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1 Kt useless?

1 Kt is one thousand tonnes of high explosive!

The biggest bunker buster of WW2 was the British Grand Slam which carried 4 tonnes of high explosive and could blow through 40 meters of ground or 4-7 meters of reinforced concrete.

The weapon the Americans are probably going to use is the  B61 Mod 11. The weapon has variable yields starting at 10 Kt (or maybe as low* as 0,3 Kt) and up to 340 Kt.

* Wow! Only 300 hundred tonnes of TNT equivalent! That's only 25 times as much as a MOAB! What a mini-nuke!

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Sun Apr 9th, 2006 at 12:02:32 PM EST
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The bunkers are - so we're told - 30m thick, and maybe 50ft undergroud.

So yes - a 1kt nuke is useless against them.  The Iranians always knew a stand-off was likely and seem to have planned accordingly.

I also think there's a psychological threshold around 1kt. Under that you can argue - no matter how uconvincingly - that the bombing is tactical and not strategic. And some people will nod their heads and believe you, because for a semi-buried detonation, the radius of 1psi of overpressure - which means broken windows and not much more - will be localised to half a mile or so. (Fall-out remains a big problem. But they probably won't be thinking that far ahead.)

The higher the yield, the less believable that argument becomes. Once you get over 15kt you're into Hiroshima territory, way on the wrong side of the red line.

Anything over 100kt would be horrendous. I don't even want to think about the reaction to that.

My point was that any nuke-based plan has a fundamental flaw. If the US wants to say 'Look - tactical!' the bombing won't work. If it increases the yield, any pretense at 'tactical' soon disappears and it turns into a much more dangerous game.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Apr 9th, 2006 at 12:49:50 PM EST
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Maybe you are right about 1 Kt being useless. But it still is one hell of a blast.

The idea that they could get away with nuclear weapons as long as they are tactical is delusional.

The big weapon=strategic/small weapon=tactical is flawed anyway.

Any nuclear strike on Iran, no matter how small, will by definition be a strategic attack.

While a 300 Kt strike on the advancing red hordes in the Fulda gap (thank god those days are gone) might very well be tactical as long as it is not a first-use attack.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Sun Apr 9th, 2006 at 01:08:45 PM EST
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Well, sure. But it's about PR and spin as well as body count.

Legally the doctrine of pre-emption is already insane.

And from where I am all war is delusional. The fact that we're even discussing this reminds me - again - that we're all living on Planet Crazy.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Apr 9th, 2006 at 01:28:02 PM EST
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I thought a "tactical" nuclear weapon was one that went off in Germany?

Sorry, bad cold war joke.

Seriously, I can't see the citizens of major nations whose governments support the "war on terror" stomaching cooperation with a state which actively uses nuclear weapons, even "small" ones. Those governments would be under intense pressure to withdraw support and leave the Americans to fight their battle alone.

Idiot/Savant

by IdiotSavant on Sun Apr 9th, 2006 at 08:28:44 PM EST
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