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Iran's Smart Concrete Can Cope With Earthquakes and Bombs
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Iran is an earthquake zone, so its engineers have developed some of the toughest building materials in the world. Ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) could also be used to protect hidden nuclear installations from the artificial equivalent of small earthquakes, namely bunker-busting bombs. UHPC is based—like its quotidian cousins—on sand and cement. In addition, though, it is doped with powdered quartz (the pure stuff, rather than the tainted variety that makes up most sand) and various reinforcing metals and fibers. UHPC can withstand more compression than other forms of concrete. UHPC is also more flexible and durable than conventional concrete. It can therefore be used to make lighter and more slender structures. All of which is fine and dandy for safer dams and better sewers, which threaten no one. But UHPC's potential military applications are more intriguing—and for many, more worrying. Deep bunkers can be tackled in other ways. America's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has looked at what is known in the jargon as functional defeat, in other words bombing their entrances shut or destroying their electrical systems with electromagnetic pulses. They are also working on active penetrators—bombs which can tunnel through hundreds of meters of earth, rock and concrete. Development work is also under way on esoteric devices such as robot snakes, carrying warheads, which can infiltrate via air ducts and cable runs."
...brought to you by "the department of give-us-more-tax-dollars."
Hey, you war-mongering assholes, fuck off and stop trying to justify your next mass-murder. If you start this war, the blood is all on your hands, just like the last one was.
So, just because this "high performance" concrete was developed in Iran, it has dangerous military applications? Dangerous as in able to withstand US bombs? Should we start banning defensive technologies in order to make it easier for the US to invade?
If this was developed in any other nation, "military applications" would never have been mentioned.
Please don't fall for the fearmongering, Iran is not going to attack anyone, they know very well they would be instantly overrun. This is Iraq all over again.
As an aside, while I very much object to anyone including the US having nuclear weapons, I can't really see why Iran having them - if they indeed do - is a problem while Israel having them is not, a country that has constantly refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty and employs an Apartheid-like policy towards Palestinians.
Iran is a very religious country, so is the US. Muslims want to kill Christians, Christians want to kill Muslims. Iran has corrupt leaders, that allow their people to suffer hunger, poor health care and bad education in order to spend millions in armament, this is also true about the US. It's also true that Iran is a fairly small country with few resources, while the US is a huge country and the most resourceful on the planet, and while Iran has failed in most military operations it has attempted, the US has succeeded. Iran is trying to get some nuclear weapons, the US is the only country to have ever used them on a civilian population. Currently Iran has no nuclear weapons, while the US has thousands. Iran is not currently at war, while the US has been consistently starting wars every year for 200 years.
And yet, when the US develops a new weapon, a new fighter, a new bomb, a new droid, or any other military advancement and clearly plans to use it soon at war, it's praised for its technological achievement. But when Iran develops a new construction technology, that has tens of applications, one of them, defense, then it's something we should be worried about and it makes Iran evil, and we should ask the glorious united states of america to destroy them real soon.
Fuck that bullshit, your western christian theocracy is no better than the eastern muslim theocracies, and just as crazy, delusional and violent.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Putting aside the obvious political flamebait, are we really now at a point where anything that's been at all updated since the 1950s is considered "smart"? The term makes sense for things that have a microcontroller added to them, but that's not the case here. This concrete isn't any smarter than my toothbrush.
Hell, they could put a nuke in a train, and drive the train right into the middle of the white house; then detonate it.
Maybe they could get Bruce Lee to drive the train, jump out right before it hit, and rip the pres' heart right out of his chest and show it to him before he dies.
Once you take that little step into insane, there is no point in coming up short.
As some comments above have pointed out, the media as of late (well, probably always) has taken a really bias view of this Iran vs. US thing, to the point that.. I don't really know what to think.
In my quest to find less bias opinions, I turned to al-jazeera and other arab news sources to view comments from those who refer to Isreal as the "evil zionist regime." While many comments were ludicrous (but perhaps no more ludicrous than pro-US comments on CNN or something), there were many who pointed out that the US and Isreal have been known to carry out assassinations in Iran and other countries with basic impunity.
The question posed was, if Iran assassinated a scientist or politician in the United States, what kind of blow-back would there be? Why is the US/Isreal allowed to carry these out events without any world condemnation?
It's a difficult topic, because as much as I believe the US is going about things in the wrong way, if there's going to be someone who is the "world police" and the global power, I would prefer the US to any other country. Yet, it is clearly shielding the public from the double-standards it holds. Why does nobody else (general public) notice this? It's weird.
Yeah to an extent it is, there are differences though but even if there weren't it's false logic to assume that they were wrong last time, so they must be wrong this time.
In terms of the differences the inspectors on the ground for the most part were given a lot more access than is granted in Iran, and many, as well as people like Hans Blix were saying "There just aren't any WMDs here". It was somewhat hard for their voices to be heard because WMDs can be quite wide ranging in features, things like chlorine factories can be pretty dual purpose for example.
In the case of Iran inspectors have much less freedom, but they're fairly unanimous in the view that they don't have access to confirm that there isn't a nuclear weapons programme. Because the focus is much smaller than the broad nature of WMDs in general there's also far less ambiguity as to what they are looking for - features of a nuclear weapons programme stand out from the rest of a civilian programme and when elements of such a programme have been spotted by the IAEA or Iran can't or wont give a reason for their existence then the IAEAs claim that they can't determine that such elements are not for a weapons programme is quite valid, and obviously not in dispute.
Again, this doesn't mean Iran does have a nuclear weapons programme, but whilst there are parallels with Iraq it's still quite different. An underground fortified militiarised nuclear site that was kept secret until exposed by foreign nations and which has a number of pieces of evidence suggesting at least some kind of weapons research at some point has gone on is a lot more suspicious than an unguarded chlorine factory that has a comprehensive paper trail demonstrating legitimate customers with legitimate uses. Whether that suspicion alone is enough for varying types of action is a fair question, and precisely what the international community is at odds over. Much of the world felt Iraq didn't have WMDs based on the evidence but America and Britain went ahead as if it did anyway, in contrast the number of nations who believe Iran probably has a nuclear weapons programme is much larger and sanctions over the issue have been agreed by such classically Western opponents as Russia and China to boot - countries that wont even agree to a response over Syria despite it's blatant murder of civilians right now.
It's not a case of being right or wrong, it a case of being flat out lied to by people who want to go to war.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.