Plans for massive blast in Nevada desert draw fire

[NVMojo]

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada leaders and a disarmament activist criticized plans made public Thursday for a Pentagon-led experiment that will detonate 700 tons of explosives in the desert northwest of Las Vegas.

The explosion scheduled June 2 at the Nevada Test Site is part of an effort to design a weapon that can penetrate deep into solid rock formations in which a country might store nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.

"I am concerned that tests of this magnitude have been planned without providing Nevadans with any information about the possible impact on their health or safety," Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a statement. "I am also not comforted by the irresponsible and inflammatory comments that were printed in the media today."

James Tegnelia, director of the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency, told reporters the blast "is the first time in Nevada that you'll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons." He later retracted the statement, saying it was inaccurate.

more...

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2006/mar/30/033010286.html

[okieinpain]

1. yeah, they are so fucking clever, but they can't come up with any

thing for us to run our cars on.

[hunter]

2. See that Iran? Our Dick is bigger!

[Oerdin]

4. This could be useful

Given that Iran and North Korea have both built facilities so deep underground that even our bunker buster bombs can't reach them I can see how such a bomb could be useful. I'd prefer to see it tested on a remote and uninhabited island in the south pacific (lord knows we own enough of them after WW2) but it would clearly have military applications.

Also to clearify the 700 tons is the total amount of ordnance being used during the tests or just one test? The shear size of the number leads me to believe that several different bombs are being dropped and that 700 tons are not being used all at once.

[MadisonProgressive]

5. 1 bomb - equivalent force of 700 tons of TNT

[enlightenment]

7. Not equivalent -- physically 700 tons

"DIVINE STRAKE would detonate up to 700 tons (635 metric tons) of heavy ammonium nitrate fuel-oil emulsion (also known as heavy ANFO), a blasting agent, emplaced in a charge hole about 32 feet (9.8 meters ) in diameter and 36 feet (11 m) deep, located at the surface of U16b tunnel . . ."

They'll bring it to the NTS in trucks, mix it on site, and put it in hole. An additional 300 lbs. of C-4 will be added and presumably ignited with an electronic pulse (though they have a back-up plan for manual detonation).

This is in the pre-approval draft of Nov 05, which was on the NV DOE web site.

[Dogmudgeon]

9. What the hell? They're just testing ANFO!

We already know quite a bit about how ANFO works -- and how it worked against the 170 poor schlubs in the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City a decade ago.

Why would they need to test ANFO for bunker-busting? It's one of the least effective explosives, in terms of shoveling it into an aircraft and then dropping it on a target. It's difficult enough to shovel two tons of it into a rental truck and get it to work.

I think the bunker-buster story is the cover for it. Not that testing ANFO is sinister per se, but it doesn't sound like anything top-secret we're planning for use on Kim Jong-Il's Fortress of Solitude.

--p!

[hunter]

10. Nuclear charges can be shaped too.

A rock cutting experiment perhaps?

[MadisonProgressive]

11. I stand corrected.

Man that's gonna be one hell of a firecracker!

[Dead_Parrot]

6. Um , excuse me...

Keep your bombs out of the S. Pacific, thank you. We're still cleaning up the last mess...
:)

[hunter]

8. They can't test nukes, so they do this.

Iran and North Korea would face nuclear bunker busters. Our guys wouldn't be drilling carefully shaped holes and loading them with 700 tons of explosives, they'd be dropping nukes.

If we occupy Iran or North Korea it really doesn't matter what they have deep underground, we can wait them out. But we don't have the resources to do this. Iraq and Afghanistan are taking all we've got. The only option beyond that is a draft, and that would be political suicide for any U.S. government.

If North Korea and Iran were actually flinging nukes about, it would be a different story, we could throw nukes back at them. Other nations could too. But that's not going to happen. North Korea and Iran, like all other nations that have nuclear weapons, will be content to simply sit on them. They'll have earned their place in the nuclear club.

Instead BushCo is probably contemplating a preemptive "precision" nuclear strike on underground facilities. But I think if they did that the United States would become an instant pariah nation, and that would kill our economy.

Ah, more DU speculation...

[nine23]

3. A "weapon of mass destruction"...

...designed to seek out, largely fictitious, OTHER "weapons of mass destruction".

"The wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round..."

[jpak]

12. This is an earth penetrator mini-nuke simulation

There is no aircraft that can deliver a 700 tonne conventional weapon.

The yield of this test, however, is in the same ballpark as the earth penetrating mini-nukes that ChimpCo is developing...

http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001/v54n1/weapons.htm

http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=88&issue_id=48

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3126141.stm

http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-56/iss-11/p32.html

These are intended for use against underground ***nuclear**** facilities in Iran.

So much for the fucking "peaceful atom".

If Iran was building wind or solar electric farms, no one would care....

[NNadir]

13. I doubt this explosion will be quite as profound as the 1988 Henderson, NV

ammonium perchlorate explosion. That explosion was an accident.

That explosion was the equivalent of a 1 kt air burst nuclear weapon.

The explosion in a missle/rocket fuel plant injured 372 people, killed 2, and did $100M in damage. It took place about 10 miles from Las Vegas. I believe the hair on the brightly illuminated billboards of Wayne Newton was singed.

People should get used to big explosions. Soon we'll be importing lots of liquified natural gas, on the grounds that we can't think too clearly.