The curious case of the busted bunker busters (concluded)

Cornell Schrödinger Cat. From Amit Goswami.

A week after the 4 January inauguration of the new president, David Sanger offered Times readers one of those magisterial (I want to say deanly? diaconal?) big articles for which he is famed, collations of a wide range of anonymous leaks and a firm grounding in Received Opinion, this one on the subject of US-Israel relations over the past couple of years; focusing, as a matter of fact, on the case of the bunker busters: on a request Prime Minister Olmert [jump]

The curious case of the busted bunker busters (continued)

The case of the busted bunker busters may turn out to be a case of that fascinating but elusive animal, the Political Observer's Paradox, in which the way you choose to observe a particular political phenomenon—whether you focus on its position at a particular point in time, or its velocity as it works its way through a particular set of spatial coordinates—can affect the way it comes out. But it's a pretty complicated matter, and we'll have to go into some background first.

The GBU-28 (Guided Bomb Unit 28), improperly known as "Deep Throat", and originally created by Texas Instruments and Lockheed but now manufactured by Raytheon, is a bunker buster: a hard-target laser-guided bomb developed during the First Gulf War in 1991 to penetrate the underground concrete bunkers in which the Iraqi command was thought to be hiding from Operation Desert Storm, 19 feet long and stuffed with something that makes it incredibly heavy, 5000 pounds.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

It works, according to HowStuffWorks, like a gigantic nail shot from the gigantic nail gun of a B-52 or F-111, plummeting nose first toward its target and piercing through 100 feet of soil or 20 [jump]

The curious case of the busted bunker busters

Bowling Bombs. From Freaking News.

One of the more arcane bits of controversy arising from last week's visit from Binyamin Netanyahu to Washington is the question of whether anything happened on the issue of the so-called bunker buster bombs made in America (Lockheed) for which Netanyahu yearns, as something that could be used to blow up Iran's underground nuclear facilities, should he find it necessary to do that.

It started for me at one or another digital hangout where a mildly paranoid participant was frantically informing people that Obama had decided to equip Netanyahu with all the bombs [jump]