Posted on 02/13/2003 3:02:39 PM PST by new cruelty
After narrowly failing last year, Republicans in Congress are poised to attempt the repeal of a law that prohibits the development of smaller, more "usable" nuclear bombs -- a decade-old cornerstone of America's cautious post- Cold War weapons policy.
Together with mounting congressional and administration support for another significant policy shift -- an end to the ban on nuclear testing -- the development of so-called "low-yield" weapons could mark a radical departure from the principles of deterrence and restraint that have become the hallmarks of the country's nuclear weapons doctrine.
The Democrat-controlled Senate held off an attempt to repeal the law last year after it was passed by the House, but lawmakers and experts on both sides of the issue expect a more concerted effort now that both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans.
The demands for these fundamental changes have grown with the increased threat from countries like North Korea and Iraq, as well as terrorist groups, and evidence that they are attempting to build stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. This week, the International Atomic Energy Agency referred North Korea to the U.N. Security Council because it had violated international agreements by restarting its nuclear program. And on Tuesday, CIA Director George Tenet warned in a Senate hearing, "We have entered a new world of proliferation."
The move, which could come as early as this congressional session, also comes against a backdrop of a potential war with Iraq in which the Bush administration has not ruled out the use of small-scale nuclear arms.
"I think there will be an effort" to remove the prohibition, said Rep. William Thornberry, R-Texas, a member of the House Armed Services Committee who supports the new weapons. "What we worked on last year will be a good place to start."
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., the sponsor of the amendment last year that would have overturned the ban, could not be reached for comment. But "given the fact that he introduced it last year and it received overwhelming bipartisan support, he very well may introduce it again," his spokesman, Bud DeFlaviis, told The Chronicle.
And a spokesman for the House Armed Services Committee said the committee's chairman, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-San Diego, "supported this before and it's safe to assume he would again." Weldon's measure is also expected to gain renewed support from some Senate Republicans, including defense experts such as John Warner of Virginia and Wayne Allard of Colorado, both of whom have previously backed research into new kinds of nuclear weapons.
The low-yield weapons -- meaning weapons of less than 5 kilotons, or about a third the power of the atomic bomb that killed 140,000 people when it was dropped over Hiroshima -- have been conceived of largely as "bunker busters." They would penetrate the earth and, if they work as planned, would destroy buried caches of powerful arms, like chemical and biological weapons, without causing indiscriminate annihilation.
But supporters of the existing law have expressed grave concerns, saying the current prohibition is critical to U.S. efforts to halt nuclear weapon proliferation, and to get other nuclear powers, notably Russia, to continue the process of reducing the number of nuclear warheads in their stockpiles.
"You're putting at risk the entire nonproliferation regime with this," said Jim Walsh, executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "To develop a weapon like this would mean testing, and that would lead to proliferation."
Critics also warn that the drive for low-yield bombs marks a dangerous shift away from the core principle of the country's nuclear policies.
Before, any nuclear attack with the massively powerful weapons in the arsenal was regarded as an almost unthinkable last resort that could well provoke terrifying counter-strikes. But with the low-yield weapons, critics warn, nuclear bombs would be seen as simply a more powerful tool in the country's battle arsenal -- a modest leap in force rather than a dramatic escalation.
"Nuclear weapons have different consequences," said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C. , one of the co-sponsors of the original 1993 ban on developing the smaller weapons. "Once you've used them, you've crossed a threshold. It would remove the inhibition we've been able to preserve over the years."
Supporters of the low-yield weapons say they have become vital in the hostile new world America faces, and may even need to be used pre-emptively to disarm potential adversaries rather than just as retaliation -- another major policy shift.
They also cite the very unthinkability of using devastatingly destructive nuclear weapons left over from the Cold War as a reason to explore the low- yield weapons of less than 5 kilotons. Thornberry called the big, older "strategic" weapons a "self-deterrent," because no enemy would really believe the country would unleash such horrific force except under the most extreme cases of self-preservation.
"If it looks like we'll never use them," he said, "they're no longer a deterrent."
Weapons scientists, more intimate than most with the awesome destructive power of nuclear bombs, are generally mixed in their views. But one influential supporter of developing new low-yield weapons, C. Paul Robinson, the director of the Sandia National Laboratories, has also offered a strong argument against them by citing concern over their "usability."
In a paper written two years ago, Robinson said the low-yield weapons might be needed to convince adversaries that their underground stores of weapons would not be safe. But he insisted: "Nuclear weapons must never be considered as war-fighting tools. Rather, we should rely on the catastrophic nature of nuclear weapons as war prevention."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Where has this guy been? Did he ever hear of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan? DUH!
Particularly this page... What drives our foreign Policies?
Let's hope that the leftist hysteria questioning the use of the best availble tools for the job does not become policy.
-- an A-Bomb survivor (my Dad was headed for the invasion of Japan)
The Clinton Administration awarded the contract to produce more tritium to an unapproved facility; which held up the process by a few years. I do not know if the government got around to changing the contract over to an approved facility for production.
Got to hate those Clintons; they raped everything they touched.
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