A B2 bomber dropped the bomb, and on its flight from Missouri it burned roughly 28,900 gallons of jet fuel, releasing 282 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, equal to the yearly collective tailpipe emissions of 66 passenger cars in the U.S.
You wouldn’t have seen it, but immediately after impact, the bomb’s 20-foot-long penetrator drill bit would have ploughed through 60 feet of limestone and dolomite in less than 0.03 seconds.
You could have seen a dull orange flare from the bomb’s work further underground emanating from the hole, but your eyes would probably still be closed, your system still in shock.
For about three seconds, everything would have then been quiet.
Of course, nothing would have had the sensory apparatus to take in this quiet. Like yours, the eardrums of the nearby little owls would have burst, and every reptile or small mammal on the ridge would have been killed outright by the shockwave.
The cones and bark of the junipers would have been stripped off, their trunks uprooted and flung alongside the blown-apart darkling beetles and dead geckos. Down the ridge, the jirds’ burrows would have caved in, the scops owls would have been fatally concussed.
There would be that three seconds of quiet, though. Maybe you would still be breathing. Maybe your heart would still be beating. After those three seconds, super-heated rock fragments, having been shot out of the bomb hole by the limestone tail-jet of pulverized rock and hot air sent back up the entry-shaft, would have ignited the juniper duff all around you, while the cascade of glowing hot rock fragments would have tumbled over your body, supine still on the shuddering ground.
It would have been more a shudder than a vibration or shake, more like an animal struck in the spine and stunned than the earth disturbed. The stunned mountain would have lurched and fallen into itself, collapsing. The underground made-spaces would have collapsed, too, and a cavity would have formed from multiple, convergent cavities created by destruction.
The ground roll vibrations from this collapsing would have been equivalent to a 3.5 magnitude earthquake, felt down in Qom, and further along the western rim of Kavir National Park, where Persian onagers, striped hyenas, Indian wolves, goitred gazelles, Persian leopards, and some of the forty remaining Asiatic cheetahs in the world would have been shaken.
The bomb’s cascading impact below the surface would have pushed a plume of warm, silk-grey dust 900-feet into the sky, rising and spreading east, confounding a gliding steppe eagle and confusing the flocks of sandgrouse, who would abort their flight path to feeding grounds and instead circle and re-circle the edge of the dust cloud in a fugue state.
The wind would still have been coming from the northwest, but it wouldn’t just have carried that juniper scent anymore. An acrid, sharp, chemical smell would have joined in, hydrogen fluoride from the breached centrifuge lines, as well as the tang of motor oil and the chalk of eviscerated concrete.
The smell would hint at the ecological shadow cast by the chemistry of the explosion itself. When the explosive charge detonated, it would have generated a hot, fast-moving plume that pushed hydrogen chloride, hydrogen fluoride, and other acid gases into the air, held in place by a fine dust of alumina, limestone powder, and perchlorate particles, until the wind and gravity would drop the toxic material over the surrounding slopes and valleys, coating the juniper needles, cutting photosynthesis for weeks and migrating through desert aquifers, blocking iodide uptake in birds and rodents. Together these acid gases, fluorides, perchlorate and fine metal dust spread stress well beyond the crater and linger in Fordo’s semiarid food web for months to years.
And you, if you had somehow still been alive there on the broken ground, you could have finally cleared the dust from your eyes, blinked once or twice and looked up again. But the sky will be different now. Every time the ground fell further into itself and the mountain slope shifted, the cloud had grown, covering the stars. No more Milky Way. No more moon. At least not until the wind from the northwest pushes the dust cloud over the ridge, and the sky clears again for whatever will come next.
