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United States II: Nuclear “Regime Busters” Needed, Study Director Says By Greg Seigle Currently a U.S. nuclear retaliation against a regime that unleashes any WMD attacks would devastate its country, an undesirable response that would kill large numbers of innocent people. The United States does not have any low-yield bombs sufficient for precision strikes, according to Clark Murdock, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you are going to threaten to respond to somebody else’s use of WMD with a nuclear response, you’ve got to have a nuclear capability that is tailored to that potential scenario,” said Murdock, adding that the B61 warhead, the only low-yield bomb currently in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, is too powerful for precision strikes that would limit collateral damage. “We’re not going to destroy Baghdad” in order to take out of the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Murdock said. “That’s not the way we conduct a war.” Murdock and CSIS colleague Michele Flournoy directed a yearlong study of the U.S. nuclear force structure due out later this month. The study, Revitalizing the U.S. Nuclear Deterrent, concluded the United States should consider developing and testing new nuclear weapons that can reach deeply buried underground targets while limiting collateral damage (see related GSN story, above). The United States should have started developing “regime buster” warheads in 1994, after the first congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review, Murdock told GSN during a briefing on the CSIS report. “We should have not only been developing them but we should have been testing those warheads so that a Saddam Hussein knows that we’re serious, that if he uses a nuclear weapon against us, if he uses a biological weapon that causes large casualties and maybe even if he uses a chemical weapon that doesn’t involve large casualties, he ain’t gonna survive that conflict,” Murdock said. Enemies Know U.S. Nuclear Shortfalls Countries that may one day challenge the United States are keenly aware that the U.S. military always tries to limit civilian deaths during war, and that its current nuclear arsenal is not prepared to limit such casualties, Murdock said. Hence, countries such as Iraq, Iran and North Korea may gamble that the United States would be extremely reluctant to drop any nuclear weapons on them during a war, even if they use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. targets, he said. “I’m a little leery of relying just upon conventional capabilities to deter other guys’ use of bugs and gas and nuclear weapons,” Murdock said. “They already know how conventionally superior we are. They already know that when we use our conventional superiority we do it in a way to try to minimize the loss of collateral damage. We’re not devastating cities. We’re not firebombing Dresden. We don’t do that anymore.” B61 Not Up to Job The B61 nuclear warhead, the only one in the U.S. arsenal considered to be low-yield, is not well-suited for scoring precision hits that limit collateral damage, Murdock said. “There is a debate within the nuclear community about the extent to which you can groom or tailor existing capabilities in order to be able to get that job done,” Murdock said (see GSN, March 19). “There are those who believe, for example, that when we’re getting in both limiting collateral damage, which is dialed low-yield, and penetrating to try to get at a deeply buried target, that you can do this by grooming the B61 warhead,” he added. Others, he said, “believe that the capability of the B61 is quite limited, [and that] you need a new weapon. If you get a new weapon, you’re going to probably have to test.” Designing, testing and deploying a new weapon could take up to 15 years, Murdock and others have said. The United States will eventually need better capabilities to strike deeply buried hardened targets, the kind Iraq and North Korea are believed to use to protect their most important assets, including WMD facilities, Murdock said. Conventional weapons are sufficient for destroying some of these types of underground, reinforced targets, but ultimately the United States should have the option of hitting them with limited, tactical nuclear bombs, he said. “If you’re relying upon a 5,000-pound bomb — which is a pretty big bomb — you have to get pretty deep in order to be able to do it,” Murdock said. “Because of the limits of its explosive power — you’re talking about being down 100, 150 feet — you’re going to have to be pretty close to that target, because it’s surrounded by concrete and rock, to make sure that when it explodes that you actually got the target,” he continued. “That’s why you think about a nuclear weapon … because you can pack in a much smaller package a much larger bang. It means you don’t have to get as close to that target down there in order to destroy it.” New Warheads Could Deter or Defeat Enemy WMD Conventional explosives used against caches of chemical weapons or, to a lesser extent, biological weapons, could wind up spreading the agents around once a bomb detonates, Murdock said. New low-yield nuclear warheads could be used against WMD depots because there would be no such risk of spreading the deadly agents, he added. “A nuclear weapon incinerates” biological or chemical weapons, he said. “It destroys the weapons of mass destruction.” Public outcries against the use of nuclear weapons, even low-yield warheads that limit and collateral damage, would be drowned out if U.S. forces overseas were ever hit with weapons of mass destruction, Murdock said. “It is my belief that if there was a biological attack on U.S. forces abroad that resulted in the loss of life on a scale of Pearl Harbor, that the political pressure on the president to use a nuclear weapon would be irresistible,” Murdock said. “He wouldn’t have to garner any support” to use low-yield nuclear warheads that limit collateral damage, Murdock said. “He would have to garner support for restraint.”
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