…an odd name for the return of big bomb blasting at the Nevada Test Site.
The planned event, now set for June 23, 2006 will set off a 700-ton ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bomb (like what was used to blow up the Oklahoma City Federal Bldg.) that opponents claim will kick up radioactive fallout left in the soil from previous nuclear bomb testing conducted from 1951 to 1992. A fifty-mile shock wave followed by a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud may also revive other sleeping giants, launching a new wave of Godzilla sci-fi and hours of TV replay. Maybe it will rain…
OK, so what’s a strake? “A device for controlling air flow over an aircraft. A strake is also a part of a boat or ship used for generally the same purpose in water rather than air. It is a strip of planking in a wooden vessel or of plating in a metal one, running longitudinally along the vessel’s side, its bottom or between them on the turn of the bilge,” explains GlobalSecurity.org (a site that tried to spawn 4 simultaneous pop-up windows so I won’t link to it).
The real Divine…
And I thought it was a DIVINE typo but it’s worse. It’s part of a plan of DIVINE inspiration. The pop-up spawners above report, “DIVINE STRAKE is one of several ‘DIVINE’ efforts under the Hard and Deeply Buried Target Defeat (HDBTD) program. DIVINE WARHAWK consists of deep underground operational tunnel facility defeat demonstrations using advanced weapons at the White Sands Missile Range. DIVINE HELCAT was a 2004 reconstitution exercise to determine reconstitution time for the C3I tunnel facility at Nevada Test Site (NTS). Also in 2004, planning began for DIVINE HATES, which is a WMD production and storage tunnel complex functional defeat effort.”
Sorry Cheeseman but there is no bomb…check the facts a bit better. The experiment will consist of the detonation of 700 tons of ammonium nitrate-fuel oil (ANFO) above an existing tunnel constructed for other research efforts. ANFO is commonly used in mining and commercial blasting operations. The amount of explosive was selected to achieve differing levels of ground shock—severe to light—along the length of the tunnel.
This experiment supports the Tunnel Target Defeat Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, which is intended to improve and validate computer model planning tools used to defeat hardened and deeply buried targets. Specifically, the Divine Strake experiment will validate and assess the capability of computer codes to predict the ground-shock environment and how the tunnel responds to that shock. This experiment is not being conducted to support any specific, existing or planned conventional or nuclear weapon. Nor does it represent a specific target.