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Boeing Delivers Massive Ordnance Penetrator
Hugh Pickens writes "In an age of drones and lightweight weaponry, the U.S. Air Force's purchase of the first batch of 30,000-pound bombs designed to pulverize underground enemy hide-outs highlights the military's need to go after hard and deeply buried targets. The weapon's explosive power is 10 times greater than its bunker-buster predecessor, the BLU-109 and it is nearly five tons heavier than the 22,600-pound GBU-43 MOAB surface bomb, sometimes called the 'mother of all bombs.' 'Our past test experience has shown that 2,000-pound penetrators carrying 500 pounds of high explosive are relatively ineffective against tunnels, even when skipped directly into the tunnel entrance,' says a 2004 Pentagon report on the Future Strategic Strike Force. 'Instead, several thousand pounds of high explosives coupled to the tunnel are needed to blow down blast doors and propagate a lethal air blast throughout a typical tunnel complex' (PDF). Experts note that the military disclosed delivery of the new bunker-busting bomb less than a week after a United Nations agency warned that Iran was secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon and is known to have hidden nuclear complexes that are fortified with steel and concrete, and buried under mountains. 'Heck of a coincidence, isn't it?' says John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org."
I'm sure there's a lot of propaganda in any such statement. It's probably a "made-up" number very close to intelligence estimates in order to be kind of a "we know what you're doing" sort of statement, meant to shake up targets and hopefully make them more willing to negotiate first. The actually specifications are almost assuredly not what was released.
Because you have no intention of actually using them.
The point here is not to be ready for a war with Iran, the point is to justify defense contractor jobs, keep the budgetary money flowing, and give Iran an excuse to do the same and give us more excuses later.
Seriously, have you been sleeping?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
you obviously know very little about atomic devices if you think that they can be set off by someone blowing up the facility. In order to form the chain reaction necessary for an atomic explosion, the forces must be very precisely directed. And with the radioactive material so far underground already, there's no danger of releasing radiation into the surrounding countryside. Its far more dangerous to let the Iranians have a working nuclear device than to worry about putting extra large pot holes all over their country. Which is sad, because if their government cared at all for their people, they'd realize that pissing off the US is a good way to look more like large parking lot than an industrialized country.
Because digging deeper and pouring more concrete costs money. Money that they could instead be spending on the Nuclear research. the more expensive and dangerous we make their nuclear program, the more likely they are to give it up.
Does this one still require a 25 point killstreak to deploy?
"Curiouser and Curiouser...." -Alice
This is George Carlin's "bigger dick" foreign policy ("What? They have bigger dicks? BOMB THEM") at work. Now we are taking it a step further and talking about how deep our "bombs" will penetrate. Do you think that maybe, just maybe, it might help to have more women in positions of power?
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Why tell potential targets how big a bomb you have and how deep it will penetrate? They can just go deeper and pour more concrete. What happened to surprise?
Because moving a nuclear weapons development facility 20 feet deeper into the ground is a hell of a lot harder than getting off of your lazyboy to get another bag of Doritos.
Secondly, you assume the advertised capabilities of the bomb are correct?
A: The bomb will penetrate X feet of hardening.
B: We will build our new complex X+15 feet deep.
Millions of dollars and years of construction later
A: Oh yeah, that bomb will actually penetrate X+30 feet of hardening.
B: Oh shit.
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If you're referring to Israel, they aren't our friend. Israel is a bit like a therapist, they care about us as long as we're giving them money.