The US has a 30,000 pound bomb named the GBU-57 A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, one or several of which are suppose to be able to destroy Iran’s Fordo nuclear enrichment facility, located under maybe 80 meters of rock and soil. Reports vary. The facility allegedly has 4 entrances.
Could a military engineer explain to me why transforming the 4 doorways to rubble wouldn’t solve the problem? I understand that nuclear enrichment requires workers and workers need to go to and from the job site. Or is permanently destroying the entrance to a mine shaft more difficult than leveling the whole mountain?
Destroying the entrances would trap people inside, but it would leave the facility intact. We also don’t know what sort of survival supplies are inside, either. Such a plan might cause some deaths, but probably not for all (at least not immediately). They might have enough to survive long enough for entrances to be cleared or a new shaft dug for exit of people and/or resupply. Also, there might be an entrance/exit we are not aware of.
Even if we manage to kill everyone inside the supplies and machinery might survive to be used again.
Whereas if we have a bomb that can penetrate into the mountain, to the heart of the facility, and directly destroy machinery and material, it really screws with the overall program and might even require the Iranians start over from scratch.
I’m no military engineer, but digging a new entrance hardly seems like an insurmountable obstacle. The contents of the bunker have to be destroyed to make any strike a successful one.
My understanding why only that bomb and only the U.S. is that the weight and size means only a B2 bomber can deliver it. And no one else has a bomber that big.
This bomb can easily be carried by a C-130, and Israel operates C-130s. But even though Israel has given Iran’s SEAD/DEAD capabilities a pretty good pounding, there may still be some risk of anti-aircraft fire, so a stealthy aircraft is needed.
Of course that’s one interpretation. There are other possible political explanations about why certain American politicians might want to join the fray, but this is FQ so I’ll leave off.
There is only one weapon for the job, experts contend. It is called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or the GBU-57, and it weighs so much — 30,000 pounds — that it can be lifted only by a B-2 bomber. Israel does not own either the weapon or the bomber needed to get it aloft and over target.
In war, the effectiveness of striking at infrastructure is directly proportional to the difficulty of repairing or replacing that infrastructure. Dams and bridges are good targets, because they take years to build new ones. It’s hard to do that in the middle of a war.
With this bunker, the entrances are the least complicated part, and moving rubble just isn’t that hard. The parts that would be difficult to replace are all much harder to hit, that being the whole point of the bunker.
Iran has spent decades building these facilities, so a few days or weeks delays while they clear out a tunnel or two isn’t going to have any appreciable impact on the ability to function.
Well Israel is supposed to have 90 or so nuclear weapons–so they would likely work. And with continuing massive radiation at the site Iran is not likely to rebuild.
There would of course be a massive worldwide negative reaction.
I was imagining massive cave-ins around the entrances to the complex would make clearing them structurally hazardous but…
…I didn’t consider this workaround.
Another hypothetical military option could involve continuing air superiority with regular bombing runs in the area. Except Iran isn’t a small country however weakened and a drawn out war may not work to Israel’s advantage.
Israel has considered placing bombs deep inside the mountain with commando raids, but those are obviously risky.
ETA below: FYI only: Estimates of the depth of the Fordo complex vary. I took the 80 meter number from a real source, but it’s an inherently soft number.
According to a claim made in a WSJ opinion piece, there was a planned commando raid to do exactly that that was compromised and scuttled by some of the leaks from Tulsi Gabbard’s office.
Depends heavily on the size of the warhead and the means of delivery, and everything publicly available about the Israeli nuclear arsenal is conjecture; Israel will neither confirm nor deny that it even has nuclear weapons.
Do you think perhaps that Israel’s military and intelligence community, who are not idiots, have not considered the possibility of using a nuclear warhead?
Undoubtedly they have. However, using nukes has repercussions. If the same goal can be achieved with “conventional” weapons then there is a lot of impetus to do it that way.
For what it is worth, the only thing Israel says about nuclear weapons is they will not be the first to use them. Somewhere on the web it was suggested that it would require two bunker busters to get through.
There is the small problem that if the bunker-buster MOAB’s are successful they could release radioactive materials into the air. Not as a nuclear explosion, but as debris from a conventional explosion, albeit a very large one. Basically turning the “nuclear facility” into a dirty bomb site. A sufficiently deep crater will help contain it, but there will still be a lot of dust kicked up and some of it will be “spicy” and “hot”.