Attack Bolsters Nuke Lite Lobby

Make the desert glow for a thousand years. Wipe them off the face of the Earth. Pulverize them. Such is the unrestrained blood lust that masquerades as military punditry these days. The Washington Times has called on the Bush administration the use of nuclear weapons against Afghanistan and Iraq. Absurd? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had the question put to them directly and neither would rule out the use of nuclear bombs as an option. Rumsfeld's deputy, the blood-thirsty, Paul Wolfowitz has warned that the Pentagon is poised to unleash "a very big hammer", a hammer capable of "ending states that support terrorism." (Rumsfeld says the Pentagon has identified nearly 60 such states.)

"At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilites should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration." These are not the words of a columnist for the war-mongers at the New York Post. No. These are the considered sentiments of Thomas Woodrow, a former officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

We now find ourselves closer to the unthinkable possibility of launching a nuclear first strike than at any time since the thawing of the Cold War. What is important to understand is the fact that there are people inside the Pentagon and the nuclear labs who have been urging just such a posture, even before the events of 9/11. Now they feel vindicated and ready to strike.

The Pentagon has come to a remarkable conclusion with regard to the nuclear weapons: smaller is better. These days the Wizards of Armageddon are palpably anxious to develop a new class of nuclear weapons, the so-called "deep penetrator" warheads. These are relatively low-yield weapons, packing warheads as small as 10 kilotons. Rear Admiral George P. Nanos excitedly refers to this new breed of nukes as "hard target killers".

During testimony before the House in May, General John A. Gordon, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, groused that for the past decade the Pentagon had not been able to actively pursue new weapons designs. He said he wanted to "reinvigorate" planning for a new generation of "advanced nuclear warheads".

"This is not a proposal to develop new weapons in the absence of requirements", Gordon told the committee in a gem of Pentagon doublespeak. "But I am not now exercising design capabilities, and because of that, I believe this capacity and capability is atrophying rapidly".

Gordon wasn't being truthful. Over the past decade the Pentagon and its weapons designers have been quietly busy crafting a variety of new weapons. Indeed, although the Clinton administration generated a lot of hoopla by supporting the comprehensive test ban treaty (which it promptly violated with a string of subcritical tests), the Department of Energy and the Pentagon were busy developing new breeds of weapons. In 1997, they unveiled and deployed the B61-11, described as a mere modification of the old B61-7 gravity bomb. In reality, it was largely a new "package", the prototype for the "low-yield" bunker blasting nuke that the weaponeers see as the future of the US arsenal.

The nuclear priesthood is salivating at the prospect of a new generation of nukes and new infusions of cash under the Bush regime, which has been stockpiled with nuclear hawks, ranging from Richard Armitage and Paul Wolfowitz to Assistant Secretary of Defense Jack Couch, who a couple of years ago wrote that the US should consider dropping a small nuke on North Korea to teach them a lesson.

The Pentagon, of course, isn't the only one pushing new bombs. So are the nuclear labs and their legions of contractors. "There's an overwhelming desire to develop new nuclear weapons and there are a lot of rationales put forward to justify the expenditure and the risks", says Don Moniak, an organizer with the Blue Ridge Environmental League in Aiken, South Carolina. "For example, the nuclear labs have said they make new design weapons if only to maintain design expertise". Moniak monitors weapons production and plutonium storage and reprocessing at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site, which Moniak says is being geared up to begin producing plutonium pits, the triggers for hydrogen bombs.

This spring the labs made a big pitch for the Bush administration to overhaul the nation's nuclear policy. The plea came in the form of a white paper by Paul Robinson, the director of the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque. Robinson titled his essay Pursuing a New Nuclear Policy for the 21st Century and began thus: "I recently began to worry that because there were few public statements by US officials in reaffirming the unique role which nuclear weapons play in ensuring US and world security, far too many people (including many in our own armed forces) were beginning to believe that perhaps nuclear weapons no longer had value".

Robinson doesn't want to let go a single part of the nuclear arsenal. He even argues that Russia remains a threat, although he inverts the alleged source from that of an opposing superpower to that of a disintegrating nation. As backup for this rationale he quotes US National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "America is threatened less by Russia's strength than by its weakness and incoherence". This stretch is used to justify an upgrading of the most destructive and expensive weapons in the US arsenal, the so-called Category I strategic weapons capable of incinerating large-scale cities.

Robinson also sees no reason to scale-back the US stockpile of Category II weapons, the kind of all-purpose nuclear missile that Robinson dubs the "To Whom It May Concern Force". Robinson hedges identifying exactly who the targets of these weapons might be, but he eventually concedes that they include the other nuclear and near-nuclear nations, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and, presumably, France, though definitely not Israel.

These weapons, primarily low-yield single rocket missiles, would mainly be an investment in the Navy's submarine-launched arsenal to give the US the all-important "forward-basing" advantage-which mainly means that the US wouldn't have to worry about the touchy diplomatic issue of launching nuclear bombs over the territory of non-combatants. (Apparently, this good neighbor policy hasn't infected the Bush Star Wars team, which is toiling away on a contraption that would, if it works, knock incoming missiles down and onto the fields of the Poland, Germany and France.)

But Robinson's real passion is for the Category III weapon, the bunker-busting nuke that is designed for the assassination of the leadership of "rogue regime", a not so subtle code word for Iraq, although it really does serve as a stand-in for any troublesome non-nuclear nation. Robinson, in a scenario that perhaps even Edward Teller himself may not have envisioned, wants the Bush administration to publicly change its policy to target heads of state with nuclear bombs. "I believe it will be important to make a part o our declaratory policy that the United States' ultimate intent, should it ever have to unleash a nuclear attack against any aggressor, would be to threaten the survival of the regime leading the state", Robinson writes. "Unless that state's leaders are deterred from the acts we are seeking to deter, our war aims would be single-minded-to destroy that leadership's ability to govern".

And now we see the prospect of nuclear weapons being used not against a regime, but against an indistinct enemy, largely untargetable, couched in the forbidding recesses of the Hindu Kush, one the world's most hostile natural landscapes. The only possible objective for their use would be to kill broadly and indiscriminately and to obliterate the distinction between intentional and collateral damage.CP

Q: What class of weapon stopped WWII?

A: nuclear

Q: What class of weapon killed more people?

A: Conventional

Q: What cities remain uninhabitable due to radiation?

A: None.

So what's wrong with nukes?

And now we see the prospect of nuclear weapons being used not against a regime, but against an indistinct enemy, largely untargetable, couched in the forbidding recesses of the Hindu Kush, one the world's most hostile natural landscapes. The only possible objective for their use would be to kill broadly and indiscriminately and to obliterate the distinction between intentional and collateral damage

This guy unintentionally makes a good case for the use of limited tactical nuclear weapons. Very little collateral damage in the areas he is talking about - hardly anybody there except the people we are looking for. Also, these weapons are small enough not to pose a fall-out threat.

On a tactical level: Nuclear weapons kill far more people than is necessary for far longer than is necessary, largely including innocent civilians.

On a strategic level: They open the door for the use of such weapons by all who have them for the purposes they choose.

Combine the two and you have a recipe for worldwide disaster, which is exactly what we successfully worked against during the entire period of the Cold War.

Yes, indiscriminate killing, such as secretarys, cubicle workers, visiting children, and people in wheelchairs, is wrong.

But now that the rules have been explained to us, we should oblige.

NONE of the attackers cares about collateral damage; there IS no such thing in an attack like the WTC.

The idea that terrorists wouldn't use nuclear weapons first is ludicrous. You can bet that as soon as they have them, they will try to use them. Using tactical nuclear weapons on a limited basis should be kept on the table. I agree with the assessment of Thomas Woodrow as outlined in his Washington Times editorial. You can read it here.

The author of this article thinks that if we use a Nuke that it will start WWIII. Sorry, but they start this from the wrong set of facts.

Tactical Nuclear weapons may be one of our best options at this point. We know that he is holed up in a cave somewhere out in the desert, along with a personal bodyguard. They used our own planes and innocent passengers as bombs, which killed more then 5000 people and injured how many more?

No, they would use them if they had them, so we should consider striking with a burrowing warhead of the tactical variety. BIG BOOM, DEEP down, that takes him and his bodyguards out in a quick flash of heat and light, and we are done. This also will take out any chemical or biological agents that they might have with them at the time.

NO, Tactical Nuclear weapons, nor Conventional Nuclear weapons can be ruled out, they must be on the table to be used, or else the terrorists will do something else, that will hurt us even more. NO, let them worry about going too far, Chemical, Biologocal, Nuclear, and knowing that we will turn them into glass if they do!!

Regrettably, I have little doubt that as matters progress Bin Laden and his cohorts will use tactical nuclear weapons if he actually has access to them. How our use of those same weapons will prevent his use escapes me.

Well, if we use them effectively I think we can safely say it will prevent Bin Laden from using them. It is kind of hard to set off a bomb when you have been reduced to radioactive ash.

As far as anyone else using them against us goes, I submit Thomas Woodrow's analysis to which I linked above.

As others here have explained, the conditions may be such that tactical nukes could be used to eliminate Bin Laden in his mountainous retreat with little or no collateral damage. So militarily it might turn out to be rational to resort to resort to nukes. Politically it would have the effect of delivering an enormously strong message to the rest of the world that attacking the U.S. means nuclear retaliation. Right now no one quite believes that we would ever actually do so; the U.S. is just too "civilized" and too afraid of releasing the nuclear genie. By employing nukes, even tactical ones in a fashion that doesn't kill innocent civilians, we would disabuse other countries of that false sense of security.

So the likely political consequence of employing tactical nukes is that governments and populations of nations that previously harbored terrorists would be unwilling to do so in the future. The people in those countries would realize on a visceral level that a future terrorist attack on the U.S., if traced back to their territory, could result in their vaporization.

Obviously I disagree. Firing off a tactical nuclear weapon in that area would no doubt lead to Pakistan's use of such a weapon in due course. Matters would likely swiftly escalate out of control.

Conventional arms properly used should be all that is necessary to win this war.

Concerning Woodward's editorial, I have serious doubts about the mental and emotional stability of anyone who could write the following:

At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilites should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration.

By his crazed analysis, unless the administration uses nuclear weapons, they are cowards.

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