Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator

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COLUMN ABOUT Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator:

The Albuquerque Tribune

Commentary: Bust of a bomb

By Robert Nelson

Tribune Columnist
September 21, 2005

TODAY'S BYLINE: Nelson is a theoretical physicist and senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C., and was a visiting researcher in the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University.

Once again, the Bush administration is recklessly pushing to develop new types of nuclear weapons, an agenda that undermines worldwide efforts to prevent the spread of the bomb.

As Republican Rep. David Hobson of Ohio said last year, "We cannot advocate for nuclear nonproliferation around the globe, while pursuing more usable nuclear weapons options here at home."

But that is exactly what the Bush administration is doing by asking Congress to fund research for a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. It is a new nuclear weapon - a nuclear "bunker buster" that would burrow a few meters into the ground before exploding to generate a powerful underground shock wave. Its hypothetical targets are deeply buried command and control bunkers or underground storage sites containing chemical or biological agents.

But the weapon would have limited effectiveness and would be enormously destructive to civilian populations. A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences estimated that using just one of these weapons could kill more than 1 million people.

Later this fall, New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican, will play a key role in deciding its fate. As the chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, Domenici reluctantly agreed last year to cancel funding for the program in exchange for more productive projects at New Mexico's weapons laboratories. He would be wise to agree with his Republican colleagues in the House again this year and cancel the funding.

Domenici argues the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator program is just a "study," even though the Department of Energy submitted a five-year budget projection last year - totaling $485 million - that would have led to full-scale development of a new nuclear weapon.

Even then, another study is unnecessary because the essential facts are already known: This battlefield nuclear weapon is ill-suited for the clean, surgical attacks that its proponents falsely imagine.

First, the weapon is hugely destructive, even for a nuclear bomb. Weapons designers at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories will modify an existing nuclear warhead - the 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear bomb - by putting it in a longer, stronger and heavier bomb casing. (A megaton is equal to the explosive power of 1 million tons of TNT.)

The B83 has the largest explosive power of any weapon in the U.S. nuclear arsenal - nearly 80 times more powerful than the nuclear bomb used on Hiroshima. That weapon, dropped at the end of World War II, killed more than 90,000 people.

The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, using the B83 warhead, would be far more devastating than the weapon used on Hiroshima. Because it would detonate only a few meters underground, the explosion would produce an enormous cloud of radioactive fallout that could drift thousands of miles downwind.

One study - using the same software the Pentagon uses to simulate a nuclear attack - showed that targeting the weapon against a suspected nuclear facility near Esfahan, Iran, would result in 3 million immediate civilian deaths and more than 35 million long-term cancers, spreading into Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

Second, even with its enormous destructive power, the weapon would be ineffective against buried bunkers more than 1,000 feet from the blast. By keeping buried control rooms and storage sites widely separated from their tunneled entrances and exits, any sophisticated country could protect their facilities against even the largest nuclear blast.

Third, the weapon would not be effective at destroying chemical or biological agents, and might actually disperse them into the atmosphere. Sterilizing the agents requires exposing them directly to the heat and radiation from the nuclear blast. But those effects diminish rapidly underground.

Instead of initiating provocative new nuclear weapons programs, the U.S. weapons labs should focus on developing conventional alternatives to neutralizing deeply buried facilities. High precision conventional weapons, for example, could be used to seal the entrances and exit tunnels, keeping suspect chemical or biological agents sealed underground.

Hobson has it exactly right. It is hard for the United States to campaign effectively to prevent North Korea and Iran from developing the bomb, while we are seeking to develop new nuclear weapons ourselves.
Given the enormous drawbacks of using this weapon and the inappropriate signal it sends to the rest of the world, Domenici should not support funding further research or development of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.