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Bite-Size Nukes
NY Times
December 14, 2003
Bite-Size Nukes
By MICHAEL CROWLEY
or 50 years the United States has maintained nuclear
weapons with the express intention of not using them.
Nukes keep the peace, the thinking goes; they are more
about threatened payback than military utility. But
there's a new school of thought among military
thinkers: maybe we should all learn to stop worrying
and love the Bomb -- at least in miniature.
With America battling new enemies, some Pentagon hawks
want to reimagine the nation's nuclear arsenal on a
smaller and more usable scale, building more precise
''low yield'' nuclear weapons with payloads a fraction
of the 15 kilotons of explosive force that erased
Hiroshima. And these hawks have influence. At the Bush
administration's urging, Congress not only voted this
year to lift a 10-year U.S. ban on research and
development of new forms of nuclear weapons; it also
approved financing for the research.
One argument for mininukes, of five kilotons or less,
is a new version of an old concept: deterrence. The old
nukes built during the cold war to roast millions of
Russians are probably too destructive to use before
Doomsday, and our potential enemies know that.
Sub-Hiroshima bombs, however, could be used on limited
targets -- the suspected hideout of Osama bin Laden in
the Tora Bora region a couple of years ago, say.
Bite-size nukes could be the answer to another one of
the military's most worrisome problems: the suspicion
that Axis of Evil types, like Iran and North Korea, are
brewing their most sinister weapons in superhardened
bunkers deep underground. Some planners think that only
a nuclear payload can deliver the punch needed to knock
them out. What's more, the ferocious heat of a nuclear
blast would incinerate deadly stocks of chemical and
biological agents, rather than spread them into the air
(although there may be a trade-off -- critics claim
that substantial radioactive fallout would be
impossible to avoid).
Democrats are having bad cold-war flashbacks. Ted
Kennedy says that ''you're either for nuclear war or
you're not.'' On the stump, John Kerry has warned that
the Bush administration is ''poised to set off a new
nuclear arms race.'' And others fret that even a
''precision'' nuclear strike requires absolute
certainty about your target. ''It turns out that this
is still about having great intelligence,'' says Joseph
Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. ''What if we'd detonated one on what we thought
were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14BITE.html?ei=5062&en=e7be1bef0fb33c7d&ex=1071982800&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
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