Chalk up one more example of how grasping at straws we’ve become in this era of neo-con ascendancy.
The joint conference committee that is reconciling the gargantuan energy and water appropriations bill chopped in half the White House’s
$15 million request for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. That’s military speak for an atomic "bunker buster."
The committee also approved language that requires the Pentagon to obtain congressional approval before building any so-called “’low yield” nuclear weapon of less than 5 kilotons. (The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs dropped in 1945 had an estimated yield of between 12kt and 23kt.)
The esteemed and usually quite sensible John Isaacs, president of Council for a Livable World, said of this development:
The Bush administration’s drive for expanding the use of nuclear weapons has suffered at least a temporary setback.”
Extremely temporary, I suspect. Two days ago the same negotiators overturned a 1993 ban on the research and
development of low-yield nuclear weapons.
Why does this matter? Why even pay attention to $7.5
million in an energy budget that will (officially) suck up at least $23
billion in taxpayer dollars (and, unofficially, a lot more)?
For the simple reason that the move to create new nuclear weapons makes it more likely the U.S. will someday use them. Advocates don’t even conceal this fact. The immensely destructive weapons now in existence, they say, are not very credible threats.
Last summer, in the Pentagon’s unreleased
Future Strategic Strike Forces, the Defense Science Board claimed America’s nuclear arsenal “is not adequate [for] future national security needs,” because our potential enemies believe that U.S. leaders would hesitate to use them. That’s because the military damage caused by using any of our current warheads would cause far more geopolitical damage. Smaller weapons would reduce collateral damage and thus make their possible use more credible, the report says.
The blindness of policymakers who propose such weapons is truly astounding. If the U.S. builds low-yield nukes, there will be internal pressure on every other nuclear power to do likewise.
The Bush Administration talks about controlling the spread of nukes while simultaneously acting in ways guaranteed to prod both our friends and potential enemies into building new and dangerous weapons.
This two-facedness is combined with a sneering distaste for realistic give-and-take arms control.. Imperfect though they are, nuclear arms control measures had met with considerable success since 1986. Then Bush’s empire-builders stepped into power. Is there any worthwhile effort they aren’t intent on wrecking?