Nuclear Bunker Buster Cut, Not Necessarily Killed

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — While congressional leaders agreed last week to cut proposed Energy Department funding to finish studying a new earth-penetrating nuclear weapons capability, the effort may continue under a new name (see GSN, Oct. 26).

In a press release last week, Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) announced that House and Senate conferees for the fiscal 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations bill agreed to withhold $4 million requested by the Bush administration for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study. The Senate bill had contained the funding while the House legislation did not.

Domenici said the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had requested the money be eliminated and that the focus of research be shifted toward developing conventional penetrators.

In a letter to a member of Congress earlier last month, however, the agency said it wanted to complete the study, including a pending “impact test” in which a mock warhead would be slammed into a huge block of concrete at high speed.

Text of the NNSA letter, obtained by Global Security Newswire, said the agency wants to complete the study at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico as planned, but with Defense Department funding and after renaming the effort.

“The administration continues to believe the proposed execution of an impact test is essential to complete this study,” the letter says.

The Defense Department “already spends over $200 million annually” at Sandia, the letter says.

“Because information developed in this study would also be valuable in the development of conventional earth penetrators, the [Energy] department supports renaming the program,” the letter states.

The letter “says we need to do this sled test for the RNEP project, and that it also gives us information about conventional earth penetrators,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director for the Arms Control Association.

NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes refused to comment on whether or not the agency had requested the funding be cut or had abandoned the study.

Following Domenici’s announcement last week, several lawmakers and multiple news reports said the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study was canceled.

“I have long cautioned against an RNEP weapon and I am relieved that the administration has abandoned this irresponsible and dangerous path,” Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) said in an Oct. 26 press release.

An Oct. 25 Associated Press story appearing in the Washington Post reported, “The Bush administration has abandoned research into a nuclear ‘bunker-buster’ warhead.” BBC News the next day ran the headline “U.S. cancels ‘mini-nukes’ program.”

Domenici, who chairs the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the program, however, did not exactly say the program was canceled. 

He stated in the press release that the National Nuclear Security Administration had asked to drop Energy Department funding, reflecting a “change in policy” favoring research on conventional penetrator options.

He noted a shift of “focus” toward examining conventional penetrators, not abandonment of the nuclear option. The study should “evolve around more conventional weapons rather than tactical nuclear devices,” Domenici said.

Furthermore, Domenici somewhat cryptically said he “expects the final Energy and Water Appropriations Bill to continue to include language addressing RNEP and the Defense Department capabilities developed at Sandia National Laboratories.”

The conferees continue to negotiate House-Senate differences over the bill.

Experts have said that were the impact test to occur next year as planned, its results could inform a government decision to fully develop either a conventional or nuclear earth penetrating weapon.

The NNSA letter last month also said: “It would provide important information regarding whether earth penetrators regardless of payload could provide a feasible and affordable means to [have the ability to destroy] hard and deeply buried targets.”

The degree to which the test could guide a decision on whether to pursue a nuclear penetrator, though, might depend on whether the penetrator shell contains a mock atomic warhead — as had been planned — or a mock conventional warhead, critics say.

“If they are going to be testing how a warhead, a nuclear package could withstand this impact, then they are continuing RNEP under the guise of something else,” Kimball said.

However, Kimball and other critics said that even if an impact test provided evidence supporting development of a new nuclear capability, the White House would have trouble getting such a project past lawmakers.

“Congress for two straight years has rejected the funding and if this sled test is a success, it would be a major political challenge to get Congress to reverse its position,” said Council for a Livable World President John Isaacs.

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