TWZ: Los Alamos Scientist’s Insights On The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator

This interview convinces me that Gary Stradling is a smart guy with a good attitude.  Good thing he is on our side.

This is very sophisticated work. It is not casual, and it’s not speculative. These are real experts who are doing the work. Careful, technical, quantitative work to be able to deliver this kind of war-fighting capability to the services.

Stradling talks about the design and application of a bomb like the MOP bunker buster.  The GBU-57 weighs about 27,000 lbs, with 4500 lbs of explosives.  It does not explode on impact, but slams into hard rock to penetrate like a bullet fired into a tree.  Then it explodes. 

Most of the bomb is there to get the explosive as deep as possible.

Because, as one of these MOP devices goes into a solid rock mountain is going to decelerate rapidly, and if you’ve got fragile stuff inside the casing, you could break it. So those are the the kind of questions that you had to deal with. And of course, you can design just about anything because we have very clever people, but that’s one of the questions.

Stradling explains that for deep, hardened targets, hitting the ground at a higher speed isn’t going to send it much deeper into the rock.

If you just have a solid piece of tungsten, and you deliver it at infinite velocity, would it go all the way through the Earth? And the answer is no, it would go a certain depth, and then would stop. Even if it was solid tungsten, three feet in diameter and 30 feet long, there is going to come a point where it’s going to lose all of its momentum, and that energy will be dissipated into sort of a half sphere.

This is a hypothetical premise to explain that there is a limit.  A solid tungsten MOP, with no explosives, would go deep, but still have a limit.  Add some explosives, and the MOP won’t go as deep, but extend the damage by exploding.  That’s the trade off. 

The MOP has a depth limit, so the obvious solution is to use more MOP’s.

One of the things that has been discussed is, can you do what they call multiple miracles – sequential miracles? If you can drop a weapon – if you’ve got three B-2s up there – and they each drop a weapon that can vector itself to a very highly accurate position in a mountain, and you can penetrate with one and blow a hole, and then all of that material is suspended. And you have another one come in immediately afterwards and penetrate through much softer material, until you get into hard material, and you penetrate that, and then you explode, and you levitate all that material. Then you bring a third one in after it, you could start thinking about digging really deeply in.

Using multiple MOP’s are sequential miracles, because a MOP doesn’t make a big impact crater and timing is critical.

A GBU-57 MOP has a diameter of about 3 feet.  The impact hole depends on many factors, but in Iran, it was about 15 feet wide and might have been a couple of hundred feet deep.  For the best results, MOP #2 should hit the bottom of the hole without losing much speed.  It will penetrate rock that was fractured by MOP #1, so will penetrate another couple of hundred feet before exploding.

The timing is critical because the shock wave and debris from MOP #1 can interfere with MOP #2.  This high speed video of a water droplet illustrates the issue.

A second water droplet hitting the rebounding water, will lose kinetic energy.  The second droplet must be timed to hit the divot left by the fall of the rebounding water.  A water droplet is purely kinetic.  The calculations for the MOP would be more complex because it explodes.

So you’d have to have those in a sequence that took all of that into account…if you can avoid the shock from the initial explosion for the second and third penetrators – you know that that is really highly, highly tuned delivery, and we have gotten very good now… could we actually do these sequential miracles and get these things on target? And when we watch Elon Musk land rocket ships, we go, maybe we’re in that kind of a world.

We are in that kind of world, and thankfully, we have Stradling and Musk on our side.

Dr. Stradling is a smart guy who has worked in and around military research.  Since we don’t know anything about that stuff, it makes sense to consider what he says.

The time it takes to refine uranium is much less once you have a few percent concentration. The time it takes to go from natural uranium to a few percent is long. The time it takes to go from 8% to weapons-grade is short…It’s not linear in any sense.

It’s fair and prudent that Dr. Stradling doesn’t want to say more than he knows.  He doesn’t even want to influence the national conversation by saying things he may know about Iran’s nuclear program.  Asked about whether Iran has a nuclear bomb, Stradling is cautious.  

I think that to presume that they don’t have one is overly optimistic. To presume that they don’t have sufficient nuclear material, to presume that they don’t have a tested device, we may not have intelligence that tells us they do, but to presume that they don’t is, I think, overly optimistic, and I really love President Trump. He’s my kind of guy…he wants to have positive reports…But I don’t want him to be embarrassed by finding out later that the uncertainty of the battlefield still applies, even to this latest attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities – that things don’t go as well as we expected, and that’s the nature of warfare.

Iran knows that Israel has an extensive intelligence operation and America has vast surveillance capabilities.  It’s clear that, if necessary, Israel will do the wet work and America will go kinetic.  The rest of the world just wants to get back to business.  The easy way is for Iran to stop with the regional bullying and stop funding terrorist groups.