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).

The U.S. arsenal already has an earth-penetrating bomb, the B61-11, but the Bush administration apparently wants something more powerful. As Robert S. Norris, Hans Kristensen, and Joshua Handler reported in the January/February 2003 Bulletin, in a drop test in 1998, the B61-11 penetrated to a depth of only 2-3 meters of tundra.

“A serious flaw in the concept of nuclear earth-penetrating weapons, even those with relatively low yields, is that they cannot penetrate deeply enough to contain a nuclear explosion and its deadly radioactive fallout,” wrote the authors. “If used in an urban environment, such a weapon would cause thousands of casualties.”