Hope, Change, and Bigger Bombs

You can choose to dwell on the contradictions, or you can thank Zeus that we haven’t abandoned the whole notion of deterrence. Me being the glass-half-full sort, I choose the latter option and tip my hat to our president for understanding that it’s prudent to have a few “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” on the shelf as a backup to Hillary Clinton’s smooth, glib charm:

The U.S. military wants to speed production of 10 to 12 huge “bunker buster” bombs, the Air Force said on Thursday, amid concerns over suspected underground nuclear sites in Iran and North Korea. [….]

The Defense Department asked Congress last month to shift $68 million in the fiscal 2009 budget to speed output of the non-nuclear, 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator and its integration aboard a long-range bomber. [Reuters]

The MOP is GPS-guided, weighs 30,000 pounds, and can be dropped from a B-2 or B-52. It would have ten times the explosive power of the largest bunker-buster in our inventory today, and would outweigh the Mother Of All Bombs by about 9,000 pounds. It is designed to penetrate up to 200 feet underground before exploding. Just for reference, the tunnel used for North Korea’s nuclear test was 2,100 feet below the surface, so it’s not clear to me that this weapon could reach all of what we’d need to hit should the worst happen.

You can see pictures of the MOP here, at the Boeing site. Here’s video of a mockup from a network with the facially suspect name of “Democracy Now!,” which I suppose means they’re Chomsky-reading hippies who carry their groceries home from Trader Joe’s in hemp tote bags:

In 2005, the Bush Administration killed a program for a low-yield nuclear bunker buster.