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US proliferation and bunker
busters
By Katrin Dauenhauer
WASHINGTON - The Strategic Command (Stratcom)
meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, this week, behind closed
doors, will involve some 150 people from weapons
laboratories, the US Energy, Defense and State
departments, and the White House. The weapons labs of
the Pentagon and the Department of Energy have already
proposed developing low-yield nuclear earth-penetrating
weapons, also referred to as nuclear bunker busters.
Since President George W Bush last year
announced plans to deploy a limited missile defense
system at several sites in the US, counter-proliferation
has moved center-stage.
Under current
administration plans, new strategic nuclear forces will
remain in the US arsenal until at least 2070, the 100th
anniversary of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under which
the United States and other nuclear-weapon states
promised to disarm.
"In my view, proposals for
new nuclear weapons provide no military value for the
United States and it would result in enormous political,
diplomatic and proliferation costs," said Daryl Kimball,
executive director of the Arms Control Association, a
Washington-based non-governmental research organization.
"To pursue the development of new types of
nuclear weapons would make the task to ban the spread of
nuclear weapons even more difficult," he said. "There is
a 'do as I say, not as I do' philosophy implied. In
order to develop and produce them, testing would be
required that by itself would trigger a global reaction
cycle that would harm international security. China
might resume testing, or Russia."
Meanwhile, a
112-page report by Physicians for Social Responsibility
(PSR), an advocacy group based in Washington, states,
"The 2002 National Security Strategy is radical in its
prescription for a preventive or preemptive use of force
in halting NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] weapons
proliferation."
That strategy to fight weapons
of mass destruction (WMD) "is a dramatic extension of
the policy of counter proliferation, and gives a far
greater role than in the past to nuclear weapons within
that strategy", continues the report, "What Wrongs Our
Arms May Do", presented at a conference on Tuesday.
Critics also oppose bunker busters, fearing that
their relative smallness will blur the line between
conventional and nuclear war, posing a new threat to
world security.
They also question whether
radioactive fallout can actually be contained.
"Constraints of physics stop bunker busters from being
effective, as there are limits to how far the bomb can
penetrate. In order to hit the deepest bunker - meaning
20-30 feet [six to nine meters] - it has to be a large
bomb to send shock waves to penetrate down," said Martin
Butcher, director of security programs at PSR and author
of the report. "However, this will lead the fireball ...
to disperse and radiate dust particles up into the
atmosphere, creating a dirty bomb - the most dangerous
weapon there is," he said. "These questions just weren't
addressed by those who are in charge of the development
of these weapons," added Butcher.
In the 2003
federal budget, Bush requested US$15.5 million for
research on bunker busters. The administration is
spending almost $8 billion on missile defense this year,
which will include equipping a California air force base
with interceptor missiles.
Washington's
missile-defense plans are also intricately linked to its
preemptive-war policies aimed at countering
proliferation of WMD, say critics.
While the
administration argues that the missile-defense system
will increase protection against a missile attack,
experts question that assumption. "Missile defense will
encourage the United States to pursue preemptive
attacks, possibly with tactical nuclear weapons," said
Martha Clar, author of another PSR report, "A False
Sense of Security: The Role of Missile Defenses in
Counter-Proliferation Doctrine", at a conference on
Tuesday. "Missile-defense deployment will actually
encourage proliferation as rogue states attempt to
develop the number of weapons necessary to overwhelm a
US missile defense," she added.
If the United
States resumed new nuclear testing, the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty would be severely harmed, critics
charge. Washington signed the treaty in 1996, but the
Senate denied its ratification in 1999. Still, the
United States' current status as a signatory places
considerable political constraint on future testing,
experts say.
"If the United States started
testing again, it would destroy the treaty, which has
been the goal of American administrations for 40 years.
To throw this away would be reckless," said Butcher.
Coinciding with the Stratcom meeting are
countrywide commemorations of the August 1945 US atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which 215,000
people were incinerated instantly or died from injuries
that year.
"It's actually a tragic thing that in
the week when people across the world remember the two
uses of nuclear weapons in war in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that this administration should get together hundreds of
its top officials and have them examine how to develop
new nuclear weapons and test new nuclear weapons and
maintain America's nuclear arsenal for the rest of the
century," said Butcher.
(Inter Press
Service)
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