This post at Subtopia: A Field Guide to Military Urbanism manages all at once to be an unintentionally self-parodying commentary on the modern Left, and an informative piece. They show pictures of Iran's infamous Natanz facility in 2002 and then 2004, and note:
"Despite advances in satellite imaging, infrared and sensor technology, and a flexing global panoptic muscle, detection methods have suffered accuracy due to the expansion of a subterranean urbanism that’s become increasingly more sophisticated at deflecting aerial surveillance. Whether burrowing into ancient mountain caves, or digging tunneled networks deeper than ever (or so we think), or whether these dank hallways merely skim the surfaces dipping under the border, the tunnelers have kept remarkably ingenuitive and entrepreneurial in their masterful escape routes and renegade economies that pulsate through them. Signs of desperation maybe but also that a real thriving form of opposition is in effect here. Perhaps these dark places are all united in a landscape solidarity against the "iminanent domains" of transnational corporatism. The article is much too long and dense to summarize here, so just read it, if you are interested in the sciences of bunker architecture, ground penetrating radar technology, seismic shockwaves, and mapping the earth's gravitational fields from orbit. Fascinating stuff, to be sure."
It is. Now, if you want to step into true Loony Left surrealism, I recommend the Subtopia articles "Vegas, Baby!" about the forthcoming 'Divine Strake' test; and "'The Long War' enters its capsule." OK, couldn't resist a quote from the latter:
"With all this renewed nuclear tension boiling up around the world, the discovery of this spat up little fossil is a silly archaeological trace of the eerie paranoia that governed the American psyche for decades while posturing with the Soviet Union, but also makes us wonder: has the Cold War really ended, or is it something that constantly lurks just below the surface, regurgitating itself up off the geopolitical backburner when it needs to, playing the earth for a hollow museum of nuclear urbanism inscrolled in synchronous economic timebelts perpetuated by run-on projections of post-future nuclear war?"
The only urbanism here is the big flashing neon sign that says "Hello, I've lost contact with reality; and I'm never, ever coming back."
"or is it something that constantly lurks just below the surface, regurgitating itself up off the geopolitical backburner when it needs to, playing the earth for a hollow museum of nuclear urbanism inscrolled in synchronous economic timebelts perpetuated by run-on projections of post-future nuclear war?"
Huh? What the hell was that? Is this a sentence or a compendium of randomly generated phonics?
Just as a guess, I'd say it's something that constantly lurks just below the surface, regurgitating itself up off the postmodernist backburner when it needs to, playing the blogosphere for a hollow museum of leftist stream of semi-consciousness inscrolled in synchronous delusional timebelts perpetuated by run-on projections of post-future semantic breakdown.
Or something.
"Huh? What the hell was that? Is this a sentence or a compendium of randomly generated phonics?"
It's a Derrida-ism, which Alan Sokal has proved to my satisfaction to be no more than self-indulgent nonsense.
It's that sort of thing which makes the description of the post as self-parody so apt.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has a computer animation that illustrates their opposition to the use of nuclear bunker-busters in Iran (or, presumably, anywhere else). View it here. Their suggestion is to use conventional weaponry on entrances.
It's a terrible situation and I don't believe we should downplay how bad it is. The Iranians have (cynically IMO) placed their nuclear development facilities (as best we know) in major population centers and important productive areas. That shouldn't deter us from doing what's required: the mullahs should not be allowed nuclear weapons. However, I don't believe that it's really possible to do it in a highly targeted way. If bombing is severe enough to take out the underground facilities, it will be severe enough to take out adjacent structures, too.
The weapons in question are called RNEPs (Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator), and DID did an article covering this issue. The is as much an engineering issue as a political one: basically, the reports made a convincing case that present technology is unlikely to work in many cases, even with nukes.
Our March 2006 Military Transformation Uplink covered a couple of somewhat far-out conventional alternatives that may increase our ability to tunnel in. If the technology works, of course, it could be fitted to nuclear bombs down the road as well.
Proximity to population centers? No problemo. Just give them two weeks to evacutate the population. And, include a warning they probably will not be presume to return to the location, along with a noTe to their embassy staff that we have several THOUSAND MORE and any form of retaliation automatically loses another Iranian city, without the generous warning.
I've been paying for our nukes for over 40 years; to be used only in case we needed them. I've never seen a time when their use was more justified.
Teheran would be in no worse shape than Nagasaki, or Hiroshima after a few decades.
Errata - "evacuate"
"Proximity to population centers? No problemo. Just give them two weeks to evacutate the population"
What happens when the Revolutionary Guard is employed to 'encourage' the population to stay put? Remember Saddam and his human shields? The civilian airraid bunker built over the command center? The truth is you are going to see thousands of wannabee martyrs out cheering in the streets (think Serbia) with their kids in tow and hundreds of thousands more in their basements sobbing because they cant leave town without being machine gunned. Hows that gonna look on CNN?
Mark,
Crispy critters would abound. We should not bomb an enemy because they use their population as human shields? If we won't, it sounds like a good tactic for the enemy to employ. That kind of thinking gets our troops killed; see Somalia. Make your moral choice, us or them.
Nukes = 0 troop loss, just NGOs sampling the air
Heavy conventional = few troops, many NGOs
Anything less = AMERICANS GET KILLED
Geoffgo, i have a big moral problem with killing millions of human beings to save a relative handful of Americans. I have a bigger problem with seeing hundreds of thousands of women and children being described as 'crispy critters'. Once the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was understood, the rational world decided using nuclear weapons to target civilians must be a matter of utter last result. To contemplate it before a bombing campaign has even been attempted is maddening. I dont even need to go into all the pragmatic reasons this is a bad idea. Morally it is simply repugnant.