With modern weapons capable of striking within feet (meters) of their intended targets, a modern 'near miss' can be much more effective than a 'hit' decades ago. Major advancements in the accuracy and precision of nuclear and conventional weapons subsequent to the invention of the missile silo itself have also rendered many 'hardening' technologies useless. Therefore, a similar degree of silo 'hardening' does not automatically equate to a similar level of missile 'survivability'. The complex fuel storage facilities and equipment needed to fuel missiles for launch and de-fuel them for frequent maintenance add additional weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Liquid-fueled missiles such as those historically used by Russia are more fragile and easily damaged than solid-fueled missiles such as those used by the United States. These systems were designed to survive a near miss of 20 megatons. As a result of this both American and Soviet sites reached a state of 'super hardening', involving defenses against the effects of a nuclear weapon such as spring- or counterweight-mounted (in the case of the R-36) control capsules and thick concrete walls (3 to 4 feet (0.91 to 1.22 m) for the Minuteman ICBM launch control capsule) heavily reinforced with rebar. The main principles in modern bunker design are largely centered around survivability in nuclear war. The primary difference between conventional and nuclear bunker busters is that, while the conventional version is meant for one target, the nuclear version can destroy an entire underground bunker system. While conventional bunker busters use several methods to penetrate concrete structures, these are for the purpose of destroying the structure directly, and are generally limited in how much of a bunker (or system of bunkers) they can destroy by depth and their relatively low explosive force (compared to nuclear weapons). As a result, significant amounts of rock and soil would be rendered radioactive and lofted as dust or vapor into the atmosphere, generating significant fallout. However, it is unlikely that the explosion would be completely contained underground. This in turn could lead to a reduced amount of radioactive fallout. An underground explosion releases a larger fraction of its energy into the ground, compared to a surface burst or air burst explosion at or above the surface, and so can destroy an underground target using a lower explosive yield. These weapons would be used to destroy hardened, underground military bunkers or other below-ground facilities. The non-nuclear component of the weapon is designed to penetrate soil, rock, or concrete to deliver a nuclear warhead to an underground target. Subsidence craters remaining after underground nuclear (test) explosions at the north end of the Yucca Flat, Nevada test siteĪ nuclear bunker buster, also known as an earth-penetrating weapon ( EPW), is the nuclear equivalent of the conventional bunker buster.

Nuclear silo minecraft