March 29, 2003
THE FINEST GERMAN ENGINEERING:
Bombs Can't Bust Saddam Bunker, Builder Says (Reuters, 3/28/2003)The German architect of one of Saddam Hussein's main bunkers in Baghdad said on Friday the Iraqi leader can survive anything short of a direct hit with a nuclear bomb if he stays within its four-feet-thick walls."It could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb the size of the Hiroshima one detonating 250 meters away," said Karl Esser, a security consultant who designed the bunker underneath Saddam's main presidential palace in Baghdad.
U.S.-led troops will also find it hard to fight their way in through its three-ton Swiss-made doors, Esser told Reuters in an interview....
Esser said he had no qualms about having helped to protect a dictator likened to Hitler.
"It's not just one person getting protection, it's several people, it's the palace staff as well. I just see it as an achievement of bunker technology," said Esser.
Mr. Esser is proud of his handiwork -- after all, it continues two German traditions, engineering excellence and the support of murderous tyrants.
Europe's gathering crisis is moral at its roots. They are drowning in selfishness. They pursue only their own profit, whether it be measured in money or leisure or comfort. Any profitable deed can be justified, no matter how vicious the consequences. Any burden is too great to bear, be it children or armed conflict or the duties of religion. Action is warranted only to postpone the costs of narcissism. But the bill is growing, and it will sooner or later come due. On that day, Europeans will find they have few friends. The evildoers they have aided will turn on them in contempt; the erstwhile friends they have betrayed will mourn their decay but not, ultimately, their passing.
Posted by Paul Jaminet at March 29, 2003 10:52 AMWhen all is said and done, we'll see that all the "No" voters on the UNSC will all have blood on their hands for their willful violations of the trade embargoes.
Coalition troops will pay the price in blood. Let us make sure we don't forget and settle that ledger as soon as we're done with the Iraqi war.
I'm not impressed by Herr Esser's claim that his bunker is impregnable. I'll take Yankee ingenuity (e.g.,
the GBU-28 "Bunker Buster") over German engineering any day. Besides, we don't necessarily need to fight our way in to the bunker in order to finish off Saddam--all we have to do is locate the air shaft and whistle up a loaded cement mixer.
Presumably they have a national program to improve bunker technology in order to better protect the next Fuhrer?
Posted by: oj at March 29, 2003 2:09 PMI am not impressed by a 3-ton door. Every
bank in town has a heavier door than that.
It's the soil over the concrete that provides
the protection. Blow away the soil (which
ought to be doable, with greater or less
difficulty), and quite small munitions can deal
with 4 feet of concrete.
Could you stop saying Europe and instead make up some term for the Franco-German-Belgian axis?
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at March 29, 2003 2:36 PMWouldn't want to forget the Russians.
Posted by: Barry Meislin at March 29, 2003 2:48 PMAli:
We consider the English and Spaniards Americans now. America is after all just a set of ideas.
Just as America is a set of ideas, Europe is becoming a mentality -- secular, selfish, amoral, hostile to freedom. We have a bit of Europe in the United States too.
The opinion polls showing that 91% of Spaniards oppose the war, and that Aznar's party trails, suggest that Spain is just Germany with a rightist government and a strong leader.
God bless England.
I like Mike's idea the best.
O.J. would that be Mr. Joschka Fisher
perhaps? I'd love to call in the cement mixer for him.
'Can withstand a Hiroshima bomb at 250 meters' is a marvelous piece of marketing. A sturdily-constructed reinforced above-ground concrete structure can manage that.
By my rough-and-ready calculations, 20 megatons at 250 meters is equivalent to a direct hit with a 320-pound bomb.
As Harry says, it's the depth that provides protection; thus the development of small earth-penetrating bombs.
Mr. Earl;
The Hiroshima weapon was 15 kilo
tons.
One might also want to note that given an underground
bunker a nuclear strike on the ground near by would actually cause very little stress to the bunker. Sounds like marketing to me.
I believe the term Mr. Choudhury is looking for is
"Old Europe."
Hiroshima was an air burst. A surface or
subsurface detonation of an atomic bomb has
entirely different effects from an air burst.
Of course, without getting out the old slide
rule, I reckon anything within 250 meters
of a 15-kiloton airburst is going to be cooked.
At Hiroshima, the cook radius was about half
a mile.
This German sounds like a great fool, but it
would not be like Reuters to do a little
fact-checking on a story of this type.
M Ali Choudhury:
Could you stop saying Europe and instead make up some term for the Franco-German-Belgian axis?
How about "Neo-Carolingian Empire"? :-)
There is no such thing as a subsurface nuclear detonation, unless someone drilled the hole first. Nuclear bombs are too delicate to withstand a high velocity impact with the ground and still function.
The only alternatives are airbursts or laydowns, neither of which is worth a darn against a hardened underground structure.
However, a sensor fused GBU-28 (or two weapons in close succession) is another kettle of fish altogether. (BTW--I flew F-111s for 13 yrs, and am a USAF Fighter Weapons School grad, that's how I know...)
The fool was too busy reading his own press releases.