Frosted mini-nukes?

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June 2002

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Frosted mini-nukes?
While its new treaty with Russia—aimed at reducing the strategic nuclear weapons stockpile—has earned it praise within the arms control community, the Bush administration's other recent moves related to America's nuclear arsenal are raising fears about the advent of a "useable" version of a battlefield nuclear weapon, often referred to as a "bunker buster" or a "mini-nuke."

Next year's proposed $393.4 billion defense budget includes a Bush administration request for $15.5 million in new spending to develop the the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) or "bunker buster," a new, earth-penetrating nuclear weapon. The RNEP would be designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets such as bunkers containing chemical and biological weapons.

A Senate committee has dropped the allocation, but arms control analysts say it is likely that some legislative effort will be made over the next month to restore the funds. The new weapon represents the first new initiative in nuclear weapons design in several decades and could require a new regime of nuclear weapons testing. The U.S. has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. It has been voluntarily observing a long-standing international moratorium on nuclear testing.

"The things they have now are just too large," says David Culp, the legislative representative for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a national Quaker lobby, explaining the official rationale behind mini-nukes. "Strategic nuclear weapons were designed to destroy a city like Moscow. They were weapons of mass destruction, not just of a people but of a country." That level of power makes them of little use to the U.S. military given the challenges it confronts today. Mini-nukes, says Culp, could become the U.S. weapon of choice against non-nuclear powers. Culp says the administration would deploy its mini-nukes, the first new such weaponry in decades, for use against targets in North Korea, Iraq, and Iran.

Culp says there is no small degree of confusion surrounding the idea of mini-nukes. Foremost, he says, is that there is little truly "mini" about the new weapons the Bush administration seeks to develop.

The "bunker buster," a weapon the administration depicts as a necessary tool to root out well dug-in enemy facilities similar to the elaborate carved-cave infrastructure U.S. forces encountered in Afghanistan, could detonate with a yield as high as 300 kilotons. By comparison the bomb which destroyed Hiroshima had a yield of 10 to 15 kilotons, and other current "tactical" nukes, those weapons designed for use in combat, maintain yields as low as .1 kiloton.

Culp and other arms control proponents worry that an effort is beginning to make the eventual field use of nuclear weapons more palatable. Supporters have been marketing the new weapons to the public and Washington legislators as low-yield and less likely to cause collateral damage among civilians. Scientists are concerned that even a low-yield atomic blast would create highly damaging effects, above and beyond what a conventional explosion of the same size could produce and that a mini-nuke dropped near any populated area would result in massive civilian casualties indistinguishable from the effects of their larger cousins in the strategic stockpile. "It would kill a large number of people is the bottom line," says Culp.

Culp also worries that the "bunker busters" would not likely work as advertised. Previous tests of similar conventional weapons indicate that the "burrowing" capacity of such weapons is limited. "The image that this just borrows into the ground and doesn't create any fallout is just not true."

In a test conducted in Alaska, an unarmed earth-burrowing missile was dropped from an altitude of 40,000 feet. The weapon burrowed approximately 20 feet into the soil. According to the Federation of American Scientists, no earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the 15 kiloton Hiroshima weapon. The resulting explosion would blow out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, "which rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly fallout."—Kevin Clarke

For more information:
Background on the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator"
Closing the Gaps: Securing High Enriched Uranium in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
Federation of American Scientists on "bunker buster"
Project on Managing the Atom
Take action to oppose the development of "mini nukes"—from Friends Committee on National Legislation
Text of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty
US nonproliferation programs—from Council for a Livable World

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