"Nuclear-hardened is not the issue," he says dismissively. "Nuclear-hardened is easy—it just means that the structure can support a brief overpressure of so many megapascals. You see, half of Saddam’s bunkers were, technically, nuclear-hardened. But this does no good against precision-guided, penetrating munitions—as the Americans proved. And it is far more likely this structure will be attacked in that way than that it would ever be nuked—we do not anticipate that the sultan will get involved in a nuclear war."