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Bunker Buster Would Not Contain Blast, Official Says By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — A nuclear weapon modified for earth-penetration that the Bush administration is seeking funding to study would not burrow far enough into the earth to contain its blast, a senior Energy Department official said yesterday (see GSN, Feb. 17). Nor is it intended to, National Nuclear Security Administration head Linton Brooks said, adding that the administration was “imprecise” if it had conveyed that impression. The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator’s (RNEP) hardened shell, which the White House hopes to field test next year, is intended to provide a few meters of deeper penetration in order to project its force deeper for striking enemy facilities far underground, Brooks told a House Armed Services subcommittee. “Is there any way an RNEP of any size that we would drop will not produce a huge amount of radioactive debris?” Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) asked. “No, there’s not,” Brooks said. “I really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in the administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fallout,” he added. “I don’t believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true. It is certainly not what we’re trying to do now. What we are trying to get in the ground is far enough so that the energy goes deep into the ground to hold at risk the deeply buried facilities,” he said. Congress last year eliminated funding for the study in the current fiscal year. Critics charge that the bunker buster and other Bush administration nuclear weapons programs are not well considered and could be counterproductive to U.S. nonproliferation efforts. The White House has requested $8.5 million to resume studying the bunker buster in fiscal 2006. Desire for Increased Usability Denied Critics have questioned whether the administration seeks deeper penetration in part to allow for better containment of the weapon’s blast and fallout, thereby making it a more usable against enemy facilities near populated areas. Tauscher said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the committee last month that the RNEP study is “taking existing weapons and doing a study to see if they can be reduced in their power, lethality, to a level that is lower than the current weapons.” The goal of reduced surface destruction was also stated in the administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, a roadmap of its aims for transforming U.S. strategic capabilities, excerpts of which were leaked and published in early 2002. While noting limitations to the blast-projecting capability of the country’s existing earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, the B61 Mod 11 gravity bomb, the review also said: “With a more effective earth penetrator, many buried targets could be attacked using a weapon with a much lower yield than would be required with a surface burst weapon. This lower yield would achieve the same damage while producing less fallout (by a factor of ten to twenty) than would the much larger yield surface burst.” The review called for developing such new capabilities by 2007 and deploying them by 2012. It said the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study “will identify whether an existing warhead in a 5,000 pound class penetrator would provide significantly enhanced earth penetration capabilities compared to the B61 Mod 11.” Brooks said at the hearing that the earth penetrator study is not intended to examine the consequences of reducing the yield of the weapon. “We are not looking at changing the yield of the physics package,” he said. He said further that the weapon would not be significantly less destructive than others in the arsenal, and would not make a president’s decision to use it easier. “There is a nuclear weapon. There is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive over a large area. No sane person would use a weapon like that lightly,” he said. “I do want to make it clear that any thought of [any] sort of nuclear weapons that aren’t really destructive is just nuts,” he said. Tauscher said a 10-kiloton U.S. nuclear weapons test in 1970, called the Baneberry test, did not contain the explosion and produced a 10,000-foot fallout cloud, even though the weapon was buried at the bottom of a sealed 900-foot shaft. The B83 warhead currently is the largest deployed U.S. warhead, reportedly having a yield of one to two megatons, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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