Nukes you can use
Build ’em, test ’em, use ’em—the Bush administration really loves the bomb.
By Stephen I. Schwartz

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.

Those first articles, and many more to follow, described in detail the Bush administration’s classified Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), a congressionally ordered assessment of current and future plans for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The NPR’s contents—revealing an ambitious expansion in potential nuclear targets, new and different weapons, and more “flexible” nuclear war planning—provoked alarm from analysts, activists, editorial writers, and the general public alike.

Among the surprises was the NPR’s expanding list of target countries, with its requirement for “nuclear strike capabilities” for “immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies” involving North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Russia, and China. Immediate nuclear contingencies included “an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan.” In addition, “Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack.”

The NPR also called for rebuilding key parts of the nuclear weapons production complex to allow the United States to “modify, upgrade, or replace portions of the extant nuclear force or develop concepts for follow-on nuclear weapons better suited to the nation’s needs.” And the review made clear that this was not an idle suggestion. “It is unlikely that a reduced version of the Cold War nuclear arsenal will be precisely the nuclear force that the United States will require in 2012 and beyond.”

The NPR also called for modifying existing nuclear weapons and developing new and smaller nuclear weapons to destroy hardened underground targets, neutralize stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, and “reduce collateral damage” from nuclear detonations. The National Nuclear Security Administration, it said, “will reestablish advanced warhead concept teams at each of the national laboratories and at headquarters in Washington. This will provide unique opportunities to train our next generation of weapon designers and engineers.” As part of this effort, the administration over the next three years will shorten the time required to resume nuclear testing from the current two-to-three years to as little as three months, to allow for the rapid resumption of testing.

As for war-planning, “the current nuclear planning system . . . is optimized to support large, deliberately planned nuclear strikes. In the future, as the nation moves beyond the concept of a large, Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP),” adaptive planning, used “to generate war plans quickly in time-critical situations,” will play a much larger role.

Caught off guard by the leak, administration officials tried to portray the NPR as nothing more than prudent planning, sidestepping its more controversial aspects. Vice President Dick Cheney hid linguistically behind the symbolic but operationally meaningless de-targeting agreement signed by President Bill Clinton and President Boris Yeltsin in 1994.

“Right now, today, the United States on a day-to-day basis does not target nuclear weapons on any nation,” he maintained. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice argued on Meet the Press that “no one should be surprised that the United States worries a great deal about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, that we are going to do everything that we can to deter their use against American forces, American lives, or American territory.”

Then, invoking the paradox of nuclear deterrence—that one must be fully capable, prepared, and willing to use nuclear weapons in order to avoid having to use them—Rice added, “The fact is, no one wants to use nuclear weapons. What we want to do is to have a range of capabilities that makes their use less likely.”

Rice and others, including President George W. Bush, insisted that the parts of the plan describing contingencies were nothing new. As an unidentified administration official told the Boston Globe, “What’s so interesting here? The big news would be if we didn’t have nuclear options against these guys.”

Bush and Co. are largely correct that contingency planning and talk of new weapons are not new. In fact, the ideas date to the presidency of Bush’s father. Observant Bulletin readers will recall the 1991 report of an advisory group to the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff that recommended targeting nuclear weapons at “every reasonable adversary,” as well as the creation of a “Nuclear Expeditionary Force,” allocating a “handful of nuclear weapons . . . primarily for use against China or Third World targets.”

Then there were the two analysts at Los Alamos National Laboratory who called that same year for the development of new, smaller, “appropriately sized U.S. nuclear weapons [that] could prevent a Dunkirk-like tragedy.”

In 1992, the U.S. Strategic Command (Stratcom) created the concept of adaptive planning “to develop a flexible, globally focused, war-planning process,” along with the “living SIOP,” a real-time nuclear war plan able to respond almost instan- taneously to new requirements. A year later, Stratcom began assembling targeting data for nuclear strikes against, you guessed it, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.

It’s as if all the really bad ideas of the last decade—many of which withered when subjected to public and congressional scrutiny—have been resurrected. Well, maybe not every bad idea—a 1995 study on deterring Third World proliferators by a Stratcom advisory group recommended the pretense of irrationality—suggesting that elements of the government or military should “appear potentially ‘out of control.’” The idea “that the United States may become vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be part of the national persona we project.”

The administration’s plan reflects a giant step back toward the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were the centerpiece of U.S. defense policy—precisely the opposite direction in which candidate George Bush said he wanted to lead the country. And despite portions of the NPR that place increased reliance on precision-targeted conventional weapons, the NPR treats nuclear weapons, in some circumstances, as just another weapon.

There’s also a faulty logic in the NPR—and in the Bush administration’s defense of it—when it comes to the deterrent effect of newer, smaller weapons. The NPR states that broadening the circumstances under which nuclear weapons could be used can constrain the proliferation of nuclear weapons and dissuade other countries from threatening the United States with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. But this reasoning seems deeply flawed.

During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union constantly sought to match each other’s capabilities, lest the other gain even a perceived advantage. Why wouldn’t this dynamic come into play today, especially if the Bush administration (like the Clinton administration before it) refuses to rule out using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states?

If the world’s wealthiest and most militarily effective country threatened you with nuclear attack—even if that country called it deterrence—wouldn’t you want to do whatever you could to defend yourself and deter the United States? And because no country in the world can defeat U.S. conventional forces by conventional means, wouldn’t you consider acquiring nuclear weapons to level the playing field, especially if the United States had made it acceptable for nuclear weapons to be considered part of a war-fighting force?

And what about the largely unquestioned assumption that U.S. nuclear weapons with yields of tens to hundreds of kilotons (only one megaton-yield weapon remains in the arsenal) are simply so large that neither U.S. war planners nor U.S. adversaries believe them to be usable? Without a safe way to test the validity of this assumption, we are left to wonder how weapons that supposedly prevented World War III are suddenly incapable of preventing far less destructive (though perhaps more realistic) scenarios.

And do policy-makers really understand that even at the relatively low explosive yields being discussed, nuclear weapons are orders of magnitude more powerful than conventional bombs?

For instance, the largest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal, the BLU-82—nicknamed the “Daisy Cutter” and used sparingly in Afghanistan—contains 12,600 pounds of chemical explosives. A 1-kiloton nuclear weapon explodes with a force equal to 2 million pounds of explosives (the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 15 kilotons). Even a 0.1-kiloton weapon (100 tons) equals 200,000 pounds of explosives.

Consider the planners’ idea that smaller nuclear weapons could be used to hit underground targets without causing above-ground damage. To be fully contained, a 100-ton burrowing “mini-nuke” targeted against a hardened underground bunker would have to penetrate 230 feet underground (through soil, solid rock, and reinforced concrete) before exploding, a feat that is physically impossible. And the NPR acknowledges that mini-nukes won’t work on all bunkers. “For defeat of very deep or larger underground facilities, penetrating weapons with large yields would be needed to collapse the facility.”

The idea that a nuclear weapon can be militarily effective while avoiding or reducing the nasty side effects of prompt ionizing radiation, blast, and fallout is as deceptive as Edward Teller’s promise in the 1950s that weapons designers would produce “clean” hydrogen bombs. It has been sold to gullible policy-makers by weapons designers longing for a renewed and relevant mission.

Could all of it be a convenient excuse to revive the dilapidated nuclear weapons production complex? Since nuclear testing ended in September 1992, the weapons labs have been funded generously (at levels exceeding the Cold War average) to act as the stewards of the “enduring” nuclear stockpile. This is important and challenging work, to be sure, but not nearly as much fun as designing new nuclear weapons and then blowing them up underneath the Nevada desert (which the labs would be doing if they could; the Energy Department is currently barred by Congress from spending money to develop nuclear weapons with yields below 5 kilotons). As Tom Thomson, a senior weapons designer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, complained to USA Today recently, “Nobody wants to work here. There’s no sense of mission.”

President Bush has frequently referred to accords like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as relics of the Cold War. He is wrong. The real relics of the Cold War are nuclear weapons and the targeting doctrine and mindset that envisage them as militarily or politically effective instruments of national policy. The president’s acceptance of the NPR, created by the nuclear priesthood for the nuclear priesthood, demonstrates a profound lack of vision and of leadership. An editorial in Le Monde put it well: “The Pentagon document is worthy of a state in the grip of panic; not of a world power conscious of its responsibilities.”

Stephen I. Schwartz is publisher of the Bulletin and the editor and co-author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (1998).