by Alec Muffett
A colleague [blogs.sun.com] pointed me to a photo of this bridge between Sweden and Denmark.
It takes a moment to work out what’s going on, and then you wonder at
…and then you wonder about European unity.
Credit where credit is due, I found the link from another on b.s.c. here http blogs.sun.com/roller/page/rama/20041018#underwater_bridge
You might also be interested in the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel: http http://www.cbbt.com/
Any link crossing water is easily disabled — explosives in the support pillars of a bridge, or in the roofing of a tunnel, or mines on the ferry route will all do the job nicely.
The way I heard it, the tunnel portion is not there for ships to pass; the ship channel runs under the cable-stayed bridge end (not shown in the photo). The tunnel end was done so that the bridge wouldn’t interfere with airport approaches, since the Copenhagen airport is just to the west of the fixed-link landfall.
That’s not to say that there weren’t other concerns (the Channel Tunnel being most famous for its precautionary measures), but that the tunnel wasn’t built for ship navigation.
See the photo at http media.pearson.com.au/schools/cw/atlas/bn/bn-swede/bnswede.htm for a wider view.
agreed; it struck me though that taking out a long, thin structure in its entirety would require a lot of cruise missiles, bombs or somesuch, and a significant attack.
To quickly disable the above for several weeks would merely require flooding.
Christopher, thanks for the additional information.
Taking out the bridges might be easy enough if you can prepare for doing so — charges on a few key points would probably suffice to take out enough of the structure to make it unusable.
(Or just put mines over a good chunk of the length of the bridge — put a FOF system in them for even more fun, as that still allows your own troops to use the bridge)
For the tunnel portion I ‘m not convinced that flooding would work well — even if you disable the tunnel portion of it there still is a lot of concrete at the bottom, which provides a nice base for emergency bridges…
And the flooding itself might turn out to be tricky (if you want to be able to restore it to operational use): flashflooding the tunnel might end up knocking it out altogether, as that stresses the internals maybe more then they were designed for; slowly flooding it would require pumps or some other rate limiting mechanism (mechanisms that in turn can be sabotaged).
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