With the recent news that Saudi Arabia would allow the IAF safe passage through Saudi airspace in order to strike Iran, I am interested to know if anyone has done an analysis on Israel’s capability to do so.
We know the targets would be the facilities at Natanz, Isfahan, Qom and Arak, with the Bushehr reactor being a secondary. The first three sites feature massive underground facilities that could only be reached using penetrating ordnance, which Israel has. The last two are reactors out in the open.
With the shear amount of targets and the size of the underground facilities, I am beginning to think this wouldn’t be anything like the Osirak or Syrian reactor strikes. I think this would be a large sustained operation over a few days rather than hours time.
Just by my rough guessing, a massive strike package would have to be put together to even cause significant damage to criple Iran’s nuclear facilities. BLUs are heavy and Paveways and JDAMs of high explosive yield (2000-5000 lbs) would mean the bombers would have to carry at most 2 of the largest bombs, with the rest of the loadout being external fuel tanks. Smaller yield bombs (500-1000 lbs) could be carried in numbers of maybe 4 or so, but this would have less of an effect on the underground facilities with regards to destructive power. And it would result in a lower range for the bombers.
Basically, it’s looking like this would take the whole Israeli Air Force.
Has anyone else done an extensive analysis using fuel consumption, inflight refueling, bomb loads, fighter ranges, weapons loadouts, and weapon type/numbers required for taking out ALL of the targets?
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June 13, 2010 at 4:21 am