Well we will never know until we try. I say let’s stop all the chit chat and get on with it...
Such bunkers have to have a way in and out...
If you lined 3 or 4 of these in sequence, 30 seconds apart, wouldn’t that just keep digging the hole deeper until it was sufficient?
Might be just as effective to bomb that damnable well...
Nuke it. We can be sure then...
I propose that we send some of the “best” reporters from CNN, AP, Reuters, NYT, etc. into a mockup of that bunker and deeply penetrate it with one of those poppers and see what they think after that. Any takers?
I don’t understand why is it necessary to destroy the bunker. Just destroy the entrances and it quickly becomes a tomb.
If Reuters’ anonymous defense experts say so, I guess it must be true. /s
Do what their sort likes to do. Throw rocks. But do it the American way, as envisioned by a retired naval officer, Robert Heinlein in “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.”
I have posted about it before...Israel can handle Iran all by itself. But it would be better and cost less Iranian lives if the USA was backing Israel up. That won’t be happening with Zero at the helm.
With US help the inevitable crushing of Iran would be a strictly conventional affair. Israel on its own will be forced to use neutron weapons to control the Iranian nuclear sites.
There will be no images of destroyed cities and no fallout spreading across the globe. But still it will be a shock for the world to awaken one day soon and realize that a type of nuclear device has been used.
We better hope the war can be contained once neutron weapons are used on the battlefield, it’s definitely coming because Israel WILL be forced to attack Iran alone because we were stupid enough to elect the Won. There is only 0.00 chance that Israel will not be forced into this horrific mess. The Iranian nukes must be destroyed.
Bunker busters, even nuclear ones cannot be relied upon to destroy the sites. Nuclear bunker busters are not so powerful that just dropping one in close to a fortified site will destroy it. This would mean that a large number would need to be used since the exact layout of underground complexes is probably not known. This would result is lots of fallout because the blasts could not be completely contained.
Best to rely on small neutron weapons to clear a large radius around the sites and then have ground teams destroy the sites at their leisure. Once the ground team has a fortified position where they are shielded from neutron bombardment then neutron weapons can be used repeatedly to clear the area until the work is done.
Drop Meghan McCain on the target and see what happens.
I would expect that we have a fairly advanced kinetic energy weapons program. It has a folklore on the internet where the program is called “Project Thor” or “Rods from God”. Essentially it operates on the concept of firing needle shaped spears, made of hardened tungsten. These spears would be akin to the size of a large telephone pole, or larger. The idea is to fire these “spears” at velocities approaching those of comets or meteors, such that they impact on the surface of the earth at upwards of 10 miles per SECOND. One only needs to run a calculation of 2000 lbs moving at that speed to realize that they would strike with the force of a nuke, without any fallout. I can’t even imagine how far they would penetrate, but I’d expect you could send several at the same target, and do some real excavating. Also, given that they are hitting with the force of a nuke, that is concentrated on a single point, there potential penetration depth would far exceed anything in our bunker buster weapons. I’d sure hate to be down in that bunker. At the impact speed, I doubt there is any defense for such a weapon, and that though we might not have them orbiting in space at present, a ballistic missile could be constructed in such a way as to do the job.
I do believe the pentagon spent quite a bit of money recently on developing a conventional trident missile for the Ohio class subs. I wonder why they would spend nearly a billion dollars developing what is termed as a “conventional” weapon. Given that the trident missile is an already completed program to launch nuclear warheads, I’d suspect that the development costs were probably on the warhead design of this new “conventional” missile. If we haven’t done this, our military are bigger fools than I gave them credit for.
Paraphrasing what Patton said about fixed fortifications being monuments to man’s stupidity, I’d say our engineers have long ago figured out how to take out such bunkers.
A nuclear “accident” with plausible deniability is the only way to go.