Sceptre is designed to give standard artillery much longer reach. Most extended-range shells use a short rocket burn after leaving the barrel. Sceptre instead carries liquid fuel for a ramjet, an air-breathing engine with no moving parts that keeps pushing the shell for much of its flight.
Hasand killed 14 and wounded 32 in a terrorist attack in 2013 when he opened fire at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center. He’d been sitting on death row ever since, until Trump realized he needed something else to drop on Iran.
“Two birds with one stone, I call it,” Trump said, seemingly proud of the clever method of execution. “It’ll be like Dr. Strangelove. You ever see that movie? Dr. Strangelove. A guy rides a bomb all the way down. He rides it like a horse. But backwards. Like Dudley Do-Right. He rides it all the way down to Japan.
But this time it’s going to be Iran. A bomb to Iran. It’s going to be a big bomb, like you wouldn’t believe. Not a nuke, because no one should use nukes, but we’re going to tie this guy to a bomb and make him ride it all the way down. A MOAB probably. It means Mother of All Bombs. I didn’t know bombs had mothers, but they do. I love mothers. It’s going to be something big, believe me.”
According to legal expert Wilcox Morton, Esq., a judge could probably have the death sentence overturned on the grounds that tying a man to a bomb and dropping him on Iran constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. However, that’s not likely to happen, as many judges are reportedly curious to see how it plays out.
“Aside from the long drop, it’s a pretty fast way to go, honestly,” said Federal Judge Norman Miller. “I doubt he’ll feel a thing.”
At publishing time, Hasan’s request for an all-female bomber crew had been denied.