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thedrifter
10-24-04, 07:13 AM
Joe Buff: Bunker Snuffers?


Columnist and author Peter Brookes, a regular contributor to Military.com, recently had an essay titled "Bunker-Buster Brouhaha." His October 18, 2004 piece discussed the importance of continuing engineering feasibility studies for a new type of weapon to destroy deep, hardened enemy underground bunkers -- the proposed Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator bomb (RNEP). Allow me to begin by quoting the concluding paragraph of that essay: "In light of the WMD-proliferation threat and the increased use of underground facilities to conceal it, looking at adding RNEPs to our arsenal only makes sense. The safety and security of our nation may depend upon it." I agree wholeheartedly with this statement and the reasoning behind it. Here, I would like to address (and attempt to refute) a counterargument I've seen in print elsewhere: that conventional high-tech munitions and tactics are able to defeat the deepest and hardest bunkers without any need to go nuclear -- even when the bunkers themselves are way beyond the reach of those munitions.

The core of this particular "no nukes" argument is that a bunker does not need to be collapsed upon itself, or blown to smithereens, for it to be rendered militarily ineffective over a lengthy (or permanent) timeframe. That, in and of itself, is certainly true. The problem lies in the details of implementation. Opponents of the RNEP concept suggest, in part, that the internationally-legal and ecologically-friendly way to snuff a bunker, while minimizing civilian casualties and other collateral damage, is to isolate the bunker from its sources of power and air, and eliminate its ability to communicate with the outside world. This would be achieved by destroying or blocking, from above the surface, a) electrical feeds into the buried facility, b) its atmospheric intakes and exhausts, c) its external antennas and phone/fiber-optic lines, and d) its personnel and freight entrances-exits.

If these goals could be achieved, equipment inside the bunker would cease operating, personnel would suffocate, intelligence and orders could neither get in nor get out electronically, and messengers or rescuers could not reach the deep installation's vital heart with its possible WMD stocks.

Sounds great, doesn't it? But alas, I think it just won't work.

Ever hear of fuel cells? Of course you have. Pioneered by NASA several decades ago, these clean-running sources of electricity are one possible solution to America's dependency on foreign natural gas and oil.

Fuel cells run on nothing more than oxygen and hydrogen, usually liquefied in advance and held in insulated cryogenic (very cold) storage tanks. This technology is available commercially around the globe. Besides the electricity produced, the only other products of fuel-cell operation are pure water, and heat. A bunker designed with fuel cells as a backup source of power, and provided in advance of anticipated military hostilities with a good supply of liquefied oxygen and hydrogen, would a) need no external sources of electricity, b) need no exhausts to the surface to eliminate poisonous wastes, and c) help keep the bunker, which like a coal or gold mine at depth would tend to be chilly, from being too cold for the occupants' comfort.

Yes, the occupants do need to breathe. A very large underground tunnel complex, with few humans inside due to automation of the bunker's main purposes, could hold out for weeks on the air contained within its own enclosed volume. More to the point, consider another context in which people must work for long periods with no access to outside air: a latest-generation non-nuclear submarine equipped with air purification equipment. Devices for releasing oxygen, for removing (toxic) carbon dioxide, and for filtering out airborne particulates that result from the things that people and machinery do, are all available on the international market in compact, easily transportable, ready-to-use form. Some of these tools of underground survival are complicated and need electricity; others, equally effective, are simple and draw no voltage at all. If we think of a deep enemy bunker as a modern U-boat that doesn't move, we begin to better understand the difficulties -- especially during a fast-paced national or expeditionary emergency -- of achieving a timely mission kill against said target with weapons whose penetration depth and explosive force combined can't reach down far enough.

Enemy bunkers, whether used by state-level adversaries or fourth-generation terrorist groups, and whether purpose-built in cities or carved from living rock in mountainous frontiers, exist to serve specific goals: In the worst case scenario, their raison d'être is to support and direct larger scale attack and defense objectives, leading up to and during active hostilities. They are underground warrens within which are performed tasks that include Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence (C4I), protection for top despots or key ideological leaders and strategists, logistical support sites, or factories and depots for the manufacture and storage of WMDs and other deadly ordnance. C4I functions can range from air-defense coordination to ground-warfare major headquarters to higher-level or supreme command posts. To carry out these functions and tasks does require access, both bulk-physical and electronic, back and forth to the arena of battle outside the bunker itself.

Isolating a bunker in order to render it ineffective is by no means as easy as it sounds. The access points down into the bunker -- for soldiers, technicians, and cargoes -- can be provided in large numbers for any single buried facility, via dispersed tunnels stretching long distances from the central bunker area. These access points, also called adits, can furthermore be superbly well camouflaged, and placed in terrain conditions (large granite overhangs, steep-sided narrow ravines) so that their exteriors are protected from high-velocity non-nuclear penetrator rounds -- long, thin, heavy dart-like projectiles that follow straight glide-paths and gather kinetic energy from gravity free-fall or a rocket engine booster, or both. One proof of this unfortunate fact of adit low vulnerability, and of how very successful even primitive approaches to protecting bunker adits can be, is to be found in the amazing history of the Tunnels of Cu Chi during the conflict in Vietnam. Simple trapdoors, hidden in the jungle or hiding in plain sight, eluded American detection, sometimes for years -- even when it was known that enemy troops and/or guerrillas were persistently active in the neighborhood.

In a similar way, given enough advance time to plan and adequate funding to construct, an important enough hardened underground facility can be given a large number of disguised, retractable antennas. The minus-side to the fast-growing world of wireless communications is that even one tiny antenna, sticking intact out of the earth somewhere above or near the bunker, can allow almost unbroken and jamming-resistant contact in and out, at high baud rates, in the face of concerted attack by U.S. conventional weapons -- such as cluster bomblets, napalm, or MOABs. These antennas can easily be designed to withdraw behind unobtrusive armored shutters when not in use or when an assault appears imminent. The problem with any sort of antenna suppression via American air raids (manned or unmanned) is that the blackout periods are always sporadic and short.

These ideas and observations are meant to demonstrate that the only way to count for sure on an enemy's very deep hardened bunker being rendered hors de combat is to destroy its actual contents -- the people and the materiel. Because the most advanced non-nuclear ground penetrator rounds now in existence or under development can't reach below a few hundred feet, a "zone of immunity" exists starting at somewhere around one thousand feet of depth, depending on local geology. For the sake of America's and other peace-loving countries' safety this zone of immunity cannot be permitted to continue to exist. It appears to me that the only way to decisively eliminate this threat is by obtaining, and retaining, the option to unleash low-yield (sub-kiloton?) tactical nuclear earth penetrator bombs.

continued.........

thedrifter
10-24-04, 07:14 AM
Specific rules of engagement for RNEPs, and broader policy for where and when they could ever be rationally used -- including attention to post-hostilities medical aid and environmental cleanup in the target area -- call for urgent discussion side by side with R&D on the weapons themselves. To fail to follow through on these urgent studies and initiatives is to leave a dangerous gap in our nation's arsenal, between high-explosive munitions of limited capabilities, and thermonuclear doomsday devices which I hope to God never get used.

Maintaining this gap as a way to somehow unilaterally inspire global nuclear non-proliferation is at best a red herring, a poisonous one: The recent unmasking of so many long-term conspiracies (e.g., Pakistan's Dr. Khan), and violations of treaties and agreements abroad (e.g., North Korea), during the very strict and high profile post-Cold War moratorium on U.S. tactical nuclear weapons development, proves that if America does try to set a "good example" of pacifist intent, evil-doers won't heed our example but will instead opportunistically exploit our position as weak. To avoid owning modernized tactical nuclear weapons altogether, on the premise that by the very reason of their low yield and contained fallout they're much more likely to be fired in anger some day, ignores the irrefutable determination of terrorist groups to lay their hands on, and use against us, any nuclear arms that they can find. To repeat for emphasis, flexible deterrence and the option to retaliate in kind across the entire spectrum of conceivable weapon yields must become and remain strong pillars of our national security posture in this violent new millennium, where the bad guys are constantly burrowing ever deeper underground.


Ellie