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Nailing a bunker buried deep under rock or concrete could one day mean the difference between nuclear war and a diplomatic row. (Think Iran's underground atomic gear caches.) In the *New Scientist *technology blog, I describe a technique developed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory known as a "cluster charge" which makes blasting rock with shaped charges far more efficient.
A normal shaped charge will punch a long, narrow hole; a cluster charge will shift a much larger volume of material using an array of several charge detonated simultaneously. This technique will blast out an impressive forty to sixty times as much rock or concrete for the same weight of explosive.
The obvious application for this technology are penetrating bombs which use a shaped charge to punch a "precursor" hole which the main warhead follows through. In March, DANGER ROOM looked at Raytheon's new cruise missilewhich is shown blasting through nineteen feet of concrete. This type of warhead is known as BROACH, for "Bomb Royal Ordnance Augmented CHarge."
However, a cluster charge does not go deeper; it just allows you to clear more concrete. The best approach would be a series of cluster charges in tandem one after another. Or perhaps, if you want to keep digging for an extended period, use a device with several rapid-fire cannon mounted in the front to tunnel through rock.
Regular readers will recognize this as an exact description of the Deep Digger burrowing bomb we looked at some time ago here and here. The last time I examined it, there were plans for an array of Deep Diggers to produce an artificial earthquake capable of collapsing underground structures. Deep Digger was then undergoing a "security review." Appropriately enough, it seems to have gone underground.
However, it's interesting to note that Lawrence Livermore scientists are researching their own Deep Digger-esque penetrator. They are examining the effects of simultaneous volleys of projectiles. And their results look (right) strikingly similar to the Deep Digger tests (above).
It looks as though Deep Digger may be far more effective than previously estimated. It could certainly beat any kinetic penetrator – even the gigantic Massive Ordnance Penetrator will only go through about twenty-five feet of hard concrete.
Deep Digger will go deeper than that – much deeper. You might be safe several hundred feet down, but a weapon that can collapse all the access tunnels means that anyone who tries will probably be digging their own tomb.
As the old saying has it, "you can run, but you can't hide."
