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Scientists take aim at low-yield nukes

By KELLY HEARN, UPI Technology Writer
 WASHINGTON, April 16 (UPI) -- A Washington-based scientific organization
said on Monday that a new type of Earth-burrowing nuclear weapon under study
by the United States government would inflict massive civilian causalities
and undercut global efforts to quell the proliferation of nuclear arms.
 Less deadly than Cold War-era bombs, the so-called "mini-nukes" would, in
theory, penetrate hundreds of feet below the Earth's surface, destroying
bunkers packed, for example, with chemical or biological weapons while
leaving civilian populations above it unscathed.
 Scientists at the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy's
nuclear laboratories are spearheading the research.
 Proponents, including a small number of politicians, planners and
government scientists, argue that, because of their limited collateral
damage and precise guidance systems, mini-nukes would be ideal for
countering rogue states that deploy chemical weapons against American
troops.
 But a study released by the Federation of American Scientists, an
organization overseen by more than half of the current American Nobel
Laureates, took issue with those claims, arguing that low-yield nuclear
bombs are a technological impossibility.
 "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
Hiroshima weapon," wrote Princeton University physicist Robert Nelson, the
author of the FAS study. "The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of
radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with especially
intense and deadly fallout."
 The study stated that a 1-kiloton explosion, less than one tenth of the
Hiroshima bomb, would have to burrow 450 feet to avoid civilian impacts.
 It noted that when conducting nuclear explosions at the U.S. government's
Nevada Test Site, scientists must bury a 5-kiloton explosive 650 feet below
ground. Even then, the study reported, there are many documented cases where
the local environment is exposed to radioactivity.
 The report said that burrowing to a depth that is safe for civilians would
destroy a warhead's ability to function.
 Apart from technological considerations, some experts said the weapon
would obfuscate distinctions between conventional and nuclear weapons and
make their eventual use more likely.
 "This type of weapon is much more problematic than proponents would have
us believe," said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in Washington. "If you start saying that the most
powerful country in world needs nuclear weapons to deter chemical and
biological attacks, then you have to ask why everyone doesn't need them? You
swing open the door to global proliferation of nuclear weapons."
 While some conventional weapons can destroy bunkers, the Washington Post
quoted an unnamed former Pentagon official last year saying that the
military needs a weapon capable of destroying a bunker buried beneath 300
meters of granite without hurting the surrounding population.
 Sen. Wayne Allard, (R-Colo.) and Sen. John Warner, (R-Va.), inserted a
provision into the 2001 defense authorization bill that required the DOD and
DOE to study the burrowing bombs but did not allocate any funds for their
development.
 The results of those studies are due before July 1, 2001.
 "Sen. Allard wants to look at ways to address the growing problem of
so-called harden targets such as bunkers," Sean Conway, spokesman for Sen.
Allard, told United Press International. "He will review the FAS study but
he is waiting on the DOE and DOD report to make his final decision. He
didn't want to take any options off the table until it was studied."
 Some of the government's leading nuclear scientists have called for
scaled-down nuclear weapons.
  "Some targets require the energy of a nuclear weapon for their
destruction," wrote Stephen M. Younger, associate laboratory director for
nuclear weapons at the DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory in June 2000.
"Precision targeting can greatly reduce the nuclear yield required to
destroy such targets. Only a relatively few targets require high nuclear
yields. Advantages of lower yields include reduced collateral damage, arms
control advantages to the United States and the possibility that such
weapons could be maintained with higher confidence and at lower cost than
our current nuclear arsenal."
 "The United States will undoubtedly require a new nuclear weapon because
it is realized that the yields of the weapons left over from the Cold War
are too high for addressing the deterrence requirements of a multi-polar,
widely proliferated world," Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National
Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., said in a speech on March 28, 2000.
"Without rectifying that situation, we would end up being self-deterred."
 A spokesperson in his office told UPI that Robinson could not comment by
press time because he had not read the FAS study.
 The Department of Energy also did not comment by press time.
  Speaking of the report, Bob Sherman, director of nuclear security
projects at FAS, told UPI "we hope the information will give a useful
perspective to claims of nuclear labs that they need to resume nuclear
testing in order to get small, very strong warheads which they claim would
do useful things we can't do now."
 "I think the low-yield systems are a solution in search of a problem,"
said John Pike, a military expert and the director of GlobalSecurity.org in
Alexandria, Va.
"There is no real evidence that potential adversaries are constructing
these deep underground bunkers and if there were, there is no particular
reason to believe we could locate them with sufficient precision to destroy
them."
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Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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