USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011008.0559 (On Screen): Great Britain had a lot of oddball geniuses during World War II. A lot of strange proposals were made for weird weapons, and many were turned down. Of course, it's sometimes hard to distinguish a genius from a crackpot, and a lot of the proposals really were crackpot. But there was one boffin who kept telling them they were using the bombers wrong. They wouldn't listen to him. But then they decided they needed to destroy the dams on the Rhine river, and couldn't figure out how to do it. Torpedos would have been perfect, except that the Germans had placed torpedo nets in the lakes behind the dams to prevent exactly that. Our hero came up with an elegant design for a special bomb which did the job, and specially equipped British bombers then proceeded to demolish all the dams in about two weeks. After that, high command realized he knew what he was talking about, and listened more closely.

His thesis was that bombs which went off when the struck the surface were inherently inefficient. Most of the concussion from the blast made a really big bang and was dissipated into the atmosphere. While impressive as all get out, it actually wasted most of the power of the blast. His contention was that the bombs should be designed to be ultrastrong and to have a delayed fuse, so that they penetrated the ground a good distance and then exploded. Furthermore, he believed that in this design bigger was better. The result was the legendary "Tall Boy", (and its successor "Grand Slam", an 11-ton behemoth which was the largest conventional bomb used in the war). These were known as "earthquake bombs", for they would penetrate several hundred feet into the ground and then go off. All of their explosive force was then transmitted into the ground, creating a local earthquake which would shatter structures on the surface (and under the surface) for a wide area. But what they were really good for was destroying railroad tunnels.

By that point in the war it had been realized that attacking transportation, especially rail, was an exellent way to disrupt German industry. Tunnels were an obvious target; a bridge can be replaced but tunnels are much more difficult. But conventional bombing had to target tunnel entrances, and the resulting damage could be cleared away. With the earthquake bombs, the attack would target the middle of the tunnel, and a long stretch of it would be collapsed. That removed that tunnel from the transportation net for the duration. It turned out that the earthquake bomb was superb for attacking many kinds of structures. For example, to bring down buildings, instead of blasting the structure directly an earthquake bomb would destabilize its foundation. The effect was the same, except that an earthquake bomb was better at it. And nothing is better at attacking underground bunkers.

According to this article, the US has a modern equivalent which uses a tactical nuke. Instead of weighing 11 tons, it weighs about half a ton. It's held within an extremely strong steel casing, and like Tall Boy it's designed to penetrate the ground and detonate well beneath it. If so, and if the US decides to take the step of going nuclear, then this may be another answer for taking out underground tunnel complexes, for the result of a detonation like this would collapse underground structures for a very wide area around the blast. It's speculated that al Qaeda actually have nukes and have them stored in such a tunnel complex; if so, that may justify use of weapons like this. Far better to set off a nuke in the boonies in Afghanistan's mountains than to set one off in Manhattan to finish the job begun on September 11. But of course intelligence on that would have to be extremely good to justify such an attack; it's not something we would do simply on speculation. (discussion in progress)