Pentagon eyes accelerated "bunker buster" bomb

[laststeamtrain]

Source: Reuters

Pentagon eyes accelerated "bunker buster" bomb
By Jim Wolf Jim Wolf Sun Aug 2, 4:52 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon is seeking to speed deployment of an ultra-large "bunker-buster" bomb on the most advanced U.S. bomber as soon as July 2010, the Air Force said on Sunday, amid concerns over perceived nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.

The non-nuclear, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, which is still being tested, is designed to destroy deeply buried bunkers beyond the reach of existing bombs.

If Congress agrees to shift enough funds to the program, Northrop Grumman Corp's radar-evading B-2 bomber "would be capable of carrying the bomb by July 2010," said Andy Bourland, an Air Force spokesman.

"The Air Force and Department of Defense are looking at the possibility of accelerating the program," he said. "There have been discussions with the four congressional committees with oversight responsibilities. No final decision has been made."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090802/ts_nm/us_usa_bomb

[billyoc]

1. The bridesmaids will never know what hit them.

[conspirator]

13. Duzzy nt

[ixion]

2. You'd never know we'd elected the 'change' candidate, or that Dems had a majority

the war machine, as always, marches on. :(

[krispos42]

5. Stuff like this needs to be developed

At least this kind of bomb will have the potential to be far more useful for far longer than, say, the F-22 project.


During the Cold War the preferred method of dealing with hardened command-and-control bunkers was to target them with multiple ICBMs, each tipped with a single, megaton-yield nuclear bomb, and just nuking the area until the bunker was powder.

I'll take a non-nuke any day of the week.



Remember, BushCo was making SERIOUS noises about using deep-penetration nuclear bombs on Iran to take our their nuclear facilities. The Union of Concerned Scientists came out strongly against that plan.

[enlightenment]

9. Please provide citation for the bunker buster nukes of

Cold War era. I've not heard of that . . .
Thank you.

[krispos42]

10. They weren't buster bunker nukes per se

ICBMs have the option of being fitted with a single large warhead or several smaller ones. If your target is "soft", like a city, you want to use multiple airbursts of nuclear warheads, as you will get more devastation from, say 3 smaller warheads detonated several miles apart than a single large warhead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_burst
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRV

If your target is "hard", like an underground command center, then you need a ground detonation to transmit as much shock into the earth above it as possible. If possible, you should sink the bomb deeply into the ground. However, those weapons are purpose-built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_bunker_buster



And the multiple targeting is just for redundancy; the reason we needed so many nuclear weapons during the Cold War era was because we could expect a fair number of them to not work in a full-scale nuclear war. Suprise attacks, weather conditions, and enemy action could take out many of them before they could be fired. For example, our ballistic missile submarines could be taken out by enemy attack submarines before they could fire, or weather could ground our bombers.

[enlightenment]

11. Ah.

Okay - I misunderstood your post. I thought you were suggesting we used nuclear warheads in this capacity during the Cold War.

I knew they were available (my dad was the first operations commander of Looking Glass; I grew up 'around' the idea of the bomb) - I just didn't think we had used them.

It would kind of defeated the 'cold' aspect of the Cold War, don't you think?

Thanks for the reply!

[Kolesar]

14. Well said...eom

[pasto76]

8. the change I voted for was not to eviscerate our military

that is a far left agenda item.

SGT PASTO

[avaistheone1]

12. You hardly have to worry about that. The U.S. spends more than 3 times the rest of the world on

armaments and defense.

I think that is pretty insane. It is not what I support, or what I voted for.

[tocqueville]

3. I doubt ill will penetrate....

60 meters (200 ft) in massive granit or similar. Anyway building bunkers deeper than that is no match (or in the middle of a mountain which gives a very akward penetration angle). Maybe the entries will have to be excavated, but the facilities would remain intact. A waste of money.

[Downwinder]

4. Contract with Iraq.

They will produce a lower cost IED version.

[spag68]

6. MOP

You just can't make this stuff up. Maybe they should have sent one to Turkey to use on that building they couldn't blow up.

[Psephos]

7. This is a hole card, not a bunker buster.

The game is Texas Hold'em, and the cards you have in the hole -- plus an inscrutable poker face -- are the key to a winning hand.