JINSA in Washington Jewish Week
Can bunker busters solve Iran dilemma?
April 17, 2014
By Dmitriy Shapiro
Political Reporter
Alarmed by what they believe to be diplomatic failures by the Obama administration in nuclear negotiations with Iran, leading scholars of a Washington-based think tank proposed to have the United States provide Israel with the largest bunker buster bombs in the U.S. arsenal to help restore the administration’s leverage in its negotiations.
Can bunker busters solve Iran dilemma?
April 17, 2014
By Dmitriy Shapiro
Political Reporter
Alarmed by what they believe to be diplomatic failures by the Obama administration in nuclear negotiations with Iran, leading scholars of a Washington-based think tank proposed to have the United States provide Israel with the largest bunker buster bombs in the U.S. arsenal to help restore the administration’s leverage in its negotiations.
In an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on April 8, Michael Makovsky, chief executive officer of The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and a former Pentagon official – along with retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the former chief of Air Force intelligence and senior advisor to JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense and Strategy – recommended that the U.S. provide Israeli Defense Forces with the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) “bunker buster” bombs.
Designed to bore deep into the ground before detonating rather than exploding on contact with the ground, the MOP would give Israel the ability to disable underground Iranian nuclear facilities if it deems that course of action necessary, in case the P5+1 nuclear negotiations in Geneva fail, the authors say.