[Peace-discuss] another reason we need to keep protesting

[patton paul]

 Kennedy Warns on Nuclear Tests
by Julian Borger in Washington


Senator Edward Kennedy yesterday warned that the Bush administration was
preparing to restart the testing of nuclear weapons so it could develop a
new generation of bunker-busting bombs and tactical "mini-nukes",
potentially triggering a new arms race.

The veteran Democrat from Massachusetts was speaking before a
congressional debate on an administration proposal to lift the legal
restrictions on research into "mini-nukes" with an explosive force of less
than five kilotons.

The proposal is the latest in a series of steps taken by the White House
to reduce the hurdles to producing the new nuclear weapons it says may be
necessary to confront threats from "rogue states" or terrorist groups.

Mr Kennedy said the Congress and the American public had not fully
realized the scale of the changes under way in US nuclear policy. "They
have been eclipsed for too long by the war on terrorism and the war
against Iraq. We can ignore them no longer."

The administration has repeatedly said it has no current plans to resume
nuclear testing, after an 11-year moratorium, but Mr Kennedy said the
details of the defense budget suggested that such plans were quietly under
way.

"The best way to get the indication of the seriousness of the
administration is to follow the request of the money in the defense
authorization," he said. "We budgeted $700m for fiscal year 2004 [for
special projects related to the nuclear arsenal], including funds that
could be used to prepare for new tests and cut in half the time needed to
conduct them."

In the next few days, congressional committees will debate a proposal by
the departments of defense and energy to repeal a 1994 ban on the research
and development on low-yield nuclear bombs.

Justifying the repeal, the Pentagon said it was necessary to "train the
next generation of nuclear weapons scientists and engineers and restore a
nuclear weapons enterprise able to respond rapidly and decisively to
changes in the international security environment, or unforeseen technical
problems in the stockpile."

Under the Pentagon's classified nuclear posture review, late last year,
nuclear weapons could be used against rogue states such as North Korea,
Iran, Syria and Libya, and to pre-empt an attack with chemical and
biological weapons.

The defense department is also planning a conference at the strategic
command headquarters in Nebraska to rewrite nuclear policy. On the agenda
are a new generation of weapons, including mini-nukes and a "robust
nuclear earth penetrator" that will burrow into the earth before
detonating, destroying command bunkers and arsenals.

Advocates of the "bunker-busters" argue that the fallout would be
contained in the underground cavern hollowed out by the blast. But Matthew
McKinzie, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said
yesterday that calculations based on the Pentagon's own computer modeling
suggested that a 0.5 kiloton nuclear warhead would have to burrow 55
meters to eliminate atmospheric fallout.

Scientists claim there is no known material hard enough to punch more than
16 meters into the earth.

Sidney Drell, a nuclear control campaigner and former Stanford University
physics professor, said a nuclear warhead which only burrowed 16 meters
down would throw a million cubic feet of radioactive dust into the
atmosphere.