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U.S. Response I: Pentagon Eyes Assortment of Anti-WMD Weapons By Bryan Bender Faced with the prospect that weapons of mass destruction might be used against U.S. troops or civilians, the Pentagon is pushing ahead with a new class of weapons that it hopes will provide a variety of options — both destructive and nondestructive — for attacking underground or otherwise heavily secured WMD sites. The effort is part of the Bush administration’s national security strategy following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that calls for preventing WMD attacks sponsored by terrorists or states by using pre-emptive military strikes under certain conditions. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said earlier this week that the United States should not wait for a surprise attack before taking steps, including pre-emptive strikes, to reduce the threat from rogue states or terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, July 23). Several weapons projects now underway range from the development of new technologies — such as a deep-penetrating warhead that would dispense a hard or sticky foam — to modifying existing weapons such as ICBMs to either destroy WMD targets or render them inaccessible, according to defense officials and industry experts. These so-called “agent-defeat” weapons, combined with new sensors that can help to positively identify weapons of mass destruction from long distances, would provide U.S. military planners with an offensive capability against the WMD threat short of nuclear weapons. “The notion of specialized weapons for disabling extremely destructive munitions has emerged as a discipline in and of itself in the Pentagon,” said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a defense policy think tank. Thompson, a consultant for the office of the secretary of defense, cited three reasons for pursuing these new weapons. “First, there is growing concern about weapons of mass destruction given their proliferation,” he said. “Secondly, the diversity of those weapons, in terms of kill mechanisms and characteristics, has expanded” to include nuclear, biological, chemical and radiological weapons. “Thirdly, in the past, the Soviets had hard-to-destroy but easy-to-find WMD places, while others had hard-to-find and easy-to-destroy facilities. Now we are dealing with both. Many of the enemies that worry us most are putting their weapons of mass destruction in hard to find, hard to destroy places.” Iraq is a case study. As U.S. military planners develop war plans for a possible assault to overthrow the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, they are being stymied by the prospect that the Iraqi leader will resort to using weapons of mass destruction against U.S. troops in the region or a neighboring country (see GSN, July 18). According to a recent Defense Department study, the Pentagon needs new weapons that can “attack rogue biological and chemical production and delivery targets.” These weapons are needed to neutralize storage facilities as well as to destroy WMD agents distributed over a wide area, according to the study on defense research, released earlier this month by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board, a senior advisory panel. Novel Weapons The Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is leading many of the development efforts, is eyeing several novel technologies to help meet the new and extremely difficult agent-defeat mission. Many of these concepts are nonexplosive in nature due to the inherent challenge in attacking adversaries’ WMD facilities: preventing deadly biological toxins or chemical agents from being dispersed into the atmosphere, risking civilian casualties or contaminating areas where U.S. troops may need to operate. “In some cases you may not want to have an explosion because the explosion may have the unwanted effect of spreading the material around the countryside, not only having negative collateral damage effects, but also complicating the situation when our ground troops go in,” DTRA Director Stephen Younger said in an interview with reporters on July 17. DTRA is currently working on a penetrating warhead that would release a hard or sticky foam designed to neutralize rather than blow up a WMD facility. Two kinds of foam are under consideration: a hard foam that would block access to the target and a sticky foam that would temporarily disable the facility so U.S. troops could attack. The foams could be dispensed from a penetrating warhead or from ground forces. Toxic agents in the foam could also be used to destroy the targeted chemical or biological agent. Another proposal that defense officials are seeking to fund calls for an agent-defeat warhead that can provide a “high temperature incendiary kinetic energy penetrator warhead to destroy biological and chemical manufacturing and storage facilities,” the Pentagon said in a March press release. “It’s not as simple as blowing it up,” Younger said. Modifying Current Weapons The Pentagon is also considering modifications to current weapons to help meet the agent-defeat mission. A primary candidate is the Trident D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missile. Currently designed to carry up to 10 nuclear warheads, Defense Department scientists are considering a conventional model that could strike hardened or underground bunkers, including WMD storage sites. “The strategic submarine’s nuclear-only arsenal … limits its ability to deter non-nuclear threats,” according to Navy Cmdr. Ken Perry, commanding officer of the USS Pennsylvania, a Trident submarine. “We are not going to launch a strategic nuclear missile in response to a tactical terrorist strike, and the terrorists know it,” he wrote in the June issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings. A D-5 missile, officials said, could also be used without any explosive warhead in the hopes that the sheer kinetic energy of the impact would render a WMD facility useless, at least temporarily until the rubble can be removed. The Pentagon has requested $30 million for next year to begin studying this D-5 concept, but many questions remain about the efficacy of using an ICBM in a conventional role, including how to prevent other nuclear powers from mistaking a launch for a nuclear attack. Nuclear Option? Meanwhile, defense officials believe that conventional warheads may not be enough to eliminate a WMD facility in some instances and are pursuing a classified project that is looking at the possibility of developing a nuclear penetrator for such purposes (see GSN, March 26). DTRA needs to “understand the theoretical limits to conventional attack of deep and buried targets,” according to agency documents. One proposal is to modify the B-61 nuclear warhead. “The B-61 warhead is the only nuclear weapon at this time configured for any kind of penetration before it explodes,” according to Clark Murdock, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Air Force war planner. However, fierce opposition to developing such a weapon exists among critics who say it would lower the threshold for nuclear warfare. Identifying WMD Sites As the Pentagon pursues a variety of agent-defeat weapons, experts acknowledge that improved intelligence on suspected WMD sites is critical. “Targets in structures or underground are extremely difficult to detect and identify using standoff sensors,” says the recent Defense Science Board report, which calls for new investments in airborne and ground-based sensors to improve surveillance of potential WMD sites. One such effort already underway is an advanced concept technology demonstration seeking to develop an expendable unmanned aerial vehicle that can covertly deliver off-board sensors and provide tactical surveillance, battle damage assessment and other monitoring of weapons of mass destruction sites (see GSN, March 6).
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