Can an American bunker-buster destroy Iran’s nuclear mountain?
Should the US enter the conflict between Israel and Iran, it would be expected to play a key role in destroying Iran’s underground uranium enrichment facilities. That task would almost certainly fall to a select number of US bomber planes that are big enough to deliver a 30,000lb precision-guided bomb, known as the GBU-57 E/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP — the world’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb.
Dropped from a B2 stealth bomber, the 6m-long MOP can reportedly penetrate with sheer kinetic force more than 60 metres of rock and soil — depending on the earth’s hardness — before exploding. Because it is precision-guided, multiple bombs can in theory be dropped on a single spot. That gives the MOP, which is more powerful than any known conventional bomb in Israel’s arsenal, potentially enough impact to destroy much of Iran’s underground enrichment facilities, especially the Natanz site, which is thought to be buried 20 metres underground and encased in some 2 metres of reinforced concrete.
However, it may not be enough to destroy the more-heavily protected Fordow facility, which is buried inside a mountain under as much as 80 metres of rock and soil — even though the bomb was developed for that specific purpose.
Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said that some of Fordow’s most sensitive facilities may be buried even deeper, as much as half a mile underground. “I have been there many times,” he told the FT this month.
“To get there you take a spiral tunnel down, down, down.” The lack of any guarantee that a successful bomb strike, or even a series of strikes, would destroy most or all of any already enriched nuclear stockpile in Fordow recalls a similar predicament faced by the US in the past.
When the US was contemplating a pre-emptive bombing campaign
against Soviet nuclear weapons stationed in Cuba during the 1962 Cuban missile
crisis, a key concern was a potential failure to destroy all the targets — a
risk calculus that prompted President Kennedy to opt for a naval blockade and
diplomacy instead.
“The US Air Force
were only confident that they could destroy 85 per cent of the targets — which
is why there were also plans for a follow-up ground invasion,” said Robert
Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark
survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. “In the Iranian case, how can the US
National Security Council be sure that they are going to get everything? That
is the big issue,” he said.
Manufactured by Boeing, the MOP has been tested at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico but has never been used in active combat. That potentially introduces a second problem. “To destroy Fordow, which the MOP was explicitly designed for, would probably take at least two bombs, each hitting exactly the same spot,” Pape said.
“That may be fine, and I am sure the
US Air Force has the technical capabilities. But it’s never been done before in
a real war.” An earlier large-scale US bomb, the 22,000lb Massive Ordnance Air
Blast or MOAB, colloquially known as the Mother of All Bombs, was less powerful
but was used to devastating effect in Afghanistan in 2017. It was dropped on a
cave complex operated by an Islamic State affiliate in Nangarhar Province.
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