Well, the US has been talking about the pros and cons of building a new generation of small tactical nuclear penetrators (the “bunker busters” you may have heard being discussed during the previous administration).
IMHO the purpose of such a bomb is to be used – unlike strategic weapons which (theoretically) have deterrent effect even when unused, a bunker buster doesn’t come up in conversations about “making opponents think twice;” instead, people talk about bunker busters in terms of “if we had one we could get those bastards” and “we’ll hit them in their holes,” which sounds to me like we’d use them. Again, IMHO, use of nuclear weapons will be bad, in the long run, for our reputation; bad in terms of supplying “moral” justification to all sorts of people who wish to harm us. If the US is seen as eager to nuke goatherders hiding in holes, it seems more like an admission of fear and weakness and an invitation to nuke us back than a show of strength.
Furthermore, if one could identify a cave entrance that contained bad guys (yes, that’s a very big if) it seems like a nuke isn’t even needed. All we really have to do is seal it up – I’ll call it the Cask of Amontillado tactic.
The engineering problem is simple; the danger would be that people in the cave would be able to attack engineers sealing the cave. Therefore I would use a three-pronged approach:
[ol]
[li]Special Forces guys identify the cave and mark the entrance with a targeting laser invisible to the naked eye[/li][li]Air Force drops a theoretical sticky bomb (some kind of sealant) with a laser guidance package attached, temporarily plugging the hole[/li][li]Engineers land by helicopter and permanently seal the entrance with concrete and rebar before anyone can fight through the sticky bomb to shoot at them[/li][li]Bad guys scream “For the love of God, Motresor!”[/li][/ol]
If the bad guys come out of the cave before step 2, light them up; if not, proceed.
The weak point in this plan might appear to be the theoretical sticky bomb, but I don’t think so. We have all sorts of fantastic weapons already (the FAE in the OP, for example, or the carbon-fiber bomb used in the Balkans to bring down electrical grids) and we routinely airdrop masses of chemicals to smother fires. Lord knows there’s a lot of sticky/gummy/adhesive materials in the world. Making a suitable sticky bomb should be a weekend’s work for a couple of munitions designers and they’d still have time to barbecue.
No, the weak point is, as always, identifying the Bad Men and determining which cave entrances contain them (possibly several entrances open to the same cave).
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