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Pentagon's mini-nukes are just
too cute
By David
Isenberg
WASHINGTON - The United States
says that the prospect of other countries
developing nuclear weapons, like Iran for example,
is a bad thing. But at the same time, the US is
seeking to upgrade its own nuclear arsenal.
While the
US has long contended that treaties
such as the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)
do not prevent it from modernizing
its nuclear-weapons inventory, the end of the Cold War with the
Soviet Union and advances in conventional military
power have made reliance on nuclear weapons less
essential. As a result, the US in the 1990s
reduced its arsenal, abided by a moratorium on
nuclear-weapons testing, and crafted new arms-control treaties limiting
the size of its nuclear-weapons stockpile.
But in 1991, a team of Los Alamos nuclear-weapons
scientists delivered a briefing to the Pentagon's
Defense Science Board titled "Potential Uses for
Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons in the New World Order".
The weapon envisaged in the briefing eventually
came to be called the Robust Nuclear Earth
Penetrator (RNEP).
During the Bill Clinton
years (1993-2001), Congress passed legislation
prohibiting US weapons labs from conducting any
research and development on low-yield nuclear
weapons. The measure defined low-yield nuclear
weapons, also known as mini-nukes, as having a
yield of five kilotons or less.
But over the years, various
conservatives and weapons scientists had insisted that
existing US nuclear weapons could not reach a
growing category of potential targets deeply
buried in underground facilities,
possibly containing chemical, biological, nuclear or
command and control facilities. As a result, the George
H W Bush administration had released
a Nuclear Posture Review in 1992 calling for options that
could be considered for future production and
deployment against "hard and deeply buried targets".
Another review in 2001 similarly called for the
creation of "new nuclear-weapons capabilities".
As
it turns out, the US already has such a weapon, or
at least a crude version of one. This early
earth-penetrating warhead is the B61-11, a variant
of the standard B61 tactical nuclear bomb, with
heavily modified casing and fusing. This was put
together in the mid-1990s and can be deployed on
the B-2A Stealth bomber.
But like the
proverbial Phoenix, the RNEP has reappeared. In
the new military budget request that was released
last week, the Pentagon asked the Energy
Department to spend US$18 million over the next
two years to finish a study on the RNEP, which
congressional opponents of nuclear weapons killed
last year by cutting all funding. Representative
David Hobson (Republican-Ohio), chairman of the
House of Representatives Energy and Water
Development Appropriations Subcommittee, led the
House conference on the annual Energy and Water
Bill, which funds the Energy Department, to cut
all funding for RNEP.
The request
stands in sharp contrast to what it experienced last
year when Congress denied the administration's
fiscal-year 2005 request for $27.5 million to enhance the
bunker-busting capability of an existing
high-yield warhead and redirected the
administration's $9 million request to investigate
"advanced concepts", such as new low-yield
warheads, to the Reliable Replacement Warhead
program.
The Department of
Energy's fiscal-year 2006 budget request includes $4 million
for research on the RNEP. It also envisages
spending $14 million on the project in fiscal year
2007. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense's fiscal-year
2006 budget request also includes $4.5 million for
work on the project, and it foresees spending $3.5
million in fiscal year 2007.
Anson Franklin,
a spokesman for the Energy Department's National
Nuclear Security Administration, said the program,
unlike in the past, will be narrowed down to
adapting a B-83 nuclear warhead into a
rock-burrowing, penetrator warhead. Earlier work
called for using either a B-83 or B-61 warhead
inside the digging package.
According
to Matt Martin, deputy director of the
British American Security Information Council
in Washington, DC, "When they got funding two
years ago, they got a line item in the Future
Years Defense Plan [FYDP], which over five years
totaled half a billion dollars [including
actual production of the weapon]. After losing
funding last year, they have apparently gotten smart.
They are not including money in the FYDP. They
are requesting $4 million this year and
possibly spending a little more next year, possibly
$11.5 million the year after. They also made a
separate account to see what you can do to harden the
case for the bomb. That is $4.5 million for
non-nuclear shell-casing testing, included in the air force
budget. They may want to see how conventional
munitions work, in order to justify the case for a
nuclear weapon."
The RNEP is being
designed to burrow through as much as 300 feet
(91.5 meters) of rock or earth before detonating a
high-yield nuclear explosion.
Martin said
the move to fund research on RNEP is the wrong
move at the wrong time. "Clearly it sends a
wrongheaded and dangerous message. When you look
at Iran and North Korea, it is clear they are
moving forward with their efforts because of what
they see the US doing and they use it as an excuse
for their own activities. And to the extent that
they are able to do that, it gives them leverage
and works to the detriment of our own
non-proliferation efforts."
The
US Defense Department says countries such as North Korea
and Iran are protecting military assets by hiding
them underground in fortified bunkers. There
are currently at least 10,000 bunkers in more than 70
countries, according to the Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Left largely undiscussed in
public debate on the issue is that the RNEP, even
if developed and produced, might not do the job.
The Arms Control Association in Washington, DC,
a leading arms-control group, noted in a release
that earth-penetrating bunker busters would
produce a high-yield blast too large to avoid
dispersal of radioactive debris and fallout around
the target, threatening civilians and military
personnel. If new, smaller-yield nuclear weapons
were used to destroy chemical or biological
targets, the fallout would still be significant,
and small errors in intelligence and targeting
could disperse rather than destroy deadly
material.
Funding for RNEP will also
undermine efforts to strengthen the NPT at the
upcoming May Review Conference, according to
critics. The US, as a nuclear-weapon state, is
obligated under Article VI of the treaty to end
the nuclear arms race and pursue nuclear
disarmament.
The law of physics works
against bunker busters. In 2002, Dr Robert Nelson,
a physicist at Princeton University, wrote that
earth-penetrating weapons "cannot penetrate deeply
enough to contain the nuclear explosion and will
necessarily produce an especially intense and
deadly radioactive fallout. A missile made of the
hardest steels cannot survive the severe ground
impact stresses at velocities greater than about
[one kilometer per second] without destroying
itself. This limits the maximum possible
penetration depth into reinforced concrete to
about four times the missile length -
approximately 12 meters for a missile three meters
long."
Even low-yield earth-penetrating
nuclear weapons would excavate substantial
craters, "throwing out a large amount of
radioactive dirt and debris". His dose
calculations indicate that "a one-kiloton
earth-penetrating mini-nuke used in a typical
Third World urban environment [such as Baghdad]
would spread a lethal dose of radioactive fallout
over several square kilometers, resulting in tens
of thousands of civilian fatalities".
According to Martin, "The one thing that
is absolutely clear is that there is no way you
can build a BB [bunker buster] of any kind that
can contain the radioactive blast that is going to
contain the blast from the explosion. Every test
that has been simulated shows that you get not
just a narrow plume but a huge crater and cloud.
In order to fully capture the explosion of any
nuclear weapon you would have to burrow down a
thousand feet. The best they have done so far is
60 feet."
It is far from clear
that the administration will succeed in getting
funding for RNEP research. Hobson, who successfully
led the charge in killing funding for it
last year, gave a speech this month in which he said no
one at the Defense or Energy Department has "ever
articulated to me a specific military requirement
for a nuclear earth penetrator".
Martin
said, "I am cautiously optimistic that it will be
defeated. For one thing, though this was a
surprise to the admin, it wasn't the doing of one
man, ie, Hobson. He had to get the votes of his
colleagues in the subcommittee, committee, floor
and conference. When you count all the places
people had a chance to stop him, there were eight
different times he could have been stopped. That
tells me there are other people besides Hobson;
including other Republicans. Nothing has changed
about the nature of the world or the weapon that
would make them change their minds so quickly."
David Isenberg, a senior analyst
with the Washington-based British American
Security Information Council (BASIC), has a wide
background in arms control and national security
issues. The views expressed are his own.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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