It's a Bomb!(United States military policy)

• Author: Millar, Alistair

Bush's Baby Nuke

On October 2, 1992, President George Bush signed into law a moratorium on nuclear testing. Now his son is preparing to end that moratorium.

The current Bush Administration is studying options for the development and production of a small, low-yield nuclear weapon called an earth-penetrator or bunker-buster, which would burrow into the ground and destroy a deeply buried hideaway of a "rogue" leader like Saddam Hussein.

But such a bomb would take many more people with it.

"The use of any nuclear weapon capable of destroying a buried target that is otherwise immune to conventional attack will necessarily produce enormous numbers of civilian casualties," writes Dr. Robert Nelson, a professor of theoretical science at Princeton University, in a recent study for the Federation of American Scientists. "No earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the 15-kiloton Hiroshima weapon. The explosion simply blows out a crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly fallout."

The blast from one of these weapons would "knock down nearly all homes and apartments--and kill nearly all the people in them--out to distances of greater than half a mile from the blast," says Greg Mello, who directs the Los Alamos Study Group, a nuclear weapons policy research and education group based in Santa Fe. Those who survived the blast would suffer a lethal dose of radiation, he predicts. "To take a specific example," says Mello, "if the target in question were the Iraqi presidential bunker located in south-central Baghdad, there would be very roughly 20,000 people located within one-half mile of this target."

If the Bush Administration proceeds with the bunker-buster nuke, it would signal a frightening departure for U.S nuclear policy. The United States would be reneging on its pledge not to develop new nuclear weapons, and this would violate the spirit if not the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which are geared to the elimination of nuclear weapons, not the making of new ones.

What's more, it would, for the first time in almost fifteen years, confer legitimacy on the idea that nuclear weapons have a suitable role to play even in conventional warfare. This leaping of the firewall would increase the likelihood of nuclear weapons being used in the next...