|
|
|
|
Opening the Door for a New Generation of Nuclear Weapons
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Molly Mechtenberg-Berrigan, Nukewatch
|
Spending for New Nuclear Weapons Initiatives Reaches Final Stage
On November 5, 2003, U.S. House and Senate negotiators reconciled their differences in the controversial spending bill for new nuclear weapons initiatives. They agreed to give George W. Bush and the Department of Energy most of the money requested to study new types of nuclear weapons. The full House and Senate are expected to clear the spending bill soon and send it to Bush to sign into law.
The funding, part of the energy and water appropriations bill, gives the Department of Energy $7.5 million to develop a “robust nuclear earth penetrator” for use against deeply buried bunkers. It grants $6 million to research small, “low-yield” nuclear weapons commonly referred to as “mini-nukes.” In order to pass this legislation Congress had to repeal the ten-year-old Spratt-Furse Amendment that banned the research and development of nuclear weapons of less than five kilotons. The bill also authorizes $25 million to shorten the amount of time to prepare for a return to full-scale nuclear testing from 24 to 18 months.
While both the robust nuclear earth penetrator and the mini-nuke may be designed to burrow into the ground to destroy a bunker, these weapons are not the same. Mini-nukes are nuclear weapons with a yield of less than five kilotons. The robust nuclear earth penetrator design has a yield up to a megaton, or around 70 times the force used on Hiroshima.
“Mini-nukes”: A Misleading Title for a Weapon of Mass Destruction
In a 1991 Strategic Affairs article entitled, “Countering the Threat of the Well-Armed Tyrant,” Los Alamos weapons analysts Thomas Dowler and Joseph Howard II make the case that the U.S. has no proportionate response to a rogue dictator who uses chemical or biological weapons against U.S. troops. They argue, “Nuclear weapons with very low yields could provide an effective response for countering the enemy in such a crisis, while not violating the principle of proportionality.” The Pentagon has maintained this argument, asserting that mini-nukes would act as a more viable deterrent in a world of terrorism and small “rogue” states. The mini-nukes program would involve the development of small-scale nuclear warheads whose explosive impact is considered, by the Pentagon, easier to control and would, they claim, minimize collateral damage.
The notion that mini-nukes are proportional weapons of low collateral damage is misleading. According to a report prepared by Gregory van der Vink in cooperation with the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1993, “Nuclear Testing and Nonproliferation,” a one-kiloton nuclear explosion will produce 41 billion curies of radiation one minute after detonation. The effects of the blast and resulting fallout would be devastating to the local region and produce cancer-causing radioactivity that would remain in the environment and air, affecting the lives of thousands, if not millions, of people. As Sen. Ted Kennedy (Dem., MA) asked during the debate in Congress, “Is half a Hiroshima OK? Is a quarter Hiroshima OK? Is a little mushroom cloud OK? That’s absurd. The issue is too important.”
A smaller-yield nuclear weapon blurs the line between conventional and nuclear weapons. The mini-nuke is heralded as a more “usable” weapon. The decision by the current administration to pursue such a weapon is an indication of future warfare in which nuclear weapons are more likely to be used. The quest for low-yield nuclear weapons will erode the international norms against the use of weapons of mass destruction at a time when the U.S. needs to be making logical and consistent policy decisions while working globally to prevent nuclear war.
Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator: A Very Dirty Bomb
The robust nuclear earth penetrator, commonly referred to as the “bunker buster,” would be designed to destroy “hardened deeply buried targets” such as bunkers holding stores of chemical or biological weapons. Some of these underground bunkers are protected by 200 to 300 feet of hardened concrete. The Pentagon has advanced the idea that robust nuclear earth penetrators would tunnel deep enough to contain the explosion and therefore spare the surrounding population.
Dr. Robert Nelson, Princeton physicist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, identified two primary problems with robust nuclear earth penetrators in a report published in the Journal of Science and Global Security. Nelson argues that the weapons cannot penetrate far enough into the earth’s surface to prevent nuclear fallout, and the nuclear explosion would not produce enough heat to neutralize the chemical or biological agents.
The U.S. currently possesses about 50 B61-11 bombs, which were modified from existing high-yield nuclear weapons to act as earth-penetrating bombs in 1996. However, the B61-11, weighing 1,150 pounds, can penetrate only about 20 feet into frozen soil. Research has shown that a weapon as small as 1 kiloton must be buried at least 200-300 feet to contain its radioactive fallout. A 100-kiloton explosive must be at least 1,300 feet deep. Otherwise, the explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with especially intense and deadly fallout.
To act as a bunker buster, the weapon design must protect the warhead and associated electronics while it tunnels into the ground. Dr. Nelson maintains that if the hardest steel and alloy available is used, it could only penetrate 30 to 50 feet into rock or hard concrete: “Even for the strongest of materials impact velocities greater than a few kilometers per second will substantially deform and even melt the penetrator.” In some cases, the fallout could include the active chemical or biological agents that the bomb is meant to neutralize. The argument that bunker busters are clean, surgical weapons is a dangerous and provocative myth.
Other drawbacks to the pursuit of the mini-nuke and bunker buster include the following:
• There is no country in the world whose military approaches the strength of the U.S. military. The development of new nuclear weapons on the part of the world’s largest superpower can act as an engine of proliferation as vulnerable nations seek to insulate themselves with their own nuclear weapon(s).
• The design of a new weapon will almost certainly lead to a resumption of nuclear testing, as indicated by the budget allocation to shorten nuclear testing readiness. A return to testing would overturn the ten-year moratorium on testing and set a very dangerous precedent for the rest of the world.
• U.S. pursuit of new nuclear weapons is in direct violation of the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in which nuclear-weapons-holding states pledge to seek nuclear disarmament at the earliest possible date. The NPT is the cornerstone of global nuclear disarmament efforts.
Weapons Labs Benefit
The most vocal proponents for the new class of hydrogen bombs come from the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories at Los Alamos in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California. Beginning in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, there was serious discussion about closing one of the bomb labs. Keeping young scientists interested in the weapons program is difficult when their main job is the relatively mundane task of assuring the reliability of existing weapons. The labs desire the challenge of designing new nuclear weapons for the scientific and technical training experience. The Bush Administration and allies in Congress had portrayed the ban on development of low-yield nuclear weapons as an un-American restriction on the creativity of U.S. nuclear physicists.
Once the bill is signed into law, the weapons labs can dream up new designs, verify their operation in supercomputer simulations and perform detailed feasibility and cost studies, including limited production of nuclear components for experiment. The Energy Department would still have to return to Congress for approval of “engineering development”—the phase involving production of a test bomb.
The compromised spending bill does not give the Bush Administration all of the requested funds for new nuclear weapon initiatives. While $15 million was originally requested for the bunker buster, only half was approved. However, at a time when disarmament efforts are key to curbing the nuclear threat, the spending bill reopens the nuclear door in the U.S. It is now our job to debunk the myths of the mini-nuke and bunker buster and renew the movement to abolish all nuclear weapons. |
|
|
|
|
|
© 2003 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
|
 |
|
Complete December 2003 - January 2004 Index - click here
|
|
 |
|
|
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
|
|
|
|
|
|
