I found this little piece of news fascinating. It seems Mr Bush and Mr Rumsfeld aren’t the only ones capable of beating the war drum.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran successfully tested its second new torpedo in as many days Monday, the latest weapon to be unveiled during war games in the Gulf that the military said are aimed at preparing the country's defenses against the United States. A spokesman for the elite Revolutionary Guards suggested the new, Iranian-made torpedo was more powerful and capable of going deeper than others in its arsenal.

Gen. Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani told state television the ship-launched weapon can target submarines at any depth and is powerful enough to "break a heavy warship" in two. He did not give the name of the new torpedo or any details of its speed or range.
The torpedo was tested in the Straits of Hormuz, the narrow entrance of the Gulf and a vital corridor for oil supplies.

I guess this is Iran’s reprisal for this threat.

A conference to plan the future of the American nuclear arsenal, including the development of so-called mini-nukes, is being held this week at StratCom, the headquarters of US Strategic Command in Nebraska.

The Bush administration appears determined to build a new generation of small nuclear weapons, especially "earth penetrators", designed to attack nuclear, chemical or biological materials buried deep underground.

And this bit of news.

Pentagon to Test a Huge Conventional Bomb

A huge mushroom cloud of dust is expected to rise over Nevada's desert in June when the Pentagon plans to detonate a gigantic 700-ton explosive -- the biggest open-air chemical blast ever at the Nevada Test Site -- as part of the research into developing weapons that can destroy deeply buried military targets, officials said yesterday.

The test, code-named "Divine Strake," will occur on June 2 about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas in a high desert valley bounded by mountains, according to Pentagon and Energy Department officials.

"This is the largest single explosive we could imagine doing," said James A. Tegnelia, director of the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is conducting the test.

The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets -- such as military headquarters, biological or chemical weapons stockpiles, and long-range missiles -- that the Pentagon says are proliferating among potential adversaries around the world.

Advanced saber-rattling, American style. I don’t know enough about this weapon. An FAE apparently uses a misted volatile fluid, like gasoline or fuel oil, or even a powdered explosive or metal that mixes with oxygen to create a flashpoint explosion when an explosive charge detonates, creating an over pressure impact on a target. It apparently is preferred to huge iron bombs for blast effect. Seven hundred tons is a LOT of bomb though. You’re not carrying that around in a B-52. I’m not at all sure this has much benefit as a weapon, but it could be just dandy as a test bed for a tactical nuke, if the objective is to determine underground blast effect from a penetrator weapon.

Oh, and it seems Iran has a second saber.

TEHRAN, April 2 — Iran said Sunday that it had test-fired what it described as a sonar-evading underwater missile just two days after it announced that it had fired a new missile that could carry multiple warheads and evade radar systems. The new missile is among the world's fastest and can outpace an enemy warship, Gen. Ali Fadavi of the country's elite Revolutionary Guards told state television.

General Fadavi said only one other country, Russia, had a missile that moved underwater as fast as the Iranian one, which he said had a speed of about 225 miles per hour. State television showed what it described as the missile being fired.

"The missile carries a very powerful warhead that enables it to operate against groups of warships and big submarines," he said.

He contended that the boats that would launch the missile were able to evade detection systems but that "even if an enemy's warship sonar can detect the missile, no warship can escape from this missile because of its high speed."

I’m told by someone who knows quite a bit about naval underwater weaponry and combat systems that this is most likely a purchased Russian Shkvall weapon, rather than a homegrown product. If Russian, it’s most likely not the latest model, since the military trend in that country is to build export models, which are less sophisticated than those used by their own forces. I’m also told it’s a real deal, and not a Russian psyops program to seem stronger than they are. The FAS article has a diagram accompanying the article, explaining slightly how the boundary ducts create the cavitation bubbles that allow the missile to move so quickly through water, which is a lot denser than air.

There’s a bit about the research history of the weapon here. And this missile is expensive, but then Iran has a lot of oil, and has been buying weapons systems for several years now. No matter how expensive, the weapon assumes the value of a “fleet in being.” Just by its existence it must preoccupy a potential enemy, and it becomes a deterrent.

It could get real interesting around the Middle East if Mr Bush continues to plan an attack against Iran in order to prop up his catastrophic image of complete failure.