The Wonderful Mini-Nuke

New US Nukes?

The United States wants to manufacture a new nuclear weapon, the .Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator,. according to an article by Dan Stober. .Demonstrating a significant shift in America's nuclear strategy, the Bush administration intends to produce--not just research--a thermonuclear bunker-busting bomb to destroy hardened, deeply buried targets, the Pentagon has acknowledged for the first time,. Stober reported (San Jose Mercury News, April 23).

Mini-nukes?

The Pentagon is looking into the development of precision, low-yield nuclear weapons, reported Walter Pincus in the Washington Post (April 16). The weapons would have earth-penetrating nose-cones and be used to attack hardened targets, an objective the Defense Department was required to study after Congress's 7-year-old bill banning R&D of mini-nukes was amended last year. "Such a weapon has long been sought by nuclear weapons scientists and some military strategists, including key members of the Bush administration, as a way of reaching targets that are hidden deep underground without incurring huge collateral damage," Pincus wrote.

MiniBus, Son of Mini-nuke

It is hard to kill the nuclear vampire. Consider a navy memo dated January 31, 1994, which attempts to justify spending $13 million between 1995­97 for an "Advanced Technology Demonstration" of a new reentry vehicle-dubbed "minibus." The minibus, according to the memo, could carry either a conventional or a nuclear payload. The scene-setting sentence, written in Pentagonese, goes like this: "There is a need for a low cost highly accurate payload delivery system, with the capability of performing ballistic nuclear and non-nuclear missions to improve precision strike capability from secure platforms, and to minimize collateral damage."

Nukes you can use

Readers of the March 9.10 weekend editions of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times must have done a double-take when reading front-page headlines like .U.S. Works Up Plan for Using Nuclear Arms. and .U.S. Nuclear Plan Sees New Targets and New Weapons.. Not for 20 years.not since the first years of the Reagan administration.had the operational details of U.S. nuclear policy been featured so prominently.

Stand and be Counted

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) turns 25 in March, and its life expectancy after that is uncertain. The NPT Review and Extension Conference, mandated by Article X of the treaty, will be held at the United Nations in New York from April 17 to May 12.
The five declared nuclear powers- the United States, Russia, Britain France, and China-say that the treaty must be extended "indefinitely and unconditionally" at the conference. That doesn't seem likely to happen. Translated, the "unconditional and indefinite" phrase means "no linkages." In fact there are linkages, and they are rooted in the language of the treaty.

The bomb has many friends

Gen. Lee Butler (ret.), the former commander-in-chief of all U.S. strategic nuclear forces, says that nuclear weapons no longer serve any useful purpose and they should be scrapped. His candid testimony is on target-and all the more powerful because of his unique experience.
Nevertheless, Butler's core idea, that a world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is by necessity a world devoid of nuclear weapons, is not likely to find universal support among groups as superficially diverse as arms controllers, government policy-makers, think-tank pundits, and editorial writers. No matter how you slice it, they all seem trapped in the same line of reasoning, an old circular conundrum that has been described like this:
What are the targets of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons.

The new-nuke chorus tunes up

With the public and much of the news media looking the other way, a small but influential group has been quietly paving the way for a nuclear revival. They want to build a variety of new and improved warheads, including a new generation of highly accurate, ground-penetrating, bunker-busting beauties that, they say, will be able to take out Kim Jong Il.s or Saddam Hussein.s subterranean hideaways while leaving the rest of Pyongyang or Baghdad unscathed.

Those Lovable Little Bombs

When former Los Alamos scientist and noted nuclear weapons adviser Richard Garwin met with Russian Minister of Atomic Energy Victor Mikhailov in Moscow earlier this year, Mikhailov brought up U.S. research on micro-nukes. The linkage is clear: the seemingly harmless doodlings of U.S. nuclear scientists justified similar programs in Russia.

U.S. NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE, JULY 1996

Warheads now fall into one of four categories: (1) those assigned to active delivery systems; (2) "hedge" warheads in storage that could be redeployed quickly to increase forces back to START I levels; (3) "inactive reserve" warheads in a less-ready condition that could be used to replace stockpiled weapons withdrawn for testing and as a source of spare parts; and (4) retired warheads awaiting final disassembly at Pantex in Texas.

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Stockpile, July 1996

Last September, the Los Alamos Study Group, a Santa Fe-based watchdog, revealed that work was being done toward modifying a B61 bomb for improved earth-penetrating capability. The U.S. government went to great pains at the time to insist that the bomb, if deployed, would not constitute a new nuclear weapon, and public talk of the modification ceased.

Iraq: 100 days of 'peace'

On 1 May [2003], President Bush declared war over after six weeks. Mission accomplished?