Tunneling by Tehran

The lead article in today’s New York Times is titled, “Iran is Shielding Nuclear Efforts in Tunnel Mazes.” It describes the scope of Iran’s efforts to hide its nuclear facilities in tunnels dispersed across the nation.

The tunnels provide an effective defense against the military option by the United States and especially Israel, described in the article as having more limited intelligence necessary to locate and destroy the tunnels.  The article notes three characteristics making it difficult to counter Iran’s nuclear development program: 1) well hidden, 2) widely dispersed, and 3) deeply buried.

Further bad news involves President Ahmadinejad’s background: he began his career as a transportation engineer and founded the Iranian Tunneling Association in 1998. Previously, during the 1980s war with Iraq, Iran began its tunneling program for shelter from waves of missiles.

As a counterpoint, the United States is currently developing a tunnel weapon known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. Due to be deployed next summer, it is ten times more powerful than its predecessor, and 20 feet long with thousands of pounds of explosives. It will be carried by the Stealth bomber and is specially designed for deep tunnels.

The problem with all these efforts, however, is that Iran has created a maze of decoy tunnels as well. And we only need to miss one area, one receptacle with a newly developed bomb for the whole effort to fail. This speaks volumes in favor of the Obama administration’s policy of engagement albeit with the big stick of sanctions included.