As with other types of explosive weapons, aerial bombs aim to kill and injure people or to destroy materiel through the projection of one or more of blast, fragmentation, radiation or fire outwards from the point of detonation.
[citation needed] Captain Simeon Petrov developed the idea and created several prototypes by adapting different types of grenades and increasing their payload.
[4] On 16 October 1912, observer Prodan Tarakchiev dropped two of those bombs on the Turkish railway station of Karaağaç (near the besieged Edirne) from an Albatros F.2 aircraft piloted by Radul Milkov, for the first time in this campaign.
A precursor was the 1937 bombing of Guernica by the Nazi German Luftwaffe and the Fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria at the behest of Francisco Franco.
[12] The end of World War Two was brought about with the aerial, atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people and which remain the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict.