Let’s say Dr. Evil gets in into his head to destroy Mt. Rushmore because reasons. Could he pull it off with a single, well-aimed tomahawk missile? Or would it require an entire barrage (as in, dozens)?
It would depend on the kind of munition being used; the cluster submunitions would only do very localized shallow surface damage at best, a 1000 kg high explosive would do more damage if you could get it to detonate upon contact but would still only spall off a few inches in depth of material over maybe a few meters in diameter of area, and a W80 200 kT nuclear warhead at near standoff would probably do even more thermal than blast damage, probably shearing off entire sections. But most of the energy will be lost due a lack of penetration, and of course the BGM-109 ‘Tomahawk’ has a procurement cost exceeding US$2M per unit not including the expense and difficulty of obtaining an export license if you are not a US DoD user.
What you really want for this job is either a deep penetrating munition that embeds itself a few feet into the granite face or else a tamper-backed explosive charge that reflects much of the blast energy initially going outward back i to the rock face, which will do much deeper and broader damage. Laying a series of such charges across the faces could potentially shear off broad swathes of the carved faces revealing the unweathered ‘virgin’ substrate behind them, and pissing off w Gutzon Borglum fans everywhere.
I’ve blown a few duck ponds and once a big tree stump that did not go as planned, and occasionally get to observe large rocket motors being ‘disposed’ by mass detonation, but I don’t really have experience with large demolition projects such as this. Maybe @Tripler can provide more authoritative guidance with implementing your scheme.
Stranger
Militaries don’t have much need for products that destroy mountain faces. But mining companies do. Don’t look at weapons to do the job, but rather engineers with some precisely formulated and positioned explosives.
Why the hate on Mt Rushmore?
Go down to Georgia and set up a howitzer pointing at Stone Mountain. Charge $1000 a pop to fire at it. Let’s answer this question in a practical manner. I’m in for a coupla G’s.
No…but they do for bunkers hiding behind mountain faces.
I am not sure what the OP is looking for. The least amount of bombs/explosives? The most cost efficient way? Something else?
A nuke would do it. The US has some bunker busters that would do it. Mining companies could spend a couple weeks drilling holes and putting in a lot of “little” charges that would do it.
Certainly it can be done.
Two slave owners, an imperialist, and a lapsed Whig.
…walk into a bar.
Stranger
This. I saw a demo once with several concrete columns. One column had a demolition charge strapped to its side, another had a charge inserted in a drilled hole in its side, all the way to the central axis of the column - and a third column had the charge inserted into a hole in its side, same as the second column , but then it had sand packed in behind the charge.
After detonation, the first column had virtually no damage, the second had a bit of concrete blown out around the entrance to the hole, and the third column was blown into two parts.
This, If you want to break up a solid mass of hardrock, you have to bore into it and fill the hole with high explosive. If you want to break up a lot of hardrock, you don’t drill a bigger hole, you drill a second hole next to the first hole, with hole diameters and separations determined by a couple centuries of research and institutional knowledge.
When miners deploy explosives like that, they tend to fill the hole completely with explosive material; in these cases I think the total mass of explosive in the hole is so large that the unexploded portion acts as a tamper for the already-detonated portion.
By that standard we need to erase almost every US historical figure. That cure is probably worse than the disease considering the current direction of the country.
But IMO this is the best answer:
If you make it a smaller one, say 105mm, people would get a nice explosion, see some rock fly, and the traitor monument would recognizably last long enough to collect a lot of money for the cause of refactoring how we teach history in a more factual direction to make clear who the traitors were/are.
And here’s 8 minutes of jus that!
If you look at the impact crater left by the plane crash in Philadelphia, you realize just dropping a bomb or firing few shells isn’t going to do much to a mountain. You would need a much more detailed plan.
Benjamin Rush? Moses Brown? Benjamin Franklin? Absalom Jones? Anthony Benezet? John Brown? Frederick Douglass?
As a nation, we’ve collectively made the decision to celebrate slave-owning figures, and moreover, to deemphasize abolitionists who criticized the practice of human slavery on both moral and practical grounds in order to avoid the discussion about the implications of slavery in our national history, both in the pre-Civil War formation of laws and ‘compromises’ that still impact jurisprudence today, and the post-Civil War failure of Reconstruction and general integration of enslaved peoples which led to mass lynchings, peonage, exploitative sharecropping, redlining, and the social epidemics of mass incarceration and environmental injustice that exists today which specifically plagues descendants of enslaved peoples. We could certainly hold up Washington as the military leader and first President or Jefferson for his political prowess and scholarship of democracy while still acknowledging the hypocrisy and injustice of their promotion of the ideals “…that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” while owning other human beings as the complexity of even leading thinkers of a less enlightened time, but vandalizing a natural geological feature in order to carve 60 foot tall visages in granite tends to shut down that discussion in favor of idolatry and myth-making, notwithstanding that the architect of the monument, Gutzon Borglum, was a massive racist who associated with the Ku Klux Klan (although not a member) and elevated Roosevelt to being included in the monument not because of historical significance per se but because he was a close personal friend.
We can learn more from history, and the lessons from the mistakes and prejudices of its makers, if we make a sincere attempt to represent the events and the major figures in it accurate context and nuance instead of hero worship and making monuments that enshrine them as incorruptible figures of virtue. And we can definitely stop blasting away at mountains just to make tacky tourist traps that will seem bizarrely fetishistic and ethically obtuse to future generations.
Stranger
If the goal is to remove the mountain, you need nukes. If the goal is to remove the sculpture off the face in one shot you’re right it’s gonna take more than an artillery piece.
But here’s a pic of Washington’s nose with some workmen for scale: Mount Rushmore pic 2 - Mount Rushmore - Wikipedia.
His nose and that impact crater are roughly the same size. From experience I can say that crater is also about what a 500# aerial bomb accomplishes. A 155mm howitzer crater is smaller, but not trivial versus the size of the nose.
IMO you could park a battery of 155mm howitzers at the Rushmore visitors center / viewing platform and render the whole sculpture unrecognizable in the space of a few minutes’ shooting.
Sounds like the plot of a Fallout: New Vegas wildcat DLC mission entitled “Ghost Dancer”.
Stranger
The Philadelphia plane came down pretty fast, but the size of the crater was probably due in part to their being soil underneath the sidewalk instead of just hardrock. If you crashed the same plane into Mount Rushmore at the same speed, I expect it wouldn’t penetrate nearly as deeply.
Many years ago the folks at Sandia-Albuquerque ran an F-4 Phantom on a rocket sled into a concrete block at 500 MPH to test the integrity of reactor containment buildings. It only penetrated a few inches. As planes are mostly made from spindly bits of aluminum, the deepest penetration was by the steel spindles of the jet engines. Some footage here (gets pretty good around 0:45):
Moderator Note
We’re getting a lot of opinions about Mt. Rushmore in this thread, so this is a reminder that we are currently in FQ. The factual question here is what firepower is required to obliterate the faces on Mt. Rushmore. This is a fairly straightforward factual question about the amount of explosives or other weaponry required to blast away a certain amount of rock.
Opinions about Mt. Rushmore itself and whether or not we should obliterate it are questions for a different forum. Please post appropriately. If anyone wishes to discuss those other aspects of the topic, feel free to do so in the appropriate forum.
Using BLU-109/B bunker-busting warheads (250 kg, 550lb tritonal) in behind the faces from above would do it. Four would be sufficient.
Here’s a picture of the aftermath of bombing in Beirut with multiple bombs.
Video of a BLU-109 impacting concrete:
The substate under Beruit is primarily karstic limestone overlayed with the sandy loam you can see in that picture, which is much softer than the Harney Peak granite of Mount Rushmore. The BLU-109/B is designed to penetrate ~6 ft of reinforced concrete and detonate within the free volume of the bunker beneath. I would achieve less penetration through solid granite with no void and basically spallate a shallow crater a few feet deep doing superficial damage about the impact point as most of the energy will be reflected back up toward the free surface. The only way it would damage the carvings is if it landed right on the top of one of the heads (again doing minor damage) or if it exercised a pre-existing fissure.
There was a proposal from the infamous Scowcroft Commission back in the MX/Peacekeeper era (before the decision was made to deploy the initial wing in retrofitted Minuteman silos around FE Warren AFB) to base the missiles in silos dug a thousand feet or more into the solid granite of the Rocky Mountains. Aside from the logistical difficulties and environmental destruction, it turned out that it would take most or all of the domestic production of high brisance for many years to bore even a wing of 50 silos that deep, and the proposal (like most that came from that commission of our ‘finest minds’) was abandoned. 1000 kg of tritonal probably isn’t sufficient to even perform a rhinectomy on Washington’s face even if you could place it optimally much less remove all four visages.
Stranger
Of course, precisely-measured and positioned explosives were how the faces were carved in the first place. Removing the faces must surely be easier than creating them.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-making-of-mount-rushmore-121886182/
About 30 men at any given time, and 400 in total, worked on the monument, in a variety of capacities. Blacksmiths forged tools and drill bits. Tramway operators oversaw the shuttling of equipment from the base of the mountain to the work zone. There were drillers and carvers strapped into bosun chairs, and men who, by hand, worked the winches that lowered them. Call boys, positioned to see both the skilled laborers and the winch houses barked instructions to the winch operators. And, powder men cut sticks of dynamite to certain lengths and placed them in holes to blast out sections of the granite.
Even assuming that it takes less effort to remove the visages than it did to carve them, and more powerful high explosives, it would still be a major endeavor to remove them from Mount Rushmore. Dropping a few bombs or pummeling the carvings with a couple of artillery barrages is just going to pock the surface, not effect an ordnance rhytidectomy on the monument.
Stranger