Re: Gather Dust?
Theres one huge difference between the MOAB and bunker busters like Tallboy, Grand Slam or the GBU-28:
- the MOAB has a thin alloy skin so it doesn't interfere with the blast wave. This means that it must be exploded above ground - drop it onto anything hard and it will splatter rather than penetrate.
- Tallboy is the archetypical bunker buster, or penetrating bomb. It weighed 5,400kg, but only 2,400kg, or just over 50%, of that was Torpex explosive. Most of the rest was a thick high tensile steel case, strong enough to be dropped through the few metres of reinforced concrete forming the roof of a U-boat or E-boat pen. Its tail boom and fins were light alloy and were only there to make sure it arrived nose first and spun up to stop it tumbling. One is known to have penetrated 18m into a hill to explode in the railway tunnel underneath.
Grand Slam was a bigger, 10,000 kg version of Tallboy
The Americans have the GBU-28, a laser-guided, 2,268kg bunker buster
THOSE are what you need to destroy caves and tunnels, not airblast bombs: I wonder why they didn't use one or two GBU-28s on the tunnel complex. Earthquakes and wrecked tunnels not spectacular enough for Proper Shock & Awe?.