Bombing Iranian nuke program won't work

ARTICLE: Iran Shielding Its Nuclear Efforts in Maze of Tunnels, By WILLIAM J. BROAD, New York Times, January 5, 2010

Some details on the long-known Iranian effort to distribute their enrichment/nuclear facilities deep under ground.

The opening:

Last September, when Iran's uranium enrichment plant buried inside a mountain near the holy city of Qum was revealed, the episode cast light on a wider pattern: Over the past decade, Iran has quietly hidden an increasingly large part of its atomic complex in networks of tunnels and bunkers across the country.

In doing so, American government and private experts say, Iran has achieved a double purpose. Not only has it shielded its infrastructure from military attack in warrens of dense rock, but it has further obscured the scale and nature of its notoriously opaque nuclear effort. The discovery of the Qum plant only heightened fears about other undeclared sites.

Now, with the passing of President Obama's year-end deadline for diplomatic progress, that cloak of invisibility has emerged as something of a stealth weapon, complicating the West's military and geopolitical calculus.

Iran's refers to this tactic as a "passive defense." Passive-aggressive would be more apt, but you get the idea.

The complications here are significant and recognized:

Indeed, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has repeatedly discounted the possibility of a military strike, saying that it would only slow Iran's nuclear ambitions by one to three years while driving the program further underground.

Some analysts say that Israel, which has taken the hardest line on Iran, may be especially hampered, given its less formidable military and intelligence abilities.

Ahmadinejad, by the way, started as a transportation engineer and then founded the Iranian Tunneling Association, so not exactly some fly-by-night effort easily bombed into submission:

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of big tunnels in Iran, according to American government and private experts, and the lines separating their uses can be fuzzy. Companies owned by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran, for example, build civilian as well as military tunnels.

As the piece points out, America has been working the technology of a deep tunneling bomb for quite some time. But that's not the issue here. The issue is the vastness of the tunneling effort, and the reality that if we went that route, we'd have to bomb at great length and even then we'd have little sense of what damage we did and what was spared.

Comments

[William R Millan]

Going after the Nukes is a waste of time. Go after the leadership and let them know in advance that if they don't come to terms, "the first thing we do is kill all the Mullahs."

Yes, I know that is a "perfect world" solution. We are not going to interfere with them getting nukes and then hope they act rationally. All we will do is stand back and hope they will only use the Nukes to bully their neighbors, not take out Tel Aviv.

[Mike Nelson]

I've never thought much of going after the hardened infrastructure. But it seems to me that since nuclear refinement is a very energy intensive process, and as electrical generation facilities are hard to hide given their thermal output, that an effective tactic would be to take out their power generation and transmission facilities. Let them build their tunnels and centrifuges and all that other expensive crap, but deny them the electricity to use them at any meaningful scale.

My humble (and ameteur thus likely naive) opinion...