N-arms cannot ensure success

Last month the United States put on the most impressive display of precision bombing in the history of warfare and demonstrated the unmatched power of the U.S. military. But despite this overwhelming conventional superiority, the Bush administration is looking to pursue new nuclear weapons, too: nuclear weapons designed to be used on rogue-state battlefields.

Congress is now considering whether that's a good idea as it marks up and votes on the 2004 defence authorisation bill, in which the Bush administration has asked for a repeal of the ban on producing low-yield nuclear weapons, $15 million to further study earth-penetrating nuclear weapons and funds to shorten the time it takes to conduct a nuclear test.

It's a shocking piece of legislation that shows the Pentagon wants the option to use nuclear weapons not just for deterrence against nuclear states but also for war-fighting against nonnuclear countries.

Its chief goal is the capability to destroy deeply buried bunkers, where it believes rogue states may house weapons of mass destruction.

That would indeed be a good capability to have, but nuclear weapons can't provide it. To destroy an underground bunker with a nuclear weapon, we'd need to know the bunker's precise location, and we'd need to be very sure that destroying its contents was worth breaking a 58-year taboo against nuclear use, enraging our allies and friends and scaring our enemies into developing their own atomic arsenals.

Our recent experience in Iraq shows just how elusive that certainty would be. Of all the rogue states thought to be pursuing weapons of mass destruction, Iraq should have been the one about which we had the best information.

In addition to the work of our own intelligence agencies, which made Iraq a priority, we also had eight years of on-the-ground reports from UN weapons inspectors.

Yet seven weeks after our forces crossed the Iraqi border, we have yet to find any chemical or biological (let alone nuclear) weapons. That doesn't mean they aren't there, but it does show how difficult it would be to obtain intelligence good enough to sanction a nuclear first strike.

Even if our intelligence was good enough, the depth to which a speeding warhead can dig before it disintegrates is limited.

Our current earth-penetrating weapons can dig only a few metres into the ground, and even with further research, physicists believe that the limits of existing materials would prevent weapons from reaching below 50 feet. The bunkers we're worried about could be as deep as 1,000 feet.

The Bush administration wants to repeal the ban on low-yield nuclear weapons because it thinks they can do the job while limiting collateral damage, making their use more acceptable.

But according to nuclear physicist Sidney Drell, exploding even a 1-kiloton nuclear weapon at a depth of 50 feet would eject one million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air from a crater the size of Ground Zero. And it wouldn't destroy a target 1,000 feet down – you'd need a weapon hundreds of times larger to do that.

Logistical and technical arguments aside, using a nuclear weapon to destroy a target in a non-nuclear country would destroy U.S. non-proliferation efforts.

Our nuclear policy already balances on the thin edge of hypocrisy – after all, we have thousands of nuclear weapons but we insist that others do not develop them. It's a one-sided arrangement that has held only because of a treaty promise we made to work toward nuclear disarmament.
That is a distant goal, but moving in the opposite direction is inexcusable and self-defeating.

Building new nuclear weapons would make it nearly impossible to roll back nuclear programmes in states such as Iran and North Korea. Bush officials who support new nuclear weapons ought to heed an old cliché and put themselves in the shoes of their enemies.

What would they recommend to their leader if faced with a United States that declared a doctrine of pre-emption, named countries against which it was prepared to use nuclear weapons and sought to build new nuclear weapons whose use would be more "acceptable"? In that situation, I'd recommend immediately building a nuclear deterrent.

What about those bunkers? With good enough intelligence, we could probably seal them off by destroying entrances and air ducts. If we needed to destroy a bunker itself, physicists are researching the idea of dropping successive precision-guided munitions on the same spot, digging a deeper hole with each strike until the bunker is reached and breached.

Intelligence and creativity are the answers to this problem, not nuclear weapons.

The writer, former editor of Arms Control Today, is a fellow at the New America Foundation