This One Is For Pentagon Planners
With deepest respect for Wiley Miller and his creation, Non Sequitur, it is time to jump into the phone booth and become: OBVIOUSMAN!
A bunker is an underground chamber, usually heavily fortified, occasionally blasted out of solid rock. They are very difficult to locate, and tough to destroy – except, if there is no access to the outside, they are a grave.
Bunkers might contain nasty things, like chemical or biological weapons; things you don’t want in the environment.
Instead of attempting to “bust” bunkers, why don’t we seal the entrances and leave all of the nastiness inside?
Our standard penetration weapons should be more than adequate to seal the entrance and ventilation tunnels which we can certainly locate with more accuracy than the underground bunkers themselves.
If there were an enemy who had developed a short range Star Trek transporter system it might make some sense to plan on going after these bunkers, but since that hasn’t happened, you seal them off and let whatever is in the bunker rot.
The floor is open for anyone to challenge my conclusions.
5 comments
Sounds like a plan to me. And at least then you’re not talking about potentially killing three or four million people, and spreading dangerous-to-lethal doses of fallout over most of the Middle East (including our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, I might add).
Acting as devil’s advocate, I challenge the conclusion.
From our current misadministration’s perspective, it wouldn’t make a big enough BOOM.
‘Shock ‘n’ awe’, you know. Give the FauxNews viewers some entertainment.
I’ve looked at the concept behind “bunker busters”, and all it takes is for the weapon to encounter different resistance at different layers for things to go horribly off course.
Detonating a nuclear device 20 feet underground is a great way to create a mountain of radioactive dust to be spread by the wind. It is stupid, just flat stupid.
A US Air Force fly over through the skies of Iran would create enough of a chain reaction in the Middle East to satisfy anyone looking for a “boom”.
On my drive to Livingston yesterday, I saw a fireworks stand with the imposing name…
AND THEY GO BOOM!
andante is right; that does seem to be an American preoccupation.
What concerns me is that neocons in general and Bush in particular seem not to understand that nuclear weapons are different in nature, not merely in the size of the bang. All of the radiation goes somewhere. Not all of the military and civilian casualties happen instantly. The land, and quite possibly the water, may be unusable for years. And the subsequent ill will of most of our (former?) allies and many of the other nations of the world is pretty much guaranteed. (For a contrary opinion, see Billmon.)
Nowhere in any neocon or Bush administration documents or statements have I seen any acknowledgement of this fundamental difference between nuclear and other weapons. Nuclear weapons, even small ones, are the true WMDs; chemical and biological weapons typically don’t begin to compare in terms of long-term damage to the ability of a region to sustain life. Of course members of the military understand it; how could they not. What will it take for the Bushies to get a clue?
The other possibility is too awful to contemplate: that Bush understands the dangers, but intends to go forward in hopes of being the agent who brings on end times. If that’s the case, Armageddon outta here…
[…] When I did my Obviousman riff, I knew other people must have come to the same conclusion. […]