Iran Winning the Underground Arms Race

Iran claims to have built at least one bunker that is filled with vehicle-mounted missiles and hidden deep beneath a mountain, well out of range of U.S. munitions.

Pro-government Iranian news agencies have published photos and videos they claim to depict an Iranian missile facility situated a staggering 500 meters underground in an unspecified mountain range.

“This is a sample of our massive missile bases," Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force said while showing off the base, according to media reports. "Our power and capabilities are like an iceberg that floats above water and whose tip barely shows above the clear water.”

To put into perspective the alleged depth of the rocket facility, consider that Iran's Fordow nuclear enrichment plant is just 80 meters below the ground and still would be "hard but not impossible" for the United States to destroy, an unnamed U.S. government official told Reuters in 2012.

While details about the alleged 500-meters-down subterranean base are few and difficult to confirm, the bunker and others like it could upset the delicate military balance between the United States and Iran as the two countries move forward on an agreement to limit Tehran's nuclear program in exchange for a gradual easing of economic and military sanctions targeting the Islamic regime.

That's because any facility a quarter mile below ground is way too deep for America's existing bunker-busting bombs to directly destroy in the event Iran reneges on the nuke deal and tries to put atomic warheads on its long-range rockets.

Which is not to say the Pentagon isn't already thinking about ways to indirectly disable such deeply buried targets.

Hajizadeh reportedly granted journalists access to one deep tunnel for the first time on Oct. 13. Among other media coverage, Abas Aslani, the general director of world and foreign policy news at the Tehran-based Tasnim News Agency, Tweeted four photos showing military-style, vehicle-mounted rockets parked in a long, dimly-lit tunnel as men in uniforms stand in ranks beside them. "#Pictures of #Iran's #IRGC #missile base in the mountain & 500 meters underground," Aslani wrote, using the acronym for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the most hardline of Tehran's military branches.

"The Islamic republic's long-range missile bases are stationed and ready under the high mountains in all the country’s provinces and cities," Hajizadeh told reporters.

It's unclear whether Hajizadeh was telling the truth—and the journalists touring the tunnel were unlikely to question him. Tasnim News Agency, for one, is a self-described ally of the Iranian regime, dedicated to "defending the Islamic Revolution against negative media propaganda campaign," according to the agency's website.

It's worth noting that Tehran has a reputation for military fakery, even building elaborate but nonfunctional weapons including at least two kinds of warplanes that turned out to be nothing but wooden mockups. In 2008, either the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps or one of Iran's government-friendly news publications altered a photo of a missile test to make it seem that the IRGC launched four rockets at a time instead of three.

Even if he was telling the truth, it's hard to know exactly what Hajizadeh meant when he claimed that the missile base is 500 meters underground in a mountain. Was he saying that the bunker is under the surface at a point a quarter mile below the mountain's peak? Or that the tunnel depicted in the photos and video extends a mostly horizontal distance 500 meters into the mountain's base?

The precise meaning matters because it indicates just how much soil and rock lie above the missile facility, between it and the surface. That's the metric that makes all the difference when U.S. warplanes attack and a layer of dirt is all that protects your missiles from the Americans' bombs.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/16/iran-winning-the-underground-arms-race.html