US defends small nuclear bombs - Deccan Herald - Internet Edition
The Bush administration wants US Congress to let it research a nuclear bomb that penetrates the earth before exploding.
The Congress denied the funding for this bunker-buster last year but Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a subcommittee that 70 countries were burying their strategic assets underground to be beyond the enemy’s reach.
“At the present time, we don’t have a capability of dealing with that. We can’t go in there and get at things in solid rock underground,” Mr Rumsfeld said. “The only thing we have is very large, very dirty, big nuclear weapons. So. . . do we want to have nothing and only a large, dirty nuclear weapon, or would we rather have something in between?” Those who believe in options will find it hard to argue but some Congressmen are worried about the death and destruction that even smaller nuclear weapons will cause above the ground.
A study mandated by the Congress found that earth-penetrating nuclear bombs would also inflict “massive casualties at ground level”. Such a bomb could cause more than a million deaths, depending on the yield, the report said. It seems in nuclear weaponry, even small is not beautiful!
An expert associated with the report said: “You can use a much smaller weapon if you use an earth penetrator, may be 20 times smaller, but you will kill a lot of people, because it puts out a huge amount of radioactive debris.” Casualties from an earth-penetrator weapon “would be equal to that from a surface burst of the same weapon yield,” causing from thousands to more than a million deaths in an urban area, and hundreds to thousands of deaths in lightly populated areas with unfavourable winds.
Health hazards
The Congress had wanted a study to examine the health and environmental effects of the bombs.
Notwithstanding the results of the study, the Bush administration has renewed its budgetary demand for $ 8.5 million for resuming Pentagon and Energy Department studies of bunker-buster nuclear warheads.
A Democrat senator from California, Dianne Feinstein, told the Defence Secretary: “It is beyond me as to why you’re proceeding with this programme when the laws of physics won’t allow a missile to be driven deeply enough to retain the fallout, which will spew in hundreds of millions of cubic feet if it’s at 100 kilotonnes.”
Mr Rumsfeld said the Pentagon’s current arsenal is incapable of destroying such deeply buried targets.
He didn’t talk of the deep caves in Afghanistan housing terrorists but he did say that many countries have acquired the technology to dig deep and fast under rocks that makes their strategic assets safer from conventional aerial bombardment.