Saudis have no airpower to carry bunker buster bombs to Iran

The possible delivery of US bunker buster bombs to Saudi Arabia will not change the balance of power in the Middle East since Riyadh does not have airpower to carry such weapons to Iran, an author and investigative journalist in Philadelphia says.

Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counter Punch and a contributor to Business Week and other news organizations, made the remarks on Friday when asked to comment on a report which says that US officials are considering selling GBU-28 bunker buster bombs to Saudi Arabia soon, a sale that had previously only been made to Israel.

“It gives Saudi Arabia, at least, conceivably the ability to use [force] against underground nuclear facilities in Iran,” Lindorff said.

“[But] I don’t think that it changes the balance of power in the Middle East because I don’t think Saudi Arabia has the air force capability to deliver such a weapon to a country like Iran that has good air defenses,” he added.

“[Saudi Arabia] would only be able to use a weapon like that against Iran with the backing of the United States’ air force, and that I think this equally applies to Israel,” he further said. “I don’t think Israel has the capability to act on his own.”

When asked if it is legal to provide such massive weapons to Saudi Arabia, Lindorff said that “there is no such thing as legality.

“The US is providing weapons that most of the world has already determined should be illegal, like antipersonnel weapons that were provided to the Saudis for the current campaign against the Houthis in Yemen.

“The US uses depleted uranium; most countries consider that to be a war crime; and it supplies DU weapons to Israel and to other allies; it was used widely in Libya by the French, by the US and by British.

“You know, over and over the US uses weapons that most of the rest of the world considers illegal, [like] white phosphorous in Fallujah and other examples.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, Lindorff said that a bunker buster bomb is not illegal under international war conventions.

“It’s a weapon basically to be used against military targets. The real question is, it’s unusually powerful nonnuclear bomb and it has a purpose of digging down into the ground before it explodes and doing damage to the things underground,” he noted.

“We saw one used in Iraq that killed, I think, maybe a hundred people who were in a bomb shelter. So it’s a dangerous weapon in that respect,” he pointed out.