Darkness at the End of the Tunnel
Schoenfeld, Gabriel
Darkness at the End of the Tunnel Penetrating the Iranian underground. BY GABRIEL SCHOENFELD Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into...
...out of the Gaza Strip that are just a couple of yards below the surface...
...The question calls attention to what might be called the ongoing Counterrevolution in Military Affairs...
...Narrower diameter tunnels than the Chunnel can be carved into solid rock at the staggering rate of 650 feet per day...
...The move follows the statement earlier this month by Shaul Mofaz, Israel’s deputy prime minister, that an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program is “unavoidable...
...Such outrageous language coming—not for the first time—from the head of a state seeking nuclear weapons, has made the Iranian nuclear program all the more ominous...
...More typical, though, is defensive digging...
...Subterranean combat is familiar to all students of military affairs...
...In Berlin, beneath an otherwise unremarkable Chinese restaurant, are the ruins of the most notorious underground facility in history: the F?hrer bunker...
...But would such a strike succeed...
...The United States (and presumably Israel) is urgently developing ways to neutralize such targets...
...Precision guided like everything else these days, it would be the ideal weapon to rattle— and perhaps pulverize—a target like Iran’s underground uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz...
...The problems posed by tunneling seldom come in for public discussion...
...Even a mediumyield nuclear weapon detonated above ground may not be powerful enough to do the job...
...This happened most recently in 2005 when Congress shelved a Bush administration plan merely to study development of something called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), amid talk it would ignite an arms race...
...Today, thanks to GPS systems and laser- and infrared-guiding devices, the radius is less than two dozen feet...
...A conveyor system pulls the spoil backward, while workers follow up, erecting a reinforced lining for the excavated structure...
...But Iran is also employing a far older means of warfare: deep burrowing...
...In one of his recent outbursts, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called Israel a “stinking corpse,” destined to disappear...
...Modern drills are huge, multi-milliondollar pieces of machinery...
...Some of its countermeasures are themselves based upon computerized systems, including highly effective Russianmade surface-to-air missiles that Iran is set to take delivery of this fall...
...Adolf Hitler held court here in the last phase of World War II, and it was in the bunker that, on April 30, 1945, together with his new bride, he ingested cyanide...
...In the 1980s, the United States developed the technology to drop munitions near enough to their targets to ensure a high chance of destruction...
...It also possesses the technology to assure that its bombs will fall close to or on their targets...
...It is exceedingly difficult to discern from the surface where tunnel ventilation shafts are located or in which direction a tunnel proceeds...
...Some of these underground facilities were hundreds of yards deep and could accommodate thousands of people, sustaining them in compartments impervious to chemical and biological attack...
...Almost any given target can be knocked out by the use of just one or two conventional bombs...
...More practical would be the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, a 30,000-pound package under development jointly by Boeing and Northrop Grumman that is the largest conventional bomb ever built...
...During the Civil War, soldiers with coal mining experience dug a 511-foot-long tunnel some 50 feet beneath the Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia...
...Its defeat was ironic because only a few years earlier, without a peep from Congress, the Clinton administration pushed through the innocuously named B61-11 bomb, which had strikingly similar characteristics, though it tends to break apart when boring into certain types of geological formations in which a hardened target might be located...
...The terminus was fi lled with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder, and the blast killed between 250 and 350 Confederate soldiers...
...As an engineering feat, the F?hrer bunker was not particularly impressive...
...Concepts range the gamut from munitions that deliver a powerful shock into the adjoining bedrock to nonlethal methods for introducing a foul odor into the underground chambers, rendering human habitation unbearable...
...One has only to consider the trouble Israel has had fi nding tunnels dug by Hamas Gabriel Schoenfeld is the senior editor of Commentary...
...Whatever the fate of the RNEP, nuclear weapons were never the best answer to the tunneling problem given the prohibitive political costs of ever employing them...
...Reportedly acting with help from North Korea (and as Emanuele Ottolenghi notes in the July-August Commentary, employing imported European machinery), Iran has built dozens of underground bunkers to house its missile and nuclear programs...
...What is more, if tunnels are dug to a suffi cient depth in the right kind of rock—a thousand or more feet into the earth—they are extraordinarily diffi cult to breach...
...Israel almost certainly knows the location of some of the critical nodes in the Iranian program that it must hit if it is to set the Iranian effort back by several years...
...The Massive Ordnance Penetrator, still in the testing phase, cannot be fi tted to the bays of American bombers a day too soon...
...The Revolution in Military Affairs was based upon silicon, in particular the computer chips that make for precision-guided weapons...
...Hitler’s honeymoon grave was a mere 28 feet underground...
...The military signifi cance of all this cannot be overemphasized: Ultra-deep shelters for critical military facilities can be made formidably resistant to attack...
...RNEP was a weapon that would have served as a deterrent to any regime thinking it c`ould buy invulnerability by digging deep...
...At the dawn of the nuclear age, the USSR constructed a vast network of tunnels under Moscow, including a 17-mile secret subway line to Vnukovo airport, to ensure that the leaders of the Kremlin would survive a nuclear strike...
...The operation ended in disaster, however, when the Union troops who had rushed into the crater to follow up the attack were slaughtered by Confederate troops fi ring downward from the rim in what was described as a “turkey shoot...
...The day is clearly growing closer when the West is going to either face the challenge or, if it permits the ayatollahs to acquire nuclear weapons, suffer a strategic setback with a range of predictable and unpredictable consequences...
...In World War II, the circular error probable—the radius of a circle into which a projectile will land at least 50 percent of the time— was more than half a mile...
...We cannot know the answer, and neither can the Israelis...
...BY GABRIEL SCHOENFELD Israel has just carried out a major aerial exercise, putting a hundred or so F-15s and F-16s into the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, evidently a rehearsal for a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities...
...Today, however, tunneling is far cheaper and easier...
...Another diffi culty is determining exactly what military activities are being conducted in any given tunnel...
...It required a totalitarian system to marshal the manpower and resources to remove such an immense quantity of soil and rock...
...They operate with a circular disk on the front end that holds steel teeth, which cut into the rock as the plate rotates...
...In the early 1990s, the Chunnel, the 30-mile rail tunnel connecting France and England, was built using drilling machines that hewed out a 30foot diameter circle of rock at the remarkable pace of 164 feet a day...
...In the face of the threat of such effi - cient destruction, Iran has not stood still...
Vol. 13 • June 2008 • No. 40
