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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
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THE CAMPAIGN FOR THE ACCOUNTABILITY OF AMERICAN BASES (CAAB) |
Democrats say the Defense Science Board's new report on "Future Strategic Strike Forces" cast doubt on recent assurances by the Bush administration and GOP lawmakers that their demands for new weapons are intended to exercise the creativity of U.S. nuclear-weapons scientists.
"This administration is at best disingenuous about the need for new weapons," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo. "It's played fast and loose with the facts as they've searched for an excuse to do it."
In a draft first reported by Jane's Defence Weekly, the Pentagon's science board suggests that today's U.S. nuclear arsenal "is not adequate to future national security needs."
The report says the nation in essence is wasting too much money and the energies of its weapons scientists at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia labs on keeping Cold War-era nuclear bombs operable by gradually replacing their parts.
"The current plan is consuming all available resources to sustain (an) aging stockpile of declining relevance," says the draft report, due for publication in January.
Instead, the Pentagon's science board suggests resurrecting earlier, tested nuclear weapons and modifying them for "greater precision, deep penetration (and) greatly reduced radioactivity" so that they pose a more credible threat to potential adversaries.
In that sense, the board's recommendations mirror a 2000 paper by former Los Alamos nuclear-weapons chief Stephen Younger and the Pentagon's still-classified 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, both of which called for tough, low-yield and earth-penetrating nuclear bombs to attack hardened and buried targets.
Defense intelligence analysts estimate that there are more than 10,000 command bunkers and weapons storage facilities buried so deeply in the ground or tunneled into mountains as to be beyond the reach of U.S. conventional bombing.
But the Defense Science Board's report goes a step beyond the Nuclear Posture Review to recommend that the new arsenal offer "enhanced" nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons and neutron bombs.
Christopher Paine, a senior nuclear-weapons analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says such rhetoric echoes the failed push two decades ago to deploy U.S. neutron warheads in Europe.
"I hope they do it because that would be a huge political misstep. We fought and won a big battle over neutron bombs 25 years ago. So I would say, 'Make my day,'" Paine said. "By all means, let's let the Bush people scare the wits out of the American people and the Europeans by making the case for new nuclear weapons."
The Defense Science Board report, emerging from the board's 2003 summer study, is scant on rationale for new nuclear arms. It notes that the Defense Department's current "structure provides neither clear requirements (for new weapons) nor persuasive rationale for changing the nuclear stockpile."
But the report does call on the nation's leading nuclear-weapons agencies -- Strategic Command, the National Nuclear Security Administration and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency -- to "aggressively improve our understanding of the effects produced by tailored-output nuclear weapons and all consequences of execution," including "calculation of spectral/temporal outputs."
The board in other words wants a research program into what such weapons could accomplish even as it calls for their design and production.
"It looks like an ideological conclusion in desperate search for rationale," Tauscher said.
She suggests that U.S. pursuit of new, more usable nuclear weapons prompts other, lesser-armed nations to acquire them, leaving the bombs susceptible to use by terrorists.
The overwhelming focus of the board's report is on using new conventional weapons to attack typical strategic targets, such as leadership bunkers and weapons-of-mass-destruction storage sites. According to Jane's, the new munitions include high-powered microwave weapons to silence communications and douse power grids; high-energy lasers; "kinetic energy" flechette and biophage bombs; and new "diggers and drillers" for carrying explosives deep underground.
Neutron bombs are fusion weapons ignited by miniature fission or A-bombs and otherwise designed to maximize the release of deadly fusion neutrons beyond the blast radius. Some defense scientists think neutron bombs could be an ideal candidate for the Bush administration's "Agent Defeat Weapon," a bomb for neutralizing storage facilities for biological weapons.
But non-government scientists say the typical neutron bomb yields are typically too small to reliably destroy bioweapons underground, where neutrons are easily absorbed in water, soil and plastics. An adversary could preserve bioweapons against preemptive nuclear attack by encasing them in wax or surrounding them with barrels of water.
Also, scientists have yet to design bombs capable of penetrating deeply enough in rock or concrete to contain the blast, raising some prospect of blasting live biological or chemical agents to the surface mixed in a plume of radioactive fallout.