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'Mini-Nukes' Threaten Security
Nuclear war is no longer unthinkable, at least in Washington. While loudly demanding that other countries dump their suspected nuclear weapons, the Bush administration is ramping up its own nuclear program. At the request of the White House, Congress recently weakened a 10-year-old ban on designing and developing "mini-nukes." Sen. Dianne Feinstein warned that this action "clearly opens the door to the development of new nuclear weapons and will...begin a new era of nuclear proliferation." The previous ban had prevented the development of battlefield "usable" nukes and maintained a clear line between conventional and nuclear weapons. Developing mini-nukes is part of the Bush administration's new, explicitly offensive military strategy. Until recently, nuclear weapons were seen primarily as a defensive "deterrent." But the White House now wants them taken off the shelf and tailor-made for offensive use in its open-ended "war on terror." Mini-nukes are those with an explosive yield of less than 5 kilotons--about one-third the power of the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Theoretically they could be used in numerous military scenarios, not just in all-out wars. MORE AGGRESSIVE NUCLEAR POLICYSo far the House has rolled back the ban to allow research on mini-nukes, but preserved its ban on the final phases of development. The Senate repealed the ban in its entirety and replaced it with a lesser requirement that the Department of Energy seek an authorization from Congress at the formal development stage. A House-Senate conference committee will determine the final policy later this summer. The administration's public rationale for developing mini-nukes is to destroy chemical and biological weapons or agents stored inside hardened underground bunkers. In a rare instructive moment, however, John Harvey, a high-ranking official in DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, told the LA Times: "We don't know if this would be a useful capability. They could release more of these agents than they kill." Harvey says he believes the main purpose of the mini-nuke program is "to maintain a nuclear weapons enterprise." The push for mini-nukes is part of a changing, more aggressive U.S. nuclear policy. The Bush administration's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review greatly expanded the role of nuclear weapons, integrated nuclear war planning into conventional weapon scenarios and targeted specific countries by name. And the National Nuclear Security Strategy of the United States moved U.S. policy explicitly into "preemption"--allowing an offensive U.S. attack with nuclear and/or conventional weapons, even in the absence of an imminent threat. The 2004 budget request for nuclear weapons programs is $6.4 billion, an increase of almost $500 million over the current budget. (See www.trivalleycares.org.) It boosts funding for a host of new and modified nuclear weapons including the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a nuclear bunker buster with a top yield of more than 60 times that of the Hiroshima bomb. It also begins to explore where to construct a new plutonium pit manufacturing plant capable of turning out more than 500 bomb cores each year. To promote disarmament, and to highlight the role nuclear weapons play in Bush's "war on terror," a National Week of Action is being organized across the U.S. to commemorate the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among other actions that week, on Sunday, Aug. 10, there will be major demonstrations at the Y-12 Plant in Tennessee and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. See www.ananuclear.org and www.unitedforpeace.org. Tara Dorabji is the outreach coordinator for Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment), a group that monitors the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. |
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