A powerful American bunker bomb is the only weapon capable of destroying the deeply buried nuclear installations of Iran, making it the choice of American president Donald Trump if he chooses to support Israel militarily.
The GBU-57, a warhead of 30,000 pounds (13,607 kilograms) capable of entering 200 feet (61 meters) underground before exploding, is absent in the arsenal of Israel despite its declared objective of preventing Iran from building a nuclear bomb.
Why this bomb?
In less than a week, the Israeli army withdrew Iranian military commanders damaged from many surface facilities, raising more questions than answers.
“The diet missile stocks, launchers, military bases, production facilities, nuclear scientists, military command and control took a very severe blow,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, director of the Iranian program for the Defense of Defense of Democracies (FDD), a conservative labor group.
“But there are still disproportionate questions about the effectiveness of a strike that Israel had against the beating heart of the Iranian nuclear program,” said Taleblu.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not reported no damage to Fordo, a uranium enrichment plant south of Tehran. Unlike the Natanz and Isfahan sites in central Iran, Fordo is buried deep underground, out of reach of Israeli bombs.
“All eyes will be on Fordo, which are buried under about 300 feet of rock in the center of Iran,” said Taleblu.
The former Lieutenant-General of the American Army and Defense of Defense of Rand Corporation, Mark Schwartz, insists that “only the United States has the conventional capacity” to destroy such a site.
And by “conventional capacity”, it means the non-nuclear bomb GBU-57.
What are his abilities?
The American army says that GBU -57 – also called a massive ammunition penetrator – “is designed to penetrate up to 200 feet underground before exploding”, sailing through rock and concrete.
This differs from missiles or bombs that usually explode their payload or when impact.
“To defeat these deeply buried targets, these weapons must be designed with enough thick steel and steel envelopes, to somehow knocking through these layers of rock,” said Masao Dahlgren, a scholarship holder working on anti -missile defense for the Forcegic and International Studies Center (CSIS), a research center based in Washington.
The 6.6-meter-long GBU-57 also has a specialized fuse because “you need an explosive that will not explode immediately in such shock and pressure,” said Dahlgren.
The design of this bomb started in the early 2000s, and an order of 20 units was placed with Boeing in 2009.
How is it deployed?
The only plane capable of deploying GBU-57 is an American B-2 bomber, a stealth aircraft.
Some of these bombers were deployed in early May on Diego Garcia, the site of a joint military base in the United Kingdom in the Indian Ocean, but were no longer visible in mid-June, according to AFP ‘S Analysis of the satellite imaging provided by Planet Labs.
With their long-range capacities, B-2s from the United States “are able to fly to the Middle East to make bombings. This has already been done,” said Dahlgren.
Each B-2 can transport two GBU-57 bombs, and Schwartz has said that several bombs will likely be necessary.
“They are not going to be one and done,” he said.
Schwartz added that the air superiority that Israel has established on Iran reduces the risks faced by B-2 bombers.
What are the consequences?
Such an American intervention would come with “a lot of political luggage for America,” said Taleblu, stressing that the bunker-business bomb is not the only way to contact Iran’s nuclear program.
Without the GBU-57 bombs, and unless a diplomatic solution, Taleblu said that the Israelis could attack access to underground complexes like Fordo by “trying to hit the entries, collapse what they can, cut electricity” and take other measures that have already been taken in Natanz.
