Nuclear Bombs as Humanitarian Weapons

How should the Pentagon get bin Laden? With a discreetly placed nuke. That's the conclusion of Rep. Steven Buyer, the rightwing congressman from northern Indiana. "Don't send special forces in there to sweep," Buyer said. We'd be very naive to believe that biotoxins and chemical agents were not in these caves. Put a tactical nuclear device in, and close these caves for a thousand years."

Buyer wants to send a message to the world that, with the Soviet Union vanquished, the US is now willing to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield. "I just want the (Bush) administration to know that I think the United States needs to send a message to the world that we are prepared to do that," Buyer said.

Admittedly, Buyer is one of the kookier members of Congress. But his is far from a lone voice. A few days later Buyer's view was echoed by Rep. Peter King, a Republican from New York. "I would never rule out tactical nuclear weapons if I thought they could do the job and if they were needed," King told WABC radio on Oct. 21. "If the military people said we think certain chemical weapons are going to be used, we know where they are, the only way we can stop their use is by using tactical nuclear weapons." Much more powerful figures than Buyer and King are actively planning along the same lines. Two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, the Japan Times reported that Pentagon war planners had presented Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and President Bush with a scenario for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Afghanistan. The Times quoted a Pentagon source as saying that Bush had rejected the option fearing almost certain global backlash.

However, Secretary Rumsfeld was more circumspect when he was asked directly on CBS's Meet the Press whether the US was considering the use of nuclear weapons against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Rumsfeld's cagey non-denial was actually a significant statement that may signal a chilling shift in US policy. Since the mid-1970s, the policy has been that the US will not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations. The Taliban is backed by a nuclear regime, Pakistan, the US's new ally in the war on terrorism, but the most potent weapons in its arsenal are probably the Stinger missiles given to the Majahideen by the CIA in the 1980s.

Rumsfel's deputy, the hyper-hawkish Paul Wolfowitz, has warned the Taliban that the US will "use a very big hammer" against them. In case the Taliban had trouble reading between the lines, Wolfowitz's pal in the outside world, Thomas Woodrow, a veteran of the Defense Intelligence Agency, made the point clear in a column for the Washington Times. "At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear capabilities should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan," wrote Woodrow.

"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."

Of course, this isn't the first time since the decline and fall of the Soviet Union that the US has implied that it might use nuclear weapons. In 1991, George Bush sent a secret letter to Saddam Hussein threatening the "gravest consequences" to Iraq if it used biological or chemical weapons during the Gulf War. In 1994, President Bill Clinton issued a similar message to the government of North Korea.

Among the wizards of Armageddon, there is an almost palpable desire to see nuclear weapons put to use on the battlefield. The frail doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction has been jettisoned with the wreckage of the Soviet Union and in its place nuclear war planners are pushing a more robust and offensive role for the US nuclear stockpile.

In a June 2000 essay titled "Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century," Los Alamos Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Steve Younger states that "it is often, but not universally, thought that nuclear weapons would only be used in extremis, when the nation is in the gravest danger...This may not be true in the future." The future may have arrived.

The bomb of choice seems to be low-yield nuclear weapons, the so-called bunker-buster nukes that could be used as a kind of radioactive assassination weapon, designed to knock out the leadership of hostile regimes. In this twisted logic, the nuclear bomb is transformed from a nightmare weapon into a humanitarian device that could save civilian lives. "We've seen example as recently as the [1991] air war with Serbia, when we attacked underground targets with conventional weapons with very little effect," said Paul Robinson, the director of the Sandia National Labs, in a September interview with the National Journal. "It just takes far too many aircraft sorties and conventional weapons to give you any confidence that you can take out underground bunkers. By putting a nuclear warhead on one of those weapons instead of high explosives, you would multiply the explosive power by a factor of more than a million."

There's another reason the nuclear hawks are pushing the idea of shifting the US nuclear arsenal more toward the low-yield nukes: they can develop new weapons without (in their minds, at least) violating the non-proliferation treaty. "We would neither have to conduct testing nor redesign for such a weapon, because we have them already," says Johnson. "Right now, all of our weapons have primary and secondary stages. Through a process known as 'boosting,' you get a thermonuclear reaction. The primary alone, however, has a yield of 10 kilotons or less, or basically what you would want for a bunker-buster or a weapon that would cause relatively low collateral damage. All we have to do is send these weapons back to the factory and replace the secondary stage with a dummy. The beauty of that approach is that we are already very good at building dummy secondary stages. For safety and cost reasons, most of the weapons we have flown and tested in the past have had dummy secondary stages. So we could develop these lower-yield weapons without forcing the nuclear testing issue back onto the table, with a richer database of past tests, and at relatively low cost."

At this point, it seems very unlikely that the US will use nuclear weapons against the Taliban. However, the nuclear hawks and their allies in the nuclear bomb-making industries seem to have succeeded in exploiting the war in an effort to breathe life (and billions of dollars) into their project of getting congressional approval for developing a new generation of mini-nukes, a project which Congress seemed disinclined to do prior to the September 11 attacks.