Stardate 20030328.0929

(On Screen): One of the reasons why there's been so much confusion about what's going on in Iraq is that a lot of reporters have been misidentifying what they see or what they hear about. For instance, there have been a lot of reports of attacks by Scuds, but I'm not sure that it's yet been confirmed that any of them actually were. Most of them turned out to be Frog missiles instead.

I suspect what was going on is that to some reporters, "ballistic missile" and "Scud" are synonyms. They may not even realize that Iraq is known to possess several different kinds of ballistic missiles.

Equally, the term "bunker buster" has come to mean "really fucking huge bomb" in some minds. Thus this report:

The biggest bombs dropped on Baghdad so far two 4,700-pound "bunker busters" struck a communications tower Friday in an intense U.S. bombardment.

That's what the headline was about, but what's quoted above is literally all they say. The rest is a wrapup of other news, clearly intended to flesh out the article.

A "bunker buster" is more properly termed a "penetrator". Where most bombs are more or less teardrop shaped, a penetrator is like a dart. Very long, extremely narrow, the casing is made of particularly good steel, and the percentage of explosive is surprisingly small, often less than 15% of the weight. In the BLU-113, there's 647 pounds of explosive out of 5,000 pounds total.

It will be dropped from great height, and because it is heavy and streamlined it's going something like Mach 5 when it hits the ground. The idea is that it penetrates (hence the name) right through soil and rock and concrete, and it only detonates once it's penetrated a very long way, in some cases more than 30 meters.

Why would we use a weapon like that against a communication tower, a flimsy structure above ground? These are not "earthquake bombs" which would shake the foundations of nearby structures; they don't carry near enough explosive for that. I certainly can't say for sure, but it seems unlikely to me that we'd use a penetrator for this mission.

But we may well have used a 5000 pound, some other kind, and that really is a big'un. I suspect that the reporter got his head wrapped around the idea that all the really huge fucking bombs are bunker-busters, hence the headline.

Update: Ah, here we go. No, the confusion wasn't the bomb. It was the target. Bunker busters were indeed used, but they were attacking a buried communications junction.