U.S. TO BUILD “BUNKER-BUSTER” NUKES

The San Jose Mercury News is report­ing a “sig­nif­i­cant shift in America’s nuclear strat­egy”: “The Bush admin­is­tra­tion intends to pro­duce — not just research — a ther­monu­clear bunker-busting bomb to destroy hard­ened, deeply buried tar­gets, the Pentagon has acknowl­edged for the first time.”
Yesterday, I reported on the open­ing phases of a new U.S. effort to build up its nuclear arse­nal. Here’s where that effort is head­ing:

The weapon — known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator — would be a full-power hydro­gen bomb that would throw up enor­mous clouds of radioac­tive dust while wreak­ing large-scale dam­age and death if used in an urban area. It would be thou­sands of times more pow­er­ful than the con­ven­tional “bunker busters” dropped on Baghdad in an attempt to kill for­mer Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Federal offi­cials signed doc­u­ments in Washington this week to launch a pre­lim­i­nary design con­test between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico…
Fred Celec, the deputy assis­tant to the sec­re­tary of defense for nuclear mat­ters, made clear that the admin­is­tra­tion wants the weapon and is mov­ing for­ward.
If a hydro­gen bomb can be suc­cess­fully designed to sur­vive a crash through hard rock or con­crete and still explode, “It will ulti­mately get fielded,” Celec said in an inter­view with the Mercury News. The United States has worked on nuclear earth pen­e­tra­tors for decades, and sci­en­tists involved in the project say they expect to suc­ceed.
The project is inte­gral to the administration’s push to move away from Cold War “city scrap­ing” bal­lis­tic mis­sile war­heads to bat­tle­field “tac­ti­cal” weapons.

April 24th, 2003 | Uncategorized | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.