“Illogical Nuclear War Alternative” Vis-à-Vis NK Vice All-Out Invasion

Kim, Jung-un's famous inspection tour — note taker entourage in tow
(North Korea is great at staging phony photo ops like these)

Non-Nuclear Bomb Alternative

If the United States seriously intends to punish North Korea for continuing to develop nuclear warheads and the rockets to deliver them, the punitive blow will likely come via a *MOP, not MOAB… WTF is a MOP, and no not the kind used to wipe a floor with.

* MOP (Massive Ordnance Penetrator): Produced by Boeing, the MOP (official nomenclature is: GBU-57).

In 2004, the Pentagon began development of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP). The MOP was ready for combat in 2011.

It can deliver a 37,000 LB payload (some 15-tons) of high explosives deep into the ground – hence its nickname: “Bunker Buster.” 

MOP video here:

MOP is the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever – even more so than the 11-ton MOAB dropped to seal the caves in Afghanistan. The ones we still don’t know much actual damage was inflicted.

How We Got to this Point: In the early 1990s, North Korea was not a nuclear power in any sense of the word, but they certainly possessed the potential to become one. The Clinton administration aimed to head off Pyongyang’s atomic ambitions and by some accounts an attack was imminent, at the risk of an enormous casualty count that is until former President Jimmy Carter stepped in and offered another remedy by diplomatic means and trips to Pyongyang and it worked.

By early 1994, the State Department signed the “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, and it was a rather simple deal:

(1) Pyongyang would suspend development of weapons-grade nuclear reactors.

(2) The U.S. would help them get out of their impoverished turmoil (food and such) and would help them build nuclear reactors that could not produce weapons-grade by-products.

Then DC changed hands. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took over and then also labeled the Clinton-Carter deal “appeasement.” By 2004, the Bush team abandoned the deal totally. Two years later, North Korea set off its first nuke.

(I must note here: The GOP always fails to mention or chooses to forget all the while they blame Bill Clinton, then Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton forgetting to look in the nearest mirror and see the real culprit. The Pentagon (* Under Bush-Cheney) adopted the policy of preemption).

In 2001, just after 9/11, Cheney said that even if there was even a 1 percent chance that a North Korean nuclear threat was real, “We have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” That was called “Cheney’s 1% Doctrine” or possibly “Cheney’s Final Solution” (my hunch).

That Cheney doctrine shaped America’s approach to North Korea just like it was planned for Iraq, but not used to stop Saddam’s WMD program (which didn’t exist).

Then in mid-2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld directed the Pentagon to rewrite its plan for war with North Korea — and called it: OPLAN 5027 — which allowed the U.S. to preemptively conduct air raids on Pyongyang and their nuclear facilities. That posed a problem, however.

North Korean had been busily burying its most important military sites, including airfields and massive artillery positions.

Starting in the 1960s, North Korea constructed as many as 8,000 underground facilities – figures supposedly from U.S. sources. Still, under Bush, the U.S. lacked the means to destroy any of deepest facilities.

During the 1991 Gulf War, the military had rushed production of 5,000-pound bunker-busting bombs capable of punching through 100 feet of earth or 20 feet or concrete. A few years later, the Pentagon developed 2,000-pound bombs that it concluded were 25 percent more effective against underground sites. More than a decade later, these two munitions remained America’s best weapons for destroying North Korea’s underground military infrastructure. Even they weren’t enough.

“Neutralization of an underground facility... is a formidable task,” Air Force Col. Russell Hart wrote in a 2012 paper. To collapse the most “hardened” subterranean facilities, the Defense Department determined that it would need to skip a 10- to 15-ton bomb into a tunnel entrance in order to blow through the door and send a shock wave into the site.

The Bush administration considered fielding a “Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator RNEP” — in essence, a tactical nuclear weapon with a harder-than-usual shell that could burrow deeper into the ground than other atomic bombs.

The Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that the RNEP could “produce tremendous radioactive fallout.”

Congress balked at preemptively nuking North Korea’s nukes. Lawmakers wanted a non-nuclear alternative.

Each of the Air Force’s 20 B-2 (“Stealth Bombers”) based at Whiteman AFB in Missouri can carry two of the 21-foot-long bombs. So, we can forget aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, or ground troops.

The B-2’s, or B-52’s carrying the MOP’s are our only non-nuclear option for destroying Pyongyang’s best-protected deeply buried sites.

Q: If we use any of them, would NK react (I suspect they would) immediately by hitting Seoul (30 miles away) with all they had as a last ditch effort. It would be a huge disaster to say the least – millions would die in days.

Are we prepared for an early form of Armageddon? I don’t think so – I certainly hope not.