A strong American bunker-busting bomb is the only weapon capable of destroying Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facilities, doing so for US President Donald Trump’s elected weapon if he chooses to militarily back Israel.
GBU-57, a war head of 30,000 pounds (13,607 kg) capable of penetrating 200 feet (61 meters) underground before exploding, is missing in Israel’s arsenal despite the declared goal of preventing Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
Why this bomb?
In less than a week, the Israeli army has taken the Iranian military command and damaged several surface installations and raised more questions than answers.
“The regime’s missilles, lifting rockets, military bases, production facilities, nuclear researchers, military committees and control have taken a very serious Christmas,” said Ben’s Ben SpokesBlu, director of the Iran program in the Washington-based Think Tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a conservative-leaning group.
“But there are still big questions about how effective of a strike Israel had against the throbbing hearts of Iran’s nuclear program,” said speech blu.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not reported any damage to Fordo, an uranium enrichment plant south of Tehran. Unlike the Natanz and Isfahan sites in central Iran, foro is buried deep underground outside the Israeli bombs.
“All eyes will be at Fordo, which is buried under about 300ft rock in central Iran,” said speech blu.
Former US Lieutenant and Rand Corporation defender Mark Schwartz insists that “only the United States have conventional capacity” to destroy such a place.
And with “conventional capacity” he means the non-nuclear GBU-57 bomb.
What are its capabilities?
The US military says the GBU-57-OG called massive ordnance penetrator- “is designed to penetrate to 200ft underground before exploding,” navigating through rock and concrete.
This differs from missiles or bombs that typically detonate their payload near or by influence.
“To defeat these deeply buried targets, these weapons need to be designed with rather thick steel cabinets, hardened steel, to beat through these layers of stones,” said Masao Dahlgren, a colleague working on missile defense to the center of strategic and international studies (CSIS), a Washington-based research center.
The 6.6 meter long GBU-57 also has a specialized fuse because “you need an explosive that will not immediately explode under so much shock and pressure,” Dahlgren said.
Design for this bomb began in the early 2000s, and an order of 20 units was placed at Boeing in 2009.
How is it implemented?
The only aircraft capable of implementing GBU-57 is an American B-2 bombing, a stealth aircraft.
Some of these bombers were deployed in early May at Diego Garcia, the site of a common military base in UK-USA in the Indian Ocean, but were no longer visible in mid-June, according to AFP ‘S analysis of satellite images provided by Planet Labs.
With their long-range capacities, B-2s departing from the US “are able to fly all the way to the Middle East to make bombing. It has been done before,” Dahlgren said.
Each B-2 can carry two GBU-57 bombs, and Schwartz said more bombs are likely to be needed.
“They don’t just want to be one and finished,” he said.
Schwartz added that the air superiority Israel has established over Iran reduces the risks facing the B-2 bombers.
What are the consequences?
Such an American intervention would come with “a lot of political luggage to America,” speech blu said, stressing that the bunker-buster bomb is not the only way to address Iran’s nuclear program.
Without GBU-57 bombs and shortly after a diplomatic solution, speech blu said that Israelis could attack access to underground complexes such as foro by “trying to hit inputs, collapse, what they can, cut electricity” and take other measures already taken at Natanz.
