A few years ago, I remember seeing a blurb on CNN (or maybe the Discovery channel) about an experimental U.S. Air Force weapon codenamed the “Colt .45”—it was a ground penetrating “bunker buster” incendiary bomb or missile; the idea being that you could target a reenforced stockpile of chemical or biological weapons, and incinerate them before they could spread to the outside enviroment.
My question is: what was this weapon, and it’s official designation? Has it/is it going to enter service, or did it never get beyond testing? If the latter, was it because it didn’t work, or it would’ve just been cheaper and easier to use something else, or what?
I recall reading something about this in AW&ST. The follow-on discusion was that there was no hope of reliably destroying even most the C/B nasties, and the maximum acceptable leakage was zero. The project quickly died.
Zero anything is not compatible with the concept of “weapon”. Ditto 100% anything. Until / unless we get over the idea that warfare can operate like a modern 6-sigma factory, we’ll be doomed to making dumb decisions in both directions.
Having said that, the idea of destroying a bunker full of chemicals in place is nuts, unless you use a ground-burst nuke large enough to ensure 100% of the volume of the bunker is within the fireball. And then you’ve made a larger mess than you started with.
