Jonah Goldberg links to this article from AFP, in which the designer of Saddam's bunker says that's what it would take to breach the bunker.
Let's see.........the Hiroshima bomb had the explosive force of 25 kilotons of TNT. That's 25000 tons, so 5,000,000 pounds. I think I read somewhere that our bunker-busters have something like 600 pounds of explosive in them. 5 million over 600 is something on the order of 8300 bunker busters.
But then when you get to thinking about it, the Hiroshima bomb was a one-time big boom. How many bunker busters would it really take to knock a big enough hole in Saddam's bunker to get a thermobaric bomb inside?
My guess is that it wouldn't be anywhere near 8300, especially if you kept hitting the same spot over and over. Which we can pretty much do.
CORRECTION: Hmm...my math is wrong! 25KT is FIFTY million pounds. But all that explosive power is still mostly wasted on a pinpoint target (remember, that sort of bomb was built to take out a whole city, not an acre or so of it), so I'm guessing it still won't take anywhere near what the German engineer who built the bunker thinks it would take.
