I would rather see the bunker sealed and then use a penatrating napalm weapon to take out the shelter the fire would gaurentee death of any one in the bunk but not taint the ground as perminatly as a nuke would alterativly they would modify the gps guidance from one of the new moab to use with a daisy cutter modified to be used as a penatrating bomb. accomlishing the same goal. teh moab it self obviously would have difficulty deploying effectivly in a multilevel bunker.

MOAB isn't for getting at deep bunkers and sanitzing them. (Although, it's perfectly possible that they might be suitable for medium deep bunkers without bio, chem, or radiation hazards. I'd think the concussion could collapse all but the most deeply buried and heavily reinforced structures.) There's at least one new weapon reported for dealing with bio/chem hazards. It's a real monster. Combines a penetrator with a very high heat explosive, with an added tail of chemical agents which would disrupt any living organism and blast apart chemical agent's at their molecular bonds.

A better way is to have a conventional warhead delivered bij a missile flying mach 5 or up and with a hardenend head (tungsten/depleted uranium). A missile flying mach 5 will penetrate any bunker with ease, even if its hardend/thickend. And yes a napalm like payload will probably kill all of the bunker population. NEVER use nukes if there is another way.

if you really want maximum penatration we would easily look to a space based kinetic weapon. from space it would require much less fuel to get up to speed for a high speed reentry. possibly a good way to use those nuclear silo missle bodies rather than destroy them, or use on a modified nucklear submarine.

A space based weapon is way to expensive. A normaly launched rocket (air/land) will be enough. Guidance will be the most hard part to get correct, but then again, it's not THAT hard. ;)

You would NOT use a simple penetrator round, by choice, against even a deeply buried target containing chemical or biological agents. This is why we've been scrambling to come up with something suitable, and why the possibility of a penetrating nuclear warhead has been raised. The idea is NOT to simply scatter toxic materials. It's to destroy them, render them inactive.

I don't see why a spaced based weapon would be so expensive. The way I see it dropping from space is a cheap way to get the velocity necassary, we have lifting vehicle being crushed now. we could keep them and rearm with a modified warhead for your roll. we could construct a reentry vehicle that could withstand a high speed entry use GPS guidance to aquire a flight path in high altitude so that if GPS communication is comprimised at low altitude it would follow the previous fall path, and use what ever explosive element necessary and what ever ancillary weapons. we could also use some kind of follow on sealant warhead, useing patterned submunitions to bury it in surrounding earth or maybe even some type of foam based sealant(like a fuel air bomb only with self activationg foam like they use to put out fires). other than developing the warhead most of the work is done. We could develope a deep penatration warhead that could be carried by any submarine or launched from a silo in the US and hit a bunker any where in the world. people say that it could start WW# but we could anounce its launch hours before hand and still hit a bunker before anyhting could be removed.

About 20.000 dollars per kg is quite expensive to get up in space if you ask me. If you want to have a re-entry weapon with double shielding (heat from re-entry and high impact of the bunker) this will be a heavy and costly dart. Also, a space bases weapon will be on a known course because of it's flight path. Even with multiple sattelites you've got more prediction than with a single conventional bomber. Then we got another problem; the re-entry. How much energy you think it will cost to slowdown a space bases re-entry weapon? You can't just release it. If you do, it just stays where it is. You need a rocket to slow its path so it's orbit wil get to a lower path. It will use lots of energy to make it a precise weapon. so, it will be bigger and more costly to get into space. If you can drop this weapons from a normal bomber you save a lot of money. Also, in wartime it may be hard to get enough weapons into space. Space bases weapons that release ordenance are not an option until anti-gravity shows up. and even then you don't heve to get it onto space first. ;)

Aha, just reading now you want to use old ballistic missiles to be use for this purpose. (I should start reading first...;) Still we keep most of the problems and we are even getting some more; -The bodies who are waiting for destruction are without the fuel, which is not cheap. -Launching a waepon from mainland USA with a flightpath over highly populated area's seems to me like maddness. -Using a bomber is much cheaper. -An ICBM can maybe carry about 15 bunkerbusters at a time. A B1 can probably carry double that load. For me space bases release weapons are out of the question.

yea but a ballistic missle can leave the USA and strike a target anywhere in teh world in 30minutes can any bomber do that? also since the basic delivery system is in existance it wouldn't cost that much. also it wouldn't be any more dangerous than any countries space program. it would travel over water until it entered space and at that point unless it was deploying warheads it would just float in space until it hit teh atmosphere and desina grate. and it would be much less dangerous than launching nuclear armed ones. also they could be used to just launch satalites into space the launch system is developed and the rockets already exist. I would rather see them destroying the warheads and stockpiling the nuclear material than destroying the rockets that could be used again. they could even be used to develope some type of recovery pod for space shuttle disastors so we could return just the pepole the same way we brought them backi teh past is a capsule.