New Bomb Drills for Bunkers

[Jared Moya]

Weapons Grade author David Hambling has another fascinating two-part series for Defense Tech, on weapons that drill and scrape their way through targets.

Meet Deep Digger, first of a revolutionary new generation of bunker-busting weapons, described in this week’s New Scientist. This is literally ground-breaking new technology which uses cannon to tunnel through solid rock, drilling a channel for the bomb.

Existing weapons for attacking hard targets are kinetic, relying on sheer momentum to break through rock and concrete. To get much improvement you have to make them much bigger - like the outsize 30,000 lb Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or much faster - like the proposed conventional version of the D5 Trident ballistic missile, or denser - like the heavy BLU-109 with its ballast of dense metal. But you can’t get around the laws of physics. As Princeton's Robert Nelson points out in a very thorough analysis, even if the penetrator is a hypersonic projectile made of solid depleted uranium:

“…no Earth Penetrating Weapon can penetrate reinforced concrete deeper than four times the length of the missile.”

So this approach really isn’t going to get you more than a hundred feet through rock at best, and the practical limit is much less.

The supercavitating bunker-buster I revealed last year looks neat, but the jury is still out on whether it works. A lot of people in the industry simply don’t believe that it can. The Broach is an interesting idea but limited to a few metres.

Deep Digger is different. It does not depend on the kinetic energy of the warhead at all – in fact, it parachutes down. Then it stars drilling. The weapon is limited only by how deep the drilling process can go, which is a matter of how deep it can ‘muck’ (clear debris from the shaft). And although the details are classified, that is much, much deeper than any kinetic weapon will ever go. In the tests last year, it demonstrated a tunneled down ten meters(32 ft) -- about 50% more than the BLU-113, which is the current record holder.

READ ARTICLE

[SanDiegoKid]

Cavemen everywhere quiver in their mamoth-skin boots.

[que-em]

did he steal this idea from Matrix revolution?

[Mels_Smileys45]

I wish these scientists would spend more time saving the world than figuring out new ways to fuck it up. I guess in some warped sense, they think they are saving us.

[mountain_rage]

The us will sell the weapon to some middle eastern country would will then turn around and use it against norad.

[.:sp00ky:.]

Oh wow just what the world needs yet another fucking bomb! hurrah for scientists.

[shawners]

THeres a saying that the use.. We have bombs so we wont have to use bombs. Kind of like, each country has a nuclear weapon, no one will attack since they can launch their nuke too at them.

But the important question is, "How is it on getting rid of pesky ground hogs?

[SanDiegoKid]

Kind of like, each country has a nuclear weapon, no one will attack since they can launch their nuke too at them.

Mutually Assured Destruction works until someone in a furvor of religious ecstacy decides to bring upon nuclear holocaust for everyone, because that's the only condition in which their God will decend from heaven to take the true followers away to Happy God Land.

Incidentally, this is what the Shahs of Iran seem to believe... so, you know... it's just for making electricity (wink, wink).