MOPs--We Gotta Have 'Em

A "bunker buster" at White Sands, New Mexico, 2007

Right up there is a picture of your tax dollars at work. That, friends, is a "bunker buster," a bomb designed to destroy sites that are located in hardened underground shelters, like, say, Iranian or North Korean facilities connected with their nuclear programs. In Pentagon gobblespeak this 30,000-pound bomb is called a "massive ordinance penetrator," MOP, naturally. Its hard--ahem!--to ignore the phallic implications of the monstrosity itself as well as its name.

Apparently, however, this particular penetrator is impotent in its present configuration. Can't go deep enough to blow those dirty Iranian bastards and their nasty nuclear devices or labs or storage spaces or enrichment places or whatever the hell they've got buried down there to kingdom come. So the Pentagon wants to administer some Viagra to the MOP. You and a whole bunch of other taxpayers have already paid $330 million for 20 of these things. The Pentagon is looking for another $82 million to make these bombs more powerful and secretly requesting Congress for the money. The bombs will then cost $20.6 million apiece. (Source)

Which might be fine if they would work even then. But we're warned by the Pentagon that these MOPs might not work against facilities built under mountains.

The Pentagon was particularly concerned about its ability to destroy bunkers built under mountains, such as Iran's Fordow site near the Shiite Muslim holy city of Qom, according to a former senior U.S. official who is an expert on Iran.

The official said some Pentagon war planners believe conventional bombs won't be effective against Fordow and that a tactical nuclear weapon may be the only military option if the goal is to destroy the facility. "Once things go into the mountain, then really you have to have something that takes the mountain off," the official said.

Got that? For $408 million dollars, we get MOPs that still cannot take mountains off. And tactical nuclear weapons are the "only military option" to do it. But of course. What lunacy!*

*Do I have to remind anybody that is is the normal mental condition of the Pentagon?

Related articles

• Busting Irans Nuclear Facility at Furdow (nextbigfuture.com)
• Pentagon denies bunker-busting bomb is intended for Iran (cnn.com)