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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

The Difference Between a Boom and a Bomb

Ya know, I really need to follow my instincts and use my latent math abilities. I took calculus and physics in college, after all. Anyway ...

I wrote of the huge friggin' explosion we are planning for our test site in Nevada.

When I read about the same test in Strategypage...

The Department of Defense emphasized that no nuclear explosion would occur, but that it would be a nuclear size explosion. Some 500 tons of explosives to be exact. That's a .5 kiloton weapon. The test, called Divine Strake, will be to investigate the effectiveness of a nuclear weapon designed to destroy facilities buried deep underground.

And then it hit me. Doh! Of course it isn't a conventional bomb. Just a substitute for testing purposes of a nuke. And we couldn't deliver such a conventional explosive, it suddenly dawned on me. Wrong week to give up sniffing glue, as they say ...

I had vaguely wondered what the heck we'd use to deliver such a huge weapon without taking it a step further and remembering that we don't have anything that can lift that much of a payload! We'd have to drive it to the target site in a convoy of semi-trailers and assemble it on the spot.

This is why we have the term "weaponize."

Still, enemies contemplating a burrowing half-kiloton nuke won't sleep well at night thinking about Divine Strake. We can deliver one of those.