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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."
As a red-blooded American who served in the military and comes from a family who also did(mother served in army, father served in Marines and saw action in Vietnam, Grandfather who was bomber aircrew during WWII, uncle served in USAF), I endorse your comment wholeheartedly.
I know the Slashdot leadership and a good majority of their chickenhawk wannabe-military fanboy readership subscribe to Judeo-Christian beliefs about being in the moral right as nation-builders, but if you're gonna tacitly encourage war with Iran, then enlist, pick up a fuckin' gun, and go shoot yerselves some strangers. See your buddies turned into hamburger and shuttled back into the states to live their lives as disfigured vegetable abominations, and you can become a nonfunctional drug-addicted alcoholic having to cope with those horrors for life. There are laws to reward employers for hiring veterans, but all it takes is one flashback flipout to make even the most patriotic employer reexamine their hiring decisions. Kids can't even afford school because that money went to some glorified security guard being paid $300,000 a year.
If you're gonna go big, then at least do it right - indiscriminately carpet-bomb the entire Middle East, including Israel.
announced it wants to annihilate one of its neighbors and is busy getting nuclear weapons
Ahh, No and No. Iran has never stated it is trying to build nuclear weapons. I hope your not refering to the speach that has been proven long ago to be a "accidental" mistranslation.
1- Israel is not a neighbor of Iran. Get a Geography 101 course
2- Iran has not announced it wants to annihilate Israel. It wished for Israeli government to lack existence.
3- Israel has at least 200-300 nukes and can defend itself. No need for crying wolf. Iran will never use nukes against Israel. A single nuke on Tehran will kill 15 million.
Back in 2003, an Iranian student, with the help of a professor from Iran, won the first prize in a competition organized by the American Concrete Institute
For more info, look into this page ---> http://www.concrete.org/STUDENTS/st_concreteprojects03_winners.htm
About the prize winning concrete ?
It has been used for building Iran's underground bunkers, which house Iran's nuclear facilities
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
doesn't all add up though.
stuxnet made a big dent in their enrichment activities (ie they had to start again because any material they'd made during the affected time would not be viable).
they are apparently working on a high-explosive lens system - that's what IAEA were worried about, that they were looking into making the critical trick to an implosion device.
only problem - enrichment is for uranium, and high-explosive lenses are for plutonium. their one nuke plant is not of the kind that can be used to make pu 239 (which no doubt is why they were allowed to build it).
maybe they're doing what the yanks did and they're working on 2 bombs at once?
Go to the US with a few copies of the Qur'an and see what happens.
The outcome is pretty predictable: Oh, I see you have a Quran. You must be a Muslim? There are millions of them in the US. Have a nice day.
Wow, that is pretty horrible, but not on a par with nations living under Sharia.
Saudi jailed for discussing the Bible
In Iran, Covert Christian Converts Live With Secrecy and Fear
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
....And what does Saudi Arabia have to do with Iran? They're close allies with the US and enemies with Iran, which happens to have a fair number of native Christians (mostly Armenians and Georgians) as well as Jews and Zoroastrians who actually are allowed to own Bibles and Torahs are allowed exemptions from certain Islamic laws such as the ones on alcohol consumption. Said Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians also have their own guaranteed members of parliament, as set by the Iranian constitution.
I certainly won't sugarcoat the condition of minorities in Iran as paradise, and as an atheist I wouldn't want to live in either country, but Iran is certainly leaps and bounds better than the Saudis in terms of minorities. The Saudis don't even tolerate other sects of Islam, and in fact they destroyed the tomb of Mohammed, as well as other prominent Muslim figures, in the fear that they might turn into objects of worship by Islamic sects that have traditionally venerated at those sites. Bringing up Saudi Arabia as a reason to stop Iran really is a red herring.
This is why Iran needs cruise missiles that can hit Israel, and why Israel will have to think twice about hitting Iranian reactors. Previously they could try strike missions against other countries with impunity, but faced with the possibility of retaliatory missiles that are very difficult to defend against they might just be put off.
People keep blaming Iran for escalating the situation in that part of the world, but actually Israel and the US already did and everyone else is just playing catch-up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC