[Previous: "Call me a doomsayer, too"] [Back to blog] [Next: "I'm still here"]
From the Washington Post:
The Pentagon is about to take the first public step toward obtaining a controversial, high-yield, earth-penetrating nuclear weapon that could be aimed at North Korea's underground nuclear and missile production facilities, according to senior Bush administration officials.
Within a week, an Air Force report is to be delivered to the House and Senate Armed Services committees stating the military requirements for the "robust nuclear earth penetrator," a device designed to dig into the ground before it explodes and crushes any facility buried beneath it. Already five times more powerful than the device detonated at Hiroshima, the bomb would have an even greater impact because a nuclear weapon's force is multiplied when its shock wave penetrates the rocky crust of the earth.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon this week sent to Capitol Hill language that would, if approved, lift an eight-year-old congressional restriction on development of a so-called low-yield warhead, one below five kilotons. Such a device would be used to attack facilities holding chemical or biological weapons. In principle, the heat or radiation of the low-yield weapon would destroy the toxicity of the agents before they were spread by the force of the blast.
David Albright, a physicist who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on North Korea, said, "It is a bad idea to develop these things, which probably would never be used, and do so openly. It develops a lot of paranoia among proliferating states who believe the U.S. is planning to attack them."
When the "earth penetrator" was first discussed in the 1990s, it was conceived as having a low yield -- a relatively small output of radiation, heat and explosive force -- so that if it exploded in the basement of a palace in the outskirts of Baghdad, it would not create much fallout.
Saddam won't bring Armageddon. We will.