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... Iran and North Korea. They want to threaten other countries with nuking (hence the talk about new, small earth-burrowing nukes), but they don't actually have such weapons. So, they are looking for conventional weapons which might do the job.
But, just for speculation's sake, here are some general observations. Even 3-5 kiloton nuclear weapons burrowing underground by a hundred feet send up a big cloud of radioactive dirt (easily detectable by radiological instruments and from seismic information), and we don't have any which can burrow 100 feet underground--much less, in fact.
So, if we use a small nuclear weapon, we'll get caught, and we won't obtain our objective of destroying deeply-buried facilities. So, the arms manufacturers have sold the Pentagon an alternative, which is impressive to the neo-con civilians who know neither math or physics--namely, even bigger conventional weapons, which will throw up a lot of dirt, but at least that dirt won't be radioactive, and therefore traceable....
If the neo-cons use nukes, both US and world opinion will relegate them to the garbage can. They know that. These much bigger conventional weapons proprosed by military contractors are a way of giving the neo-cons what they think they want, without actually accomplishing anything but the transfer of funds from the government to private industry.
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