer of the metal liner principle. After the war started, Mohaupt came to the United States, and in October 1940 he took over direction of the bazooka project.