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U.S. Tries to Harden Nukes for 'Bunker Busting' NewsMax.com WiresWASHINGTON – The Energy Department's director of nuclear security confirmed Tuesday that weapons scientists were trying to create a nuclear missile casing strong enough to penetrate deeply buried enemy facilities, but said the government was not working on a new, low-yield nuclear weapon for use against terrorist targets. A 1994 law prohibits the creation of a low-yield nuclear weapon. Congress worried that making a weapon with less than 5 kilotons of explosive power could be tempting enough to leaders to lower the distinction between conventional and nuclear war. "We are transparent to Congress. They control the purse strings," retired Gen. John Gordon, the under secretary of energy for nuclear national security, said at a breakfast with reporters. However, language passed in the 2001 defense authorization act directed the Energy Department and Pentagon to study the usefulness of low-yield nuclear weapons. The Pentagon is concerned that terrorist organizations and rogue nations are burying chemical, biological and nuclear weapons under layers of concrete or deep in natural caves, out of reach of conventional weapons like the 4,000-pound GBU-28, which can penetrate 30 feet of hardened steel, concrete and dirt. "If we can get to the tunnel, we can use thermobaric," Gordon told reporters, referring to the powerful bomb that creates terrific heat and overpressure to destroy whatever is hidden in caves. At least one such weapon was used in Afghanistan in March. But the Pentagon is concerned that conventional weapons cannot be brought to the mouth of a cave, tunnel or laboratory. Scientists at weapons labs are searching for ways to harden the ground-penetrating nuclear weapon - the B-61-11, introduced in 1997 - to penetrate deep underground before detonating. Tests at the Nevada Test Site required that nuclear devices of 5 kilotons be buried 650 feet below ground before detonation to contain the radiation, according to a paper published by Robert W. Nelson, a Princeton University theoretical physicist who consults for Federation of American Scientists, an arms control advocacy group. According to Nelson, tests of the B-61-11 showed it could burrow only 20 feet into the ground before exploding. At that depth, the nuclear bomb would shower the area with radioactive fallout. One way of diminishing the danger to civilians in areas surrounding potential targets is to create a low-yield weapon, one strong enough to destroy the facility but not so overpowering as to render an area uninhabitable to human life. The director of Sandia National Laboratory raised the possibility of the need for a low-yield device at the Nuclear Security Decisionmakers Forum on March 28, 2000 in New Mexico. "The U.S. will undoubtedly require a new nuclear weapon, either for a different delivery mode or vehicle or, quite likely, because it is realized that the yields of the weapons left over from the Cold War are too high for addressing the deterrence requirements of a multipolar, widely proliferated world. Without rectifying the situation, we would end up being self-deterred," President and Laboratories Director Paul Robinson said. Self-deterrence refers to the belief that the United States would not use a traditional nuclear weapon because of the magnitude of the destruction it would cause, unless the United States were itself under nuclear attack. In theory, reducing the yield on a nuclear weapon is easy, according to Gordon. It would involve simply removing the "secondary" fusion reaction that provides the explosive wallop of a bomb and leaving in only the primary fission device. Copyright 2002 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
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