This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
"no, these missiles only bust the bunkers we tested them on."
If it's reinforced steel concrete, it would be much harder to bunker bust.
I suspect the world would be safer if everyone just let Trump think he won.
That's impossible. "Make America Great Again" is a slogan that he can only abuse as long as there are problems. If he wants to stay in power it's in his best interest to create problems. It's what fascists dictators have been doing since forever. Even if there are no problems they will point towards something and make you think it is a problem, so they can market themselves as the solution. If he would "win" he would lose his power, which is obviously the opposite of what somebody like Trump wants.
I wonder if Hasbara accounts are pressing this narrative?
Holy nothing burger, Batman!
First off, this article is from 2022, re-released to farm clicks from the current hype cycle.
Secondly, this is conjecture on top of conjecture. They discuss that we can't know the current damage from satellite, and Iran down plays the damage. Then they go on to say "concrete is strong and can be stronger".
Articles like this annoy me. It's all based on lots of unsubstantiated claims, and then one guy's theoretical research. We don't know the strength of the bombs. We don't know the strength of Iran's bunkers. We don't know how much damage was done. None of this has changed. I doubt we'll ever really know. But throw whatever political spin on it you want, and now you've got a click worthy news article.
There's also the fact that the majority of Iran's nuclear facilities were built before UHPC, the concrete discussed in the article, was available!
In the late 2000s, for instance, rumors circulated about a bunker in Iran struck by a bunker-buster bomb. The bomb had failed to penetrate—and remained embedded in—the surface of the bunker, presumably until the occupants called in a bomb-disposal team. Rather than smashing through the concrete, the bomb had been unexpectedly stopped dead. The reason was not hard to guess: Iran was a leader in the new technology of Ultra High Performance Concrete, or UHPC, and its latest concrete advancements were evidently too much for standard bunker busters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordow_Fuel_Enrichment_Plant
Construction on the facility started in 2006, but the existence of the enrichment plant was only disclosed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) by Iran on 21 September 2009,[6][7] after the site became known to Western intelligence services. Western officials strongly condemned Iran for not disclosing the site earlier;
Seems to fall into the same timeframe.
Sounds to me like someone is trying to justify actually using a tactical, atomic bunker buster.
tactical
Lol, they're gonna do the strategic one next
I never really got why tactical and strategic nukes are so wildly different. Aren't those words more or less synonyms?
In common usage they're equivalent to small and big. In practical terms, all nukes are strategic - use of a nuke has profound global diplomatic repercussions.
The reality is that "tactical" and "strategic" are functionally meaningless adjectives when applied to weapons or systems.
Theoretically, "tactical" refers to how a military unit engages another military unit. It is how a commander wins a battle against an enemy unit.
"Strategic" refers to how a nation engages another nation. It is how a government wins a war.
The term "tactical nuke" referred to something that a lower level commander could have been authorized to use under his own judgment. If Soviet tanks were rolling across Europe during the cold war, commanders may have been granted the discretion to use small nuclear weapons to halt their advance.
Since the the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction was established, there has been no such thing as a "tactical" nuke. Any wartime use of a nuclear weapon of any kind demands an escalation to total annihilation. I used the term "tactical" ironically, to refer to a pre-"MAD" doctrine that can no longer exist.
In declaring that conventional bombs cannot penetrate this fixed bunker, it seems that someone is pushing for unconventional warfare. The reality is that this bunker is not impenetrable. It shares the same weakness as any bunker: getting into and out of it. Bomb the entrances to the bunker, and it will take months or years to tunnel back in. Whatever they are doing inside it, they won't be doing until they manage to dig it up again.
Strategic = Hiroshima getting obliterated
Tactical = The Imperial Palace is obliterated, but rest of Tokyo is mostly intact.
rest of Tokio is mostly intact
and housing becomes much more accessible too when buildings are intact but their inhabitants have much shorter lives because of radiation
Eventually, the radiation will be gone.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are habitable now btw
It is like a rifle vs. a cannon.
Yes it is functionally the same, but the "bullet" is much much larger.
Very much not.
Tactical means immediately useful. E.g. use against troops. Strategical means mediately useful. E.g. use against infrastructure and production capacity. Also massively killing civilians. This is where most heinous war crimes live.
immediately
mediately
One means directly, one means by middle man. E.g. a president is elected mediatly by electing a law giving council that then votes on who becomes president. As opposed to the people electing said president directly.
Giving the yield strength in psi is the most pointless thing ever. Every single engineer would use metric Pa so its clearly a conversion for the average american idiot but the average American idiot has no idea what yield strength is.
We dropped a big boom worth 120000 hamburgers and the explosion was many football fields big. Salute to the brave troops.
Sorry bud, you're straight up wrong. Aerospace and defense in the US very much still uses the inch-pound-second system of units.
I'm not a concrete guy, but I know that metals and composites have material properties certified for use in civil and commercial aviation are given in psi in MMPDS and CMH-17. I would be willing to bet that concrete specifications in the US are no different.
I could keep going. Our bolts are specified in ultimate tensile strength by psi. Structural steel standards use minimum yield strengths in psi. There is literally a type of steel called A36 because its minimum required yield strength is 36,000 psi.
Yeah psi is a pretty common unit and trivial to swap between if SI is needed.
Arguments like above often show a lack of real world experience.
Your comment is informative but now all I can hear in my head is Green Day’s “American Idiot”.
I prefer my mechanical stress calculations in millidynes per square kiloparsec thank you very much.
They mean mixing in steel dust or nylon hair?
Hard to believe this is a recent enough thought.
Its called FiberMesh
Fiberglass, carbon fibers, or small steel wires. They don't need to be long, the snippets are only a few centimeters in the video I have seen.
I doubt it's a recent thought, knowing civil engineers, they're absolute perverts when it comes to concrete.
It has been around in some form since there has been manmade concrete.
Personally, I bought a box of chopped fibers for inclusion in a concrete project some 30 years ago - sold labeled for that specific use.
IIRC this type of thing isn't new - there was research into the possibility of making ships out of ice mixed with sawdust in WWII.
It also wasn’t and isn’t that crazy of an idea.
It’s strong AF, buoyant, and you can repair it at sea using the ocean around you.
You just need a reliable way to keep it cool.
How is the fleet holding up?
We almost made it this time!
Oh well, let's freeze another fleet, wait for January and try again
I think that was kinda the idea - war production meant steel was in great demand, and this seemed like a really cheap way to make ships. I wouldn't want to try sailing one round the Caribbean, but they might have been okay in the north sea, for example. They didn't work out though, can't recall why but it's not impossible that melting may have been a factor!
Fuel requirements could get to astounding levels, even with ambient air and water temperatures below 0C any "hot stuff" onboard (engines, lights, radios, people) would have to be offset with some kind of refrigeration system, which requires: more fuel to be burned. I'm sure you can "stay ahead of things" in some environments, but it won't be cheap on the fuel side of things.
The idea was to build giant floating barges in the mid North Atlantic for sub hunting escort aircraft to refuel halfway across. The escort aircraft at the time couldn’t stay with the convoys the whole way, leaving a stretch in the mid Atlantic where they were vulnerable. An ice runway would allow aircraft to cover the convoy for the entire passage, and in the North Atlantic would last months (if not longer) before melting.
Look up pykrete, it’s actually a really cool material
It's been done in mining for decades
I asked because I've heard such advice for bloody countryside home floors. Not even something requiring it.
Turns out that anti-cracking tech is widely applicable, if a bit expensive.
That concrete really isn't new and really isn't that special. There's a reason they built it under a mountain - because the mountain does what concrete can't.
It is not that it can do what concrete cannot. It is just that digging a tunnel under a mountain is much easier than making a mountain out of concrete.
