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Posted on Fri, Nov. 07, 2003
House repeals research ban for some nuclear weapons
By Jonathan S. Landay
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted Friday to repeal a
10-year-old ban on researching low-power nuclear warheads.
The Bush administration pushed for the legislation, arguing that the United States must
maintain the technology and skills needed to develop new weapons to counter threats of chemical,
biological and nuclear attacks. Critics say it will undermine efforts to curb nuclear proliferation.
The U.S. move to develop a possible new generation of nuclear weapons comes as the Bush
administration defends its decision to invade Iraq as necessary in part to prevent deposed leader
Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons.
President Bush has insisted that he has no plans to build any new nuclear weapons or end a
10-year U.S. moratorium on underground nuclear tests.
The repeal of the research ban was contained in a record $400 billion defense authorization
act for 2004 that the House passed Friday by a vote of 362-40. The bill is expected to win final
approval next week in the GOP-run Senate and then go to Bush for signing.
The bill would provide U.S. nuclear laboratories with $6 million to explore new nuclear bomb
designs and $15 million to conduct a study of the feasibility of modifying existing high-powered
nuclear weapons to make a warhead that could burrow deep into the Earth and destroy buried bunkers.
It also would authorize spending $34 million to improve the Nevada Test Site so that it could
resume underground nuclear test explosions in 18 months rather than the 24 to 36 months it now
needs.
Critics charged the measures are a step toward resuming underground test blasts and nuclear
weapons production. The United States built its last nuclear warhead in 1990.
"We are on the slippery slope back to the dark days of bomb production and testing," said
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, an advocacy group.
He and other opponents warned that the measures would make the United States less secure
because foes such as North Korea and Iran, and potential rivals, such as China, could respond by
accelerating their nuclear weapons programs.
"I can only hope that it (the legislation) won't be perceived as a step toward the
development of new nuclear weapons," said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., one of the two sponsors of the
research ban.
The bill lifted a decade-old ban prohibiting research and development of nuclear warheads
with explosive forces of less than 5 kilotons. (The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, was
about 15 kilotons.) Such warheads are known as low-yield weapons or "mini-nukes."
Any decision to engineer and build a prototype would require congressional approval.
Administration officials contend that nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal are unsuitable for
use against growing numbers of deeply buried bunkers or stockpiles of chemical or biological
weapons. That's because they could devastate civilian areas around the targets and release massive
amounts of lethal radioactivity.
Low-yield warheads would cause far less damage to surrounding areas and would not throw up
massive amounts of radioactive fallout, they insisted.
"We are seeking to free ourselves from intellectual prohibitions against exploring a full
range of technical options," Linton Brooks, head of the Energy Department agency in charge of
nuclear weapons, told a congressional hearing in April.
Bush's national security strategy sees low-yield weapons as possibly playing key roles in
deterring and pre-empting chemical and biological attacks on the United States, its troops or its
allies. U.S. foes would worry that the United States would be more prepared to use nuclear weapons
of limited power than weapons than would cause huge civilian casualties and release massive
radioactive clouds.
Opponents counter that it's technically impossible to build a nuclear weapon that could
penetrate through earth and rock and destroy deeply buried bunkers.
There are no materials that could penetrate more than 20 yards of rock, and the massive
clouds of radioactive dust thrown up by underground explosions could kill large numbers of people,
they said.
Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist, contended in a March article that "even a
lower yield, 1-kiloton nuclear bomb detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would eject more than 1
million cubic feet of radioactive debris, forming a crater about the size of Ground Zero at the
World Trade Center."
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/7210241.htm
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