Can Iran’s underground Fordow uranium enrichment facility, outside Qom, be successfully destroyed by bombing? The short answer is: no one knows for sure. But you can make a much more informed guess after reading the National Security Archive’s electronic briefing book, Underground Facilities: Intelligence and Targeting Issues. The EBB, by Archive fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson, is an extraordinary collection of documents about underground bunkers… and how to “bust” them.
Richelson traces the challenge of identifying and destroying underground sites all the way back to the Nazi’s production of A-4 (V-2) rockets at Nordhausen. Other notable underground structures include: the bunker where Kim Il-Sung conducted the Korean War; Cuban bunkers eventually used to store Soviet tactical nukes; underground air fields in China; a twelve-level tunnel system in Moscow allegedly including a secret metro rail to the Soviet leadership bunker adjacent to Moscow State University; a twelve-room complex inside a Baghdad cave, and a bunker 40 feet below a Qadhafi mansion that included an operating room, medical supplies, a generator, and living quarters.
The EBB also presents documents that providing detailed analysis on how to detect and destroy these underground structures –including those constructed to protect the creation of WMD.
Definitely click over and read for yourself, but highlights include:
- A 2001 report submitted to Congress by the Secretaries of Defense and Energy estimated that there were over 10,000 “potential hard and buried targets” in the world. And that number will almost certainly increase.
- A 1999 Defense Intelligence Agency twenty-year threat assessment stated that, “The proliferation of underground facilities (UGFs) in recent years has emerged as one of the most difficult challenges facing the U.S. Intelligence Community and is projected to become even more of a problem over the next two decades.”
- To combat this challenge, intelligence agencies have established a number of “hard target” components: The National Reconnaissance Office’s Hard and Buried Targets Working Group; the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’ Information and Underground Issues Division; the Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s Hard Target Research and Analysis Center. Richelson writes that, “the most significant indication of the concern about underground facilities was the establishment, in 1997, of the Underground Facility Analysis Center (UFAC), which while subordinate to DIA also relies on participation from a number of other intelligence agencies – including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), U.S. Strategic Command Joint Intelligence Operations Center, and the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) – as well as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). When it was established, UFAC had a staff of 20; by 2009 that number had grown to 240.”
- The EBB has some very interesting information about how underground facilities are detected. A 1999 report describes how the magnetic detection of machinery, heat shimmer, and laser vibrometry can be used (as well as HUMINT, COMINT, and SATINT) to detect hidden underground facilities.
So how do you destroy an underground facility (say at Fordow) after it has been discovered? That is a tricky question to answer, but one document, Chapter 15 of the 2000 Joint Warfighting Science and Technology Plan, provides some clues. (more…)
