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Pentagon: 30,000 Pound Bomb Too Small
smitty777 writes "According to the Pentagon, the 30,000-pound, precision-guided Massive Ordnance Penetrator GBU-57 bomb is just too small. Concerns around Iran's fortification of their nuclear program facilities has the DoD seeking from Congress something not quite as subdued as the GBU-57, the largest non-nuke bomb operated by the USAF. This 'smaller' bomb just recently won a prize for its ability to cut through 60 feet of concrete. The upgrades will cost $82 million on top of the $330 million spent so far to develop the system. There is some interesting high speed camera footage of the GBU-57 in the video below."
Light speed's too slow! We'll have to go straight to.... Ludicrous Speed!
The right to offend is central to the right to free speech.
Coincidentally, the construction plans for Iran's entirely peaceful nuclear facilities are being modified to require at least 120 feet of concrete covering to protect them from terrorist attacks and tsunamis.
The name of the bomb is "Massive"
How can you call it "Not big enough?"
A prize like the X-Prize or something? A) who hands out prizes for stuff like this and B) where to I apply to be a judge?
bah.
Let's call it the Mountainous Occluded Fortification Ordinance.
I can see the fnords!
And the misconception how to resolve conflicts and disputes between humans efficiently is too big.
Just rev up the volume (and your ego), keep the green buck rolling and feel good about it.
.... it has nothing to do with "brown people" or white superiority. The Chinese have nuclear weapons and you don't see the Western World freaking the fuck out about that. Why is that? Because for all of their flaws the Chinese actually behave like adults in the global community. They don't sponsor terrorism, they don't threaten freedom of navigation on the high seas and they don't have an openly racist high level politician that denies the right of one of his neighbors to exist. If Iran wants to be treated like a grown up perhaps it should start acting like one.
BTW, I like the subject "Typical American". Do you realize that Europe is just as freaked out by the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as the United States is? Actually it probably bothers them more; we aren't within range of Iranian missiles but most of Europe is.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Its pretty obvious that the miltiary-political-industrial complex is trying to talk us all into war with Iran and now you see one of the many things they plan to gain from it. Plus more power and control of the populace.
You already have a giant phallic bomb called a MASSIVE (ordnance) PENETRATOR and it's not good enough for you? Does everyone in the Pentagon have such a small penis or is it just the people in charge of purchasing?
A better question would be will they ever approach what's possible with nuclear warheads? Little Boy was 15 kilotons or 640,152,000,000,000 joules of energy released in less than the blink of an eye. Modern nuclear weapons are much more powerful and can be scaled up indefinitely using the Teller–Ulam design. The largest American weapon ever tested was 15 megatons -- 6.40152e+17 joules. The largest Russian weapon ever tested was three times as powerful. It will be a long time before you see a directed energy weapon that comes close to those energy levels.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Why should we? Taking a bunch of my money from me by force to build a bunch of bombs to better threaten a bunch of nutters in the Middle East is inherently political. Discussing the politics of US military spending in the context of this story is perfectly topical.
Sequential Bombing System.... where a sequence of bombs is dropped concurrently in short succession. (ie: 4-8 bombs in a 60-120 second interval).
But SBS is a lame sounding name. How can that compete with Mother of All Bombs (MOAB)
How about Bombing On Sequence System (BOSS)
Now the BOSS BOMB has a nice Pentagon expenditure feeling way. Essentially the delivery system should transit from the bomber to target via a cruise delivery system. Which would contain 4-8 war heads each about a 1/4 to 1/2 of MOABs size. The delivery unit would circle target while releasing the individual warheads which would each be guided to their target at about 15-30 second intervals. Allowing the first bomb to detonate and blow a crater while the next bomb hits the new exposed area, so on and so on. Tests would need to be completed to determine the amount of time necessary between individual warhead impacts for optimum penetration.
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Proposed solution to MOAB. Build big ballon under first layer of protection with lots of vents. When MOAB hits it explodes, but instead of crushing your super secret facilitity (that was obviously not secret enough if it's being bombed), the balloon detonates the bomb early and above and allows the pressure to escape through hundreds of vent area.
Bomb two, kills you...GAME OVER
Yes, quiet all you sensible people! We want more feeble-minded, opinionless sheep around these here parts!
which is totally what she said
Will Iran war be Obama's October Surprise? Triggered perhaps by false flag or provoked attack?
Kill 'em from orbit!
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
From the Department of Defense which should be renamed to the Department of Wasting Tax Dollars..
Sure. We call these particular energy weapons "fusion devices." You let me know when a human-caused chemical reaction gets to 100 MT, lol. (reference is to the Soviet's Tsar Bomba, which was tested at a low (!) yield of ~50 Mt but was designed for 100Mt in actual use.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
There are reasons why there are as few SEAL/Rangers/Green Berets/Delta/ParaRescue/Combat Controllers as there are, it's fucking hard to earn this designations. Most people can't earn them, ever. So trying to find an additional 500+ people to fill those roles would mean you need to relax standards. That's not happening.
Each successive bomb would have to hit the exact same spot, and blow through a layer of debris in an ever-changing target zone. This isn't water torture, this is blowing the motherloving shit out of a huge chunk of reinforced concrete. You don't kill a tank by shooting it with an AK-47 a hundred times, you hit it once with something that will penetrate. The effects of lesser attacks are not necessarily cumulative.
Personally, this sounds like a use case for kinetic bombardment--drop titanium telephone poles on them from orbit.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
From TFA "secretly submit a request to Congress for funding"; so I guess it isn't a secret now is it?
Anyway, if ONE bomb can penetrate 200ft. and supposedly laser enhanced GPS targeting can allow almost pinpoint accuracy, how deep can two or more bombs go? I know it wouldn't be linear but even an additional 50ft. would be worth something.
Or maybe the air defenses around these installations (they must be the most highly protected items in the whole country) would make getting off more than one too dangerous?
I know, it would be a radical departure from the traditional Teller-Ulam fission/fusion design and may not yield nearly as much bang, but a pure fusion bomb would be much cleaner. Everyone knows how important cleanliness is when starting a war. We could send drones with fusion bombs practically anywhere we suspected 'rouge' nations to be plotting WMDs. By nuking them with fusion, we could cleanly demonstrate just how dangerous such power is in the hand of those who might abuse it WITHOUT leaving behind any fissionable materials that may be traced back to us or cause 'collateral damage'. Definitely a 'win-win' for stopping nuclear proliferation and increasing jobs at home via the American military industrial complex. The only question, "How could you build such a tidy-bomb?" I see a patent opportunity.
Isn't the bomb it's the video narrators voice because I am sure it's computer generated.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Was it obvious and also STRANGE to anyone else that the video was randomly narrated by a robot british lady? I'm impressed because its solid voice work, from a machine. But you can still tell it wasn't a person.
When your business is to wage war, there is never enough.
It is disingenuous to claim US does not have the ordinance to destroy Iranian underground facilities. It clearly does.
The most important question is not "how" but "why".
There's a long and distinguished history in the USAF of delivering massive ordnance bombs via cargo planes (see the daisy cutter and MOAB as examples). If you can open the rear hatch, roll it out, and achieve a margin of error smaller than the blast radius, then you're golden. In today's age of GPS-guided munitions that is a much lower threshold to cross than it's ever been.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. I'm an American; my legitimate control ends where the country's borders and maritime boundaries lie. If you're inside them, or use weapons against the population or the infrastructure inside them, you're my problem, and I support a workmanlike mechanism to wholly terminate your ass. I might, depending on the nature of your incursion, support going further and eliminating your ability to do it again. I would not, by the way, support paying for medical care or rebuilding your infrastructure. You aggress, in my opinion, the consequences are entirely your responsibility.
You stay out, or behave within, you're not my problem. Someone comes inside your borders, assuming you're from some other country, that's *your* problem, and *you* need to deal with it. If you can't, then you may go the way of history. You can, *they* may go the way of history. Either way, my legitimate role is to have breakfast and read about it in the paper. I might feel regret, I might feel enthusiasm, but I would *not* feel the urge to intervene.
I have not in any way forgotten it, in fact I'm somewhat of a student of WWII, which means I know a considerable bit more about it than most people. However... yes, so? What's your point?
Well, other than over a thousand US nuclear weapons detonations, most of which dropped various amounts of fallout on the entire planet, yes. So?
Yes, so? Has Iran used nuclear weapons? No. Has Israel used nuclear weapons? No. Has France? No. Has England? No. Has the USSR? No. They all have them; yet no one has used them (well, except us, and I'm not saying that was a mistake, either.) So what's your point?
I don't say anything about Iran. I'm not an Iranian citizen. I don't concern myself with things they say about us, and I don't expect them to concern themselves with things we say about them. Also, what you're trying to do here is an exercise in "what if", which is bullshit. Iran has done nothing to make me think they are a threat to my country; ergo, I don't worry about them. I worry more about the loonies here that want to go in, and based on events that only exist in their imagination, do some terrible damage to some other sovereign country, thus setting a legitimate stage for other countries to come and do the same to us. National borders are what they are for a reason; violating them is a VERY bad idea.
Yes, absolutely.
No, we wouldn't. We'd use them as excavation tools, space drives, anti-asteroid devices, and so on. And there is no such thing as a perfect world anyway.
Buddy, wherever you got the idea that *you* know what direction *we* need to g
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Somebody set them up the bomb.
War isn't about military superiority. It's about politics and economics. It simply wouldn't do to nuke Iran with the purported goal of reducing the threat of nuclear warfare.
Since when did Holocaust denial become a reason for the United States to attack another nation state? I thought the attitude of the U.S. people was supposed to be more along the lines of : "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."?
I actually find it quite distasteful to use the Holocaust as an excuse for a war that would result in the deaths of millions of people. And it appears I'm not the only one. Obscene: Using the Holocaust to Justify War With Iran .