BUSH LOOKING AT OTHER NUKES

by Ian Hoffman - Tri-Valley (CA) Herald -- May 16, 2003

Now cleared by a Republican-led Congress to develop a high-yield, nuclear "bunker buster," the Bush administration is internally debating other nuclear weapons -- a precision, low-yield
"agent defeat" weapon to destroy germ weapons, plus other new bombs yet undisclosed.

Speaking Thursday at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where scientists already are working on the bunker buster, the administration's top nuclear-weapons executive said one idea is revamping the existing U.S. arsenal for "greater robustness," making them more likely to detonate at their design yields after decades in storage.

But Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, made clear that new weapons ideas also are in the works.

"There are some other ideas being discussed between us and the Defense Department that I probably shouldn't get into right now," Brooks told reporters.

The huge bunker buster, known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, and the idea of a precision, low-yield weapon are in fact old projects, dating to the first Bush administration. Today they are being recast as new ideas to inject more "credibility" into U.S. threats against terrorists and Third World rogue nations.

"The best way to make sure nuclear weapons won't be used is to make sure their use is credible," Brooks said.

If the new Bush administration stays this course, its undisclosed ideas for "usable" nuclear weapons stand a good chance of being unfinished or unresolved nuclear ambitions from the past. High on the list is an
electromagnetic-pulse weapon, designed to create a more-or-less focused blast of radiation to fry circuits, plunge cities into darkness or render military command facilities useless.

When last seen in the early 1990s, the bomb was known as a high-powered microwave weapon or a radio-frequency weapon. Such a weapon probably would require nuclear testing before the Pentagon and Brooks' agency inside the U.S. Department of Energy would be confident enough to add it to the U.S. arsenal.

But despite pushing provisions in Congress to reduce the preparation time for nuclear testing from nearly three years to 18 months, the Bush administration has no current plans to restart nuclear testing, Brooks
said.
"We don't, at this moment, have any interest in doing that," he said.

For now, however, Brooks suggested most of these notions are open to internal and external debate. So far, the Senate and House armed services committees have approved $6 million for scientists at Livermore
and its sister lab, Los Alamos, to explore new weapons ideas, plus $15 million to keep them competing a second year on the design of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.

At Livermore, scientists are starting with the most powerful weapon that the United States has in field, the 1.3 megaton B-83 bomb. Los Alamos scientists are starting with the B61, a bomb available in both tactical and strategic versions with explosive yields up to 350 kilotons, or more than 20 times the destructive power of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945.

In a new disclosure, Brooks said scientists will try to preserve all of the original characteristics of the two weapons as they figure out how to guarantee the bombs' detonation after crashing through a couple dozen
feet of solid rock or concrete.

That means each bomb will also be able to double as a mininuke or low-yield, tactical weapon, because their design inherently offers yields adjustable down to a few kilotons and even a few hundred tons of TNT equivalent.

On Wednesday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein pressed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the rationale for the weapon. Rumsfeld assured her that the research was just a study.

But Brooks said weaponeers at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia labs, which designs the all-important, rigid casing for the bombs and other non-nuclear components, will finish their $45 million, three-year
feasibility studies with more than a stack of paper reports. He suggested they will have prototype weapons that have been flight-tested.

"We'll have technology," he said. His agency and the Pentagon are "going to end up with enough for us to decide to go forward."