Pentagon Gets Help on Plan for Low-Yield Nuclear Bomb

The Senate has paved the way for the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons laboratories to aid Pentagon research into a new low-yield nuclear weapon that could destroy hardened and deeply buried targets by penetrating far into the ground before exploding.

The purpose of the study is to develop “a deep penetrator that could hold at risk a rogue state’s deeply buried weapons or Saddam Hussein’s bunker without torching Baghdad,” said one former senior Pentagon official who is still involved in government military and intelligence research.

The most recent modernization of a U.S. strategic nuclear weapon, the B-61 thermonuclear bomb, took place in the early 1990s. At that time the bomb, which has a variety of yields above 50 kilotons (or 50,000 tons of TNT, more than three times the power of the Hiroshima bomb) was given an earth-penetrating capability great enough to destroy “a garden variety underground bunker, 100 meters into solid rock,” the former official said.

“What’s needed now is something that can threaten a bunker tunneled under 300 meters of granite without killing the surrounding civilian population,” he said.

Last year, a Pentagon effort to get assistance from Energy’s weapons labs in researching the options for such a weapon was blocked when Energy lawyers said a 1994 provision in the law prohibited the government’s nuclear laboratories from “all research and development which could lead to a precision, low-yield nuclear weapon,” according to a senior Energy official who asked not to be identified.

To overcome that roadblock, Senate Republicans this year put a provision in the fiscal 2001 defense authorization bill that requires the secretaries of Defense and Energy to undertake such a study and permits the nuclear labs to “conduct any limited research and development that may be necessary” to complete it, according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report.

The measure is expected to pass the Senate this week and eventually be approved by a House-Senate conference, according to its backers.

Supporters of this new low-yield nuclear weapon include a small group of senior Republican senators and some top officials within the nuclear weapons community who, in the wake of Senate defeat of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in October, believe the United States soon might need to resume underground testing to design new warheads and maintain old ones.

“The United States will eventually need a new, low-yield nuclear weapon” because the explosive power of silo-busting thermonuclear warheads designed for the Cold War “are too high” to deter small nations in the multipolar world of today, said Paul Robinson, head of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories, one of the nation’s leading weapons labs.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said at a May 23 hearing: “I do not believe that, in the foreseeable future, we’re going to see the abolishment totally of nuclear weaponry. . . . And, therefore, we’ve got to maintain a capability in the United States for a future president or presidents to initiate a program, to build a new warhead.”