U.S. Tests 15-Ton Bunker Buster

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — In a tunnel under the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the U.S. military this month conducted the first test detonation of a massive bomb designed to crack hardened bunkers (see GSN, Oct. 20, 2006).

At the helm of the $30 million project to develop what the Defense Department calls the Massive Ordnance Penetrator is the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon branch devoted to countering threats from weapons of mass destruction.

The 30,000-pound bomb could be deployed against the type of underground facilities in which Iran is engaged in uranium-enrichment work in defiance of tightening U.N. sanctions (see GSN, March 26).  The Bush administration has said both that it is committed to diplomacy in the Iranian nuclear crisis but also that military options remain on the table.

While the immediate applications of the enormous conventional weapon seem to relate to the standoff with Tehran, the bomb likely sprang from concerns about a different state, according to defense strategy expert Michael O’Hanlon, a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“It probably has more to do with North Korea than Iran,” O’Hanlon said,   noting that this type of weapon development takes years.  Defense officials said planning for the March 15 test began three years ago.

The Bush administration in 2002 alleged that the North Korean regime was cheating on a Clinton-era nonproliferation agreement by pursuing uranium enrichment while its plutonium-based program was frozen (see GSN, March 7).

Defense planners were probably spurred by improvements in tunneling technology as well as concerns that the United States might not be willing or able to use nuclear weapons to defeat hardened, underground targets, O’Hanlon said.

A Defense Department plan to develop a nuclear bunker buster faced intense opposition in Congress and was eventually abandoned in 2006 (see GSN, March 24, 2006).  A planned test to detonate 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in the Nevada desert was also recently scrubbed amid public fears that the explosion, to take place over an underground tunnel, was designed to simulate a low-yield nuclear weapon (see GSN, Feb. 23).

Declared a “success,” the recent test of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator was not related to the recently canceled “Divine Strake” test, defense officials said. The penetrator packs 5,300 pound of explosives into its 30,000-pound shell.

Officials at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency would not quantify exactly what the criteria for success were but said that “MOP technology demonstration” is proceeding on track. Test drops from a B-52 long-range bomber are planned to start late in 2007.  The Air Force is also proceeding with work to shoehorn the enormous bomb into the B-2 stealth bomber.

There was no immediate word on when the weapon could be deployed.

DTRA officials refused to discuss capabilities of the weapons, but in 2005, after a briefing from Northrop Grumman and Boeing contractors involved in the weapon design, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that the 20-foot-long bomb would burrow as many as 200 feet into the ground through reinforced concrete.

In terms of underground facilities surviving bunker-buster attacks intact, there is pretty much a single consideration:  “It’s always a question of how deep they are,” O’Hanlon said.

While the tunnelers and burrowers can largely always go deeper, bomb designers end up butting against a wall.  For the bombs to penetrate increasingly deeper before detonating, the velocity of the projectile needs to increase, O’Hanlon said.

Eventually, “you’d have to do things like drop rocks from space,” he said.  “There tends to be a very stark technical limit. … The basic point here is you can only get so deep.”

That does not mean that pushing penetrating-bomb technology forward is a useless enterprise, said Michael Levi, a defense and nuclear weapon expert with the Council on Foreign Relations.

Building a better bomb means those who wish to avoid it have to dig deeper, and that is not entirely without pain, he said.  “There’s a cost to digging deeper, whether it’s in how quickly something can be deployed or whether you need to spend money on completely new facilities,” Levi noted.

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