Scott Canon has an excellent piece in the Kansas City Star today on the “massive ordinance penetrator”–the Big BLU–a 30,000 pound bomb the Air Force is building to reach hardened, underground facilities of the kind used by North Korea and Iran to shield their nuclear weapons programs. According to Canon, the Air Force will detonate one of these monsters underground at the White Sands Missile Range sometime this week in an effort to better understand the effects of such a massive blast. Canon spoke to my favorite weapons expert, John Pike of globalsecurity.org:
Indeed, Stephen Trimble, the America’s Bureau Chief for Jane’s Defense, fixated on this quote from Canon’s piece at his always interesting blog The DEW Line.
I’ve spoken to Pike before about the effectiveness of bunker-busting bombs versus advanced concepts like hyperkinetic weapons and low-yield nuclear penetrators. According to Pike, even a 5,000 pound bunker-buster would likely cut through Iran’s underground facilities “like a hot-knife through butter.” Pike speculated that the development of these larger weapons might be, at least partly, a ruse by the U.S. military to convince the Iranians that their facilities are safe from American attack. If that’s true, Cannon also notes the limitations of deploying the massive ordinance penetrator rather than conventional 5,000 pound bunker-busters.
From globalsecurity.org, this image shows the Big BLU alongside the GBU-28, the military’s 5,000 pound bunker-buster. Also shown are Tallboy and Grandslam, two World War II era bombs designed by the British, the latter of which remains the largest conventional bomb ever used in combat, weighing in at 22,000 pounds. 41 Grand Slams were dropped on Germany in the final months of the war.
