Hiding Deeply Buried Targets Challenges and Vulnerabilities

Many countries worldwide are using underground facilities to conceal and protect leaders, military and industrial personnel, weapons, equipment, and various other assets and activities. The identification, attack and destruction of these facilities which are considered as high-value targets is on the top priority of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations of the attacking country.The goal of this essay is to introduce the characteristics and structure of deeply buried targets and review the characteristics of nuclear and conventional earth penetrating weapons and finally the main and collateral effects of the explosion of such weapons along with challenges and impacts of attacking deeply buried targets using nuclear and conventional earth penetrating weapons. Many strategically deeply buried targets are beyond the reach of conventional earth penetrating weapons and their destruction can be made possible only by taking the risk of using nuclear weapons. The ability of any country to put at risk these kinds of facilities are challenged not only by depth and their widespread numbers of their vital systems but also the complex CCD techniques and the presence of some of them in the vicinity of civilian areas make this challenge worse. Such facilities hide and protect high value strategic facilities of every nation. This essay shows that knowledge of characteristics, weak and strong points of these weapons which are used against underground facilities can contribute effectively to designing, hardening and will finally lead to the reduction of possible damage and vulnerabilities to these facilities and humans well.