"Howard Berkowitz" wrote in message
...
In article , "Keith Willshaw"
wrote:

All built under clay

When were they built? Were nuclear weapons or penetrating PGMs design
consideration?


For the cabinet war rooms no, for Northwood nuclear weapons
were certainly a consideration

I certainly agree they are stable under normal conditions, and, for that
matter, the German bombing of WWII. I'm not as convinced that 617
Squadron, using the Tallboy, couldn't have broached them, much less if
more modern weapons were used.

Neither am I but thats not the issue. Tunnels arent just
hard to damage they're hard to find, especially in a
closed society




And won't have much effect on a modern penetrating or high blast
weapon.

It wasnt suggested it would, however a 100ft of clay or
sandstone, especially if properly reinforces is rather
difficult to penetrate using conventional weapons.

The interim "bunker buster" rigged from old artillery barrels penetrated
over 100 feet of hardened clay (caliche) in the US trials before
deployment. They never did dig it out.

And how many would you need to collapse 10
miles of tunnel ?


Cheyenne Mountain isn't only granite, it's granite in a matrix of
steel
stabilizing bolts. Zhiguli is presumably comparable.

I think the Syrians know about steel and concrete too.

I didn't say steel and concrete, but steel and granite. Cheyenne
Mountain was selected, in part, because it is a mountain, and it was
possible to tunnel in from the side. Even so, there was a significant
amount of construction (and excavated rock and soil) that would have
been visible in overhead imagery. I find it hard to believe that Syria
could have (1) found an appropriate granite mountain and (2) hidden from
satellites the evidence of building a major shelter.


You are the only one fixated on granite.

You may recall that the only weapons able to
penetrate the concrete U-Boat pens were the
Tallboys and Grandslam weapons used by the
RAF and the former were definitel marginal
against some of the later pens

What is plausible is that the Syrians might have improved some of the
karst caves, which would be much more hardened than the sandstone
through which the qanats are built. Improved karst, however, isn't the
same as reinforced granite.


The Syrians cant re-order the geology of their country but they
can still hide stuff in tunnels

I will grant that you can superharden something of the size of an ICBM
silo with steel and concrete, although some of the techniques need
research. Again, the construction is difficult to hide from
overheads--it is much more distinctive than a truck of mystery materials.

Difficult to be sure BUT the Serbians managed to hide a lot
of stuff in Kosovo as did the Iraqi's. The UN inspectors
found underground complexes hidden beneath civilian
facilities on numerous occasions



In the middle east the techniques for building extensive
underground tunnels have been know since antiquity.
The network of irrigation tunnels in Iran are known
as the qanat and in Arabia they call them the falaj.

Exactly. The qanats are what I'm describing in the Syrian lowlands.
They
don't and can't go deeply enough to withstand modern bombing.

But tunnels built using modern techniques can and do.

If the Syrians did build such a complex, I suspect we would know about
it. We tracked their attempts to build a subway system, which were
abandoned.

Civilian systems are rather easier to track than military ones
but we may well know about it. That doesnt mean they
couldnt build em though. I suspect any such were built more
with the IDF in mind than the USAF

Keith