Bunker Busters probably failed to penetrate Iranian concrete
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
Centrifuge manufacturing has come a long way in the previous 20 years. Precision machining has newer models with up to 200,000 rpm. "Centrus (formerly USEC) plans a centrifuge with 60 cm diameter, 12 m height and 900 m/s peripheral speed." Even with their centrifuge manufacturing facilities hit/destroyed, they could reconstitute within a year or two and continue the refinement process.
Boggles the mind that this is 3,333 revolutions per second.
I'm not saying you're wrong but a quick check of a few LLMs says that 90,000 RPM is widely cited as the practical upper limit for current operational centrifuges in facilities like those operated by Urenco, Rosatom, or Orano.
900m/s is approx Mach 1.5.
But isotope separation is usually done on UF6, which is a gas. These centrifuges work a bit differently, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge
That's not a typo, I actually own this device and couldn't believe at first this thing spins with ninety thousand rpm. A lot has happened since my last 5400rpm hdd bit the dust.
Why not pick a mountain where you install the bunker 300m under the peak ?
The way I understand it, is that they drill horizontally, so it doesn't really matter how high the mountain is, but it does matter how high it is for protection obviously.
The assumption is that they haven't done that -- but it's not implausible to add some multiple of 10m on to the estimate.
I'd imagine they studied bunker buster arms in the design, and very probably concluded, that there wasn't much need to go very deep. Demolishing 80m of granite alone is a nuclear-sized problem, +20m and maybe 10m of specialised concrete, i'd imagine is fine.
It's also highly likely that the design of the installation is robust against collapse, eg., designed so that small areas can collapse independently. So even with arms which could penetrate that deep, you'd need a large number.
I think it's plausible that the entire supply of bunker busters the US currently has could do the job, but I highly doubt the US would risk depleting its capacity on a "maybe" of this kind.
The whole operation was a performance to try a carrot rather than stick approach with israel
That would be beyond any reasonable doubt that it cannot be destroyed (even with nukes ? ), which would make more sense to me. And the country is surely big enough to find one suitable for that.
You don't destroy a facility by bombing through concrete and exploding it. This isn't an action movie.
You overpressure the structure with a shockwave.
By targeting the vents, we've produced a 200m crater showing that the shockwave did violate the facilities containment. That place is gone.
This is the same sort of silly as "but they didn't blow up the reactors!" No, they intentionally avoided them to avoid throwing radiological material into civilian areas.
We can detect a pencil size rod of uranium from satellite and plane - because we've informed countries when they have had radiological leaks. If Iran moved any meaningful material (doubtful, uranium is hard to transport when enriched..) then the US knows where.
2. The facilities are dual use. Bombing IRGC is fair game, bombing Bobby the Janitor or James the Steam Engineer is not. Giving a warning so personnel can evac is normal.
If they had moved a few KG it's reasonable for the containers to be heavily shielded but 400KG? Not a chance, that would be hundreds of trucks and tons of specialized equipment.
Sure, if by "this" you mean media and a segment of the population harping on how the strike did little or nothing.
After the strike and before this reporting Israel could justify deescalation by saying the nuclear program was crippled and Iran could justify deescalation by acting like it was no big deal and they lobbed counter strikes to great effect (lol) and the US could justify deescalation with the usual "look what happens to brown foreigners who cross us and our buddies" schtick and from there the matter could be quietly dropped, at least as much as such things can be.
That may all still happen, but all this rhetoric about how the strikes were ineffective is driving things toward escalation.
Except Netanyahu doesn't appear to want to de-escalate. And has a long history of repeatedly declaring Iran is only X weeks away from a practical nuke to justify immediate strikes.
Almost every national or international report I see and read has a distinct narrative threaded through it. Just look at descriptives and word choice.
“ICE Barbie” etc…
Obviously everything you hear from someone else, whether it's published in the newspaper or a passing comment from your neighbor, it's going to be filtered through their ideas, beliefs, and goals.
Some people have a goal to communicate accurately and limit their bias. Other people find it more important to get ad clicks or upvotes.
Just do a google search for the phrase and qualify it with news results only. Lots and lots of well known news outlets are using it regularly to refer to her.
I am not saying this is a one-sided thing only on the left. It’s on the other side too. The “ICE Barbie” was the most obvious recent example that I have been seeing.
What you will see is msn, nj.com, telegraph, yahoo news, TNR, metro.co.uk, Toronto Sun, New York Sun using it
Do you honestly believe this?
If my neighbor, who grew up in Canada, says "it's not very cold out today", he is attempting to describe the world as it is. Is he correct? If I consider him to be incorrect, it doesn't follow that he is trying to mislead me.
I have heard them talk so negatively on the owners and chief editors of populist media such as Murdock, Berlusconi, Springer that I have just cut them completely out of my news consumption.
Netanyahu's goal is to either occupy or destroy the Islamic world. He's smart enough to know he has to do it in baby steps. He's been working the long game on this for decades. So he'll notch this up as a win, and already be working on his next plan.
I don't see an imminent escalation, unless Iran itself escalates things (in ways other than economic)
No…Trump’s base didn’t want this. They might not pull back support if the deescalation holds (because he is scratching their other itches) but the MAGA base are definitely not excited about more war and conflict for the US.
MAGA is not neocon.
Hypocrisy or inconsistency have already never stopped the Republican party and they will most certainly not stop the most extreme version of it.
- https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-posts-bom...
- https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1147408825006...
Almost every Trump voter I know voted for him as the lesser of two evils.
How anybody can consider voting for Trump as a lesser evil is just incomprehensible.
She should have raised a flag…she had the media access to do it, but stayed silent. She put her party over her country.
Is not prosecuting crimes more evil, or is jailing people more evil?
Is not trusting science more evil, or is trusting (at least partly) wrong science more evil?
Is hiring people with lesser qualifications more evil, or is letting structural inequality persist more evil?
Is letting evil persist in the world more evil, or is foreign military intervention more evil?
Those are not questions with objectively verifiable answers. The answers depend on your values system. If someone has answers that you disagree with, that does not inherently mean that their values system is stupid or immoral or wrong.
Note well: I'm not saying that Trump is a good answer. Even plenty of people who voted for him don't think he's a good answer. But some like his actions during his first term better than they liked Biden's actions.
Can someone tell me why the US or Israel can’t just fly in a Seal Team that goes into the facility, plants a bunch of C4 and calls it a day? They can surely ringfence and defend the area by putting fighter jets and a couple hundred drones in the air while the operation is ongoing.
This happened 45 years ago, with different gear, and a lot of operations between now and then. It should have zero impact on any decision to go into Iran or not.
Of course, whether the US would go in is still a valid question, including other aspects of risk.
The entire point of making the comparison to "doing the same thing in another country" rather than nothing or some alternative course of action was to head off this specific nitpick.
The US already tried that thing once in the early days of the current regime (literally linked in the comment I initially replied to!) and it's one of the bigger reasons we don't have normalized relations with them, though it's perhaps a distant second to the 800lb gorilla with a little hat in the region.
After all, you're supposed to police your own residents, and keep them from invading embassies, which are foreign turf. You're also supposed to respect that aspect of diplomacy. Letting your citizens raid an embassy and kidnap diplomats is the act of a banana republic, and definitely signals the end of diplomacy.
If the current regime is upset at someone trying to rescue their own people kidnapped from their embassy, then frankly that regime is insane. Iran is 100% at fault for allowing that to happen, not working quickly to resolve it. The US is 100% correct to have sent people in to rescue their own people, under those circumstances.
If the embassy was better armed, with more security, they'd be completely correct to shoot-to-kill every single person who stormed that embassy. Yet sending people in to rescue them after the fact is... wrong?
Hardly, and I sincerely doubt Iran is significantly upset still. Yelling about it, sure. Upset for real? No.
After all, it was a spectacular failure.
(mind you, the idea that a raid on a fortified facility, rather than lightly or undefended civilian buildings, would be an easy win, is the real delusion)
It was a clever move on the part of Iran, because an invading force would need to bring heavy equipment with them, which isn't going to happen.
And yes, I don't know the skill set to validate the thought. However, I have seen beaver dams cleared with dynamite, and there's a wide level of explosives which can be dropped or deployed on foot...
(People saying it would be violent, well sure, but so is dropping bunker busters...)
There’s a big risk difference between boots-on-the-ground and flying over while pushing a button.
I wonder how much the US taxpayer paid for 6 B2 bombers to drop 12 mega bombs for the benefit of Israel.
That said, I’m just a programmer and have no idea.
I doubt they are conducted that often at this scale.
We don't even know if it worked.
The base is not entirely in their control, but also doesn't shed US military lives when it stirs the pot. Using a local minority to project influence over their majority neighbors. A play as old as colonialism.
"Get To Know America’s Long Serving B61 Family Of Nuclear Bombs" (2019)
https://www.twz.com/19263/get-to-know-americas-long-serving-...
> "The most recent operational variant, the B61-11, entered service in 1997 and is the first to dramatically differ in form, as well as function. The U.S. military treats this version as a combination tactical and strategic bomb even though it’s based on the B61-7 and reportedly has a single, maximum yield of approximately 340-400 kilotons."
> "The bigger difference, though, is that it has a significantly reinforced shell, possibly with a depleted uranium penetrating nose section, a delay fuzing system, and a booster rocket motor in the rear, all so it can break into deeply buried, hardened facilities. There are less than 100 of these bombs in existence, according to publicly available data, and the United States more or less built them with one specific target in mind."
> "In 1996, Russia finished work on its Kosvinsky Kamen bunker, part its so-called “continuity of government” plans to protect senior leadership in the event of a nuclear strike or other major emergency. Similar in concept and reportedly similarly—if not better—protected than the U.S. military’s Cheyenne Mountain Complex or Site R, also known Raven Rock, the Kremlin built it specifically to be hardened against nuclear weapons going off up above. The B61-11’s job was to put even those defenses beyond reach in what would likely already be an apocalyptic scenario."
> "Before the B61-11, the United States planned to use a much less elegant approach when it came to nuclear bunker busting, relying on aging B53 bombs, a design dating back to 1958 for this purpose. These 12-foot long, 4-foot wide, nearly 9,000 pound weapons would have used the sheer explosive power of their 9 megaton yield to create massive craters and crush underground targets. The U.S. government also explored using a modified B83-1, with its 1.2 megaton yield, for the role before deciding on the modified B61."
(The article also discusses the newer B61-12 as a potential substitute, although it's unclear as the key information is secret).
Is probably what the Russian and Chinese reaction to a tactical nuke usage even if it was for bunker busting.
It only counts as escalation if they weren't building a nuke but Israel bombing their nuke programme forced them to build a nuke?
The only way this deescalates is if the US is able to regain some sovereignty and remove the parasitic influences dragging us to war. From Trumps cabinet to the broader administration, military industrial complex, media and even many prominent billionaires like Adelson - there’s too many Zionists pulling the strings.
You can inherently dig deeper than you can bomb. Mines go miles down. The odds are not in your favour unless you know it’s shallow and soft - and administration is giving more yolo vibes than knowing vibes
> Why the Strongest Bombs Can’t Crack [High] Performance Military Concrete
Israel (and SA) are the only ones with skin in this game and won't be able to easily interfere forever. yes, iran has been massively infiltrated - kudos israel. But after all this recent spectacle, the regime will be focus on survival - this includes cleaning house and continue bomb building efforts.
Napoleon proved that having meritocracy in the battlefield leadership beats out old sullen generals that are there because they have always been..
This seems like nonsense. Rebuilding an entire facility from a crater is so much work that you may just as well build it elsewhere.
Fixing entrances and aerials seems trivial in comparison.
> Hypersonics are missiles which travel through the atmosphere at speeds in excess of Mach 5. Equipped with tungsten penetrators, they could act as “rods from God,” punching through layered concrete like an armor-piercing bullet. With no explosive warhead, such weapons do damage through kinetic energy alone.
Then what, though? Underground installations are not like bodies; you can't just expect to take one out by shooting through the brain, heart or lungs (which is hard enough to do as it is). Unless you're launching 100 non-explosive hypersonic missiles, you're probably not going to do much damage.
Maybe the hypersonic missile can be used to create a path for a normal warhead to penetrate to where the explosive can do the required amount of damage. That's going to require some pretty precise needle-threading, though.
Alternatively, the hypersonic missiles could have a core of extremely radioactive material.
Early US Intel assessment suggests strikes on Iran did not destroy nuclear sites
Was this attack just all for show, did they move everything?