Inside Saddam's Baghdad bunker

[DoYouEverWonder]

24 January 2006

The huge dining room's domed roof still stands, as do the pillars decorated with ornate plaster, but everything else in the room is destroyed beyond recognition.

In the middle of the circular hall, where the great and the good of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party would have sat around a huge, luxurious table, are two deep trenches.

Look up, and the two overlapping holes slap bang in the middle of the dome show where the bunker busting bombs entered the palace from more than 12,200 metres (40,000 feet).

Everything else is rubble. Concrete reinforcing rods have been bent around a pillar by the force of the blast.

The walls are deeply charred and daylight streams in through crumbling walls, but underneath the dust, debris and twisted metal is what the American bombs were aiming at.

The whole palace is just an elaborate disguise for Saddam Hussein's nuclear shelter and underground command centre.

It's huge - 1,800 square metres - and was not even scratched by any of the seven bunker buster bombs, or 20 cruise missiles fired at it during the war.

The palace still stands - from the outside just like the many huge lavish buildings that are scattered across Iraq.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4642916.stm

So bunker busting bombs couldn't destroy Saddam's palace and bunker but a passenger jet penetrated three rings of the Pentagon, a building that was supposedly built to withstand a nuclear attack?

[Taxloss]

1. How was the Pentagon designed to withstand a nuclear blast?

Such a building above ground would be impossible. You might be able to build a structure robust enough, not that it would be practical, but after a nuclear blast it would be unusable - electrics knocked out and, more importantly, so irradiated it would glow in the dark.

It was built in the 'burbs. That's the only nuclear-proofing.

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. I just remember that was the myth

that most us believed before 9-11. That the Pentagon had all sorts of defenses built in and was built so strongly (ha-ha) that it would withstand an attack since it was such a strategic and important location.

[babylonsister]

2. Do You Ever Wonder?

Couldn't resist. :spank:
It does make a person go hmmmm....

[Spoon]

4. The way the article reads, the palace sounds pretty trashed, "standing"

on it's last legs perhaps. Bunker busters aren't designed to knock down the surroundings by definition, they are to penetrate deep. However, looks like they failed miserably in this case, exploding near the surface in the foundation between the palace and bunker.

As for the Pentagon, the visable parts obviously aren't designed to take a nuke, it's what is below that counts. I doubt coffee was even spilled in the bunker that day.

Edit:

Perhaps this is why the big push for the "low yeild" bunker buster nukes, Bush's toys just ain't workin...

[newyawker99]

5. DoYouEverWonder

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NYer99
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