Micro-Nukes
Prather, James Gordon
MICRO-NUKE$ BY JAMES GORDON PRATHER O ne Cold War "lesson learned" at the Pentagon was that in confrontations between two nation-states, nukes do have a deterrent effect. The nuke deterrent...
...George W. Bush has declared war on terrorism, and that war's battlefields will be here, at home, and in about fifty nation-states around the world, all harboring terrorists, knowingly or otherwise...
...In particular, Osama bin Laden may now be hunkered down in a bunkermas Saddam was a decade ago...
...The lowest yield that could be dialed~essentially by disabling parts of the otherwise far more powerful weapon~was indeed less than five kilotons.Without actually modifying the warhead, the Pentagon turned the thin-shelled gravity bomb into an earth-penetrating projectile...
...The 2001 National Defense Authorization Act expressly authorized the Department of Energy m which provides nuclear warheads to the Pentagon--to assist the Pentagon in "options assessments for defeating hardened and deeply buried targets...
...Clinton also announced that we would abide by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty~irrespective of whether the Senate ever ratified it-and that we would never again design, build or test new nukes...
...In particular, in 1991 no Islamic nation-statemlraq includedmhad nukes...
...Obviously not.You can't retaliate against terrorists who are already dead...
...In the meantime, the only bunker-killer we have is the B61 Mod 11...
...By 1992 the Bush-Quayle administration had already begun to dismantle thousands of obsolete Cold Former Weapons-Lab Physicist James Gordon Prather was the arm),'s chief scienc advisor in the Reagan admistration...
...So what...
...But can the threat of nuke retaliation deter suicidal terrorists...
...In answering India's nuke tests in 1998 with their own, Pakistan has once again demonstrated the deterrent effect of nukes on nation-states...
...The Pentagon got around this prohibition by modifying an existing weapon, the Air Force's B-61 "dial-ayield" gravity bomb...
...He didn't, even after his armies in the field had been utterly destroyed, leaving Baghdad practically defenseless...
...Now at least one~Pakistan~does...
...The nuke deterrent worked in the Gulf War, as well.We suspected that Saddam Hussein might have nukes and chembio weapons, and so we warned him that if he used any of them against us or our allies, we would retaliate with nukes...
...Well, we are not at war with Afghanistan and the world is a very different place in 2001 than it was in 1991...
...That leaves pre-emptive strikes~ say, with the B-61...
...K 2 ' 4 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2OO...
...But George Bush~ w i t h Dick Cheney presiding at the Pentagonm supposed that a new class of nukes might need to be developed for the battlefields of the post-Cold War era...
...Last year, the Republican-controlled Congress effectively repealed the Clinton ban on "micro-nuke" research...
...Of course, even if Congress actually does authorize ,, 9 1 ,, development of new mlcro-nuKes, it will be years before they can actually be ready for use...
...War nukes...
...A Gulf War corollary for our nuclear warriors was that our existing stockpile did not then include the kind of weapon we would have needed if Saddam~hunkered down in his bunker~had in fact unleashed his chembio weapons.What we wanted then was the type of low-yield, earthpenetrating "micro-nuke" bunkerkiller proposed by two Los Alamos National Lab scientists in a 1991 article in Strategic Review entitled "Countering the Threat of the Well-armed Tyrant: A Modest Proposal for Small Nuclear Weapons...
...So, he vigorously opposed the efforts of the disarmament crowd in Congress to sign-on to an indefinite "zerothreshold" nuke test ban...
...And he is protected by the Taliban, still recognized as the official Afghan government by neighboring Pakistan...
...It turns out Saddam did have chembio weapons, which he could have used...
...But, before we nuke bin Laden~as some pundits and warhawk Congressmen have urgedmmaybe we ought to take into account that we will also be nuking the nation-state of Afghanistan.Then consider that Pakistan's version of our CIAmthe Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, a rogue elephant if ever there was one--not only installed and sustains the Taliban, but is also the custodian of the several dozen Islamic nukes in the Pakistani stockpile.Just a thought...
...Though hardly the 'micro-nuke' envisioned by the Los Alamos scientists, this "bunkerkiller"~ designated the B-61 Mod 11~entered the stockpile in 1997, and the B-2 bomber was certified to be its delivery vehicle...
...The next year, however, Clinton and Gore came to Washington and set out to dismantle our entire nuclear stockpile~not just nukes that were obsolete or excess to our more modest, post Cold War needs...
...a nuclear weapon that has a yield of less than five kilotons...
...Clinton got the Democrat-controlled Congress to enact a total prohibition against "research and development which could lead to the production by the United States of a low-yield nuclear weapon...
Vol. 34 • November 2001 • No. 8
