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Bunker buster 100x hiroshima { May 8 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~1377535,00.htmlhttp://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~1377535,00.html
Critics debunk nuclear 'bunker buster'
By Ian Hoffman
STAFF WRITER
Thursday, May 08, 2003 - As Congress this week takes up a Bush administration proposal for modifying a hydrogen bomb to wage nuclear war underground, lawmakers face a bewildering array of conflicting rationales from senior defense officials and Pentagon weapons policy documents.
They depict the weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, as a destroyer of the Third World's toughest, most deeply burrowed military bunkers, where leaders and weapons of mass destruction might be hidden -- but with minimal collateral damage.
But the political selling of the bomb -- RNEP to defense experts -- is disconnected from the weapon that scientists in California and New Mexico have begun designing. It is a high-yield weapon that will produce huge clouds of lethal radioactive fallout and, in terms of numbers of supposed ideal targets, is best matched in intended design to highly impregnable strategic fortresses carved inside mountains in Russia and China.
"Basically, they're selling a crock to the Congress," said Christopher Paine, a senior nuclear weapons analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council. "RNEP won't work. They'd be committing some kind of humongous war crime to use such a weapon pre-emptively against such a state as North Korea.
"Just like the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons we've built, we're not going to use the RNEP. We're not going to even threaten anybody with it," he said. The push for a new "bunker buster" reflects a nuclear weapons establishment, military and civilian, in search of a mission, Paine argued.
That lobbying is coming less from today's weapons lab executives than from retired weaponeers and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Armed with $7.5 million each, teams at the University of California's two nuclear weapons labs already are at work, at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and at Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, with some of the toughest work reserved for Lockheed Martin at Sandia labs in California and New Mexico.
It is the nation's first feasibility study of a nuclear weapon since 1996. It is an unusual project because, while the Nuclear Weapons Council of senior military and civilian nuclear officials has asked for the study, the Pentagon has not made a formal request for the weapon.
That's a striking fact for Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo, whose district houses Lawrence Livermore and Sandia-California and, who as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, talks regularly with military commanders.
"The warfighters don't think these are weapons systems that will ever be applied in a war," Tauscher said Wednesday after losing an argument against $15 million in new funding for next year's research on the weapon. "They don't think we will ever use them, and they don't know how they will operate in a theater after they have been used.
"The targets that people talk about were meant to be in Iraq, and we certainly didn't need them in this last war," Tauscher said. "Until the military tells me they need these things, why would I spend a farthing on it?"
In all, the Bush administration intends to spend $45 million over three years on the robust penetrator. The defense bill moving through Congress this week also calls for $6 million in "exploratory," advanced concepts funding to look at new weapons designs and seeks repeal of a 1994 prohibition on research and development leading to production of new nuclear weapons.
Working on the weapon will be a tremendous intellectual exercise: Scientists and engineers aim to retool one or both of two very complicated thermonuclear bombs, each with more than 5,000 parts, to crash through 20 or more feet of concrete or granite, sit still a while, then detonate at 20 to 100 times the explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb dropped during World War II.
The robust penetrator is unlikely to penetrate deeper than a few dozen feet through rock or concrete. At 30 feet into solid rock, a huge advance, RNEP would blast millions of cubic feet of radioactive rock and dust into the air.
Paine and NRDC colleagues ran Defense Department computer models of nuclear attacks with a variety of yields on underground bunkers. For an attack on a facility in Pyongyang, where North Korea's nuclear command and control is centralized, the models project fallout casualties of at least 430,000.
In briefings and testimony on Capital Hill, Bush administration officials have cast the new weapon as a break with old, overpowered nuclear arsenal of the Cold War, a bomb to make more credible U.S. threats against nations pursuing weapons of mass destruction and tempted to share them with terrorists.
Yet while classified Defense Department intelligence estimates suggest dozens of such targets exist in North Korea and to vastly lesser extent in Iran, Syria and Libya, the overwhelming majority are in Russia and China.
"The rhetoric may be new but the reality is the same old Russian and Chinese facilities that have been around for decades," said Michale Levi, head of the Strategic Security Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com
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