Why America's giant bunker-busting bombs may have failed to reach their target, NPR, June 25

[progree]

The infographics were everywhere in the run-up to Sunday's early-morning strike on Iran's nuclear facilities by American stealth bombers.

They depicted America's bunker-busting bomb, (snip). the graphics showed it plowing a narrow channel deep beneath the ground — around 60 meters, or 200 feet — and erupting in an illustrated explosion.

(snip)

I went back to take a look at the math from those early studies, and I found it actually was fairly straightforward. The so-called penetration equations have existed since the 1960s . . .

"It depends enormously on the kind of rock," (snip)

When I ran the calculations, using a key equation from that study, I found out that the GBU-57 could go up to 80 meters (262 feet) underground if it was dropped in silty clay.

In medium-strength rock, things looked far different. The GBU-57 could only go around 7.9 meters (about 25 feet) beneath the earth — far short of the 60 meters claimed by the infographics.

More: https://www.mprnews.org/story/2025/06/25/npr-did-america-bunker-busting-bombs-fail-reach-iran-nuclear-target

As an interesting sidelight, back in the Osama Bin Laden Tora Bora days, the U.S. looked at the feasibility of a nuclear bunker buster and scientists found there was no way to get a nuclear weapon nearly deep enough to contain the blast and radioactive fallout, and the program was eventually abandoned.

[John1956PA]

1. Of course. Mother nature's strength and immensity dwarf humans' silver bullets.

The energy of a bomb is intense in the atmosphere, but it is handily absorbed by rock strata. The power of a bunker buster wanes when it is absorbed by millions of cubic feet of rock near the surface.

Likewise, the scope and energy of an ocean storm dwarfs that of a nuclear bomb. Trump does not understand the basics of science. Grade school classes teach that there is more kinetic energy in a bathtub of tepid water than there is in a red-hot nail. The energy of a nuclear bomb detonated in an ocean storm (as Trump suggested) would be minuscule compared to the power of the storm which covers millions of square miles.