Mike Fredenburg
Back in September, Israel successfully destroyed a bunker buried 60 feet underground, killing virtually all of Hezbollah’s senior leadership. Executing the operation involved about a dozen F-15s, each carrying six 2000-pound GBU-31v(3) joint direct attack munitions (JDAMs) bunker-buster bombs. First the residential high rises over the underground bunker were systematically destroyed. Then a brilliantly planned operation was executed, involving dropping dozens of bunker-busters in a precisely timed pattern that eventually blasted through 20 yards of soil and rock to destroy the bunker. Only a few militaries in the world could have executed such an intricate and complex operation.
The point of the above description is not to praise Israeli military competence, but to show just how hard it is to destroy a bunker. This sheds concerning light on analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security that finds that two of Iran’s most important nuclear weapons facilities buried under at least 80 to 145 meters of rock (262 to 475 feet), with further protection from reinforced concrete that is very resistant to penetration and the ground shockwave produced by a bunker buster’s explosives. This makes taking them out problematic; the world’s most powerful conventional bunker buster, the United States’ 30,000-pound GBU-57 bunker buster can penetrate only about 40 meters of moderately hard rock.
Still, multiple precision strikes by massive ordnance penetrators delivered by our B-2 stealth bombers could almost certainly severely damage or destroy Iran’s less deeply buried facilities. Even the more deeply buried facilities could be crippled by collapsing their main entrances, although such facilities almost certainly have backup entrances that would allow them to continue with some level of function.
But even if our B-2s can evade Iran’s Russia-supplied anti-stealth radars and deliver enough GBU-57s to damage or destroy all the known facilities involved with nuclear weapons production and delivery, we still don’t really, truly know how much weapons-grade enriched uranium or plutonium—which can be quickly made into implosion-type fission bombs—the Islamic Republic has been able to acquire and hide away in secret locations.
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