[ RadSafe ] Report on NAS Study on Bunker Buster Nuclear Weapons

[John Jacobus]

>From another list server.  It will interesting to see
how the budget issues play out.

-----Original Message-----
From: fyi at aip.org [mailto:fyi at aip.org] 
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2005 3:45 PM
To: Jacobus, John (NIH/OD/ORS)
Subject: FYI #83: NAS Study on Bunker Buster Weapons

FYI
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science
Policy News Number 83: June 3, 2005

NAS Committee Reviews "Bunker Buster" Weapons

One of the more contentious issues in the Energy and
Water Development Appropriations bill last year was
the funding of a program to study nuclear
earth-penetrator weapons.  Also known as RNEP (Robust
Nuclear Earth Penetrator) or a nuclear "bunker
buster,"
the proposed weapon is designed to hold-at-risk deeply
buried targets beyond the range of conventional
weapons.  Last year, Congress voted to deny funding
for the study of this weapon. The House of
Representatives recently passed its version of the FY
2006 Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill
which did not include funding for such a nuclear
weapon study (see
http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/073.html.)  The
House-passed version of the FY 2006 Defense
Authorization bill worked around this controversy by
removing the nuclear component from a study of earth
penetrator weapons systems (see
http://www.aip.org/fyi/2005/078.html) and by shifting
the proposed work from the Department of Energy to the
Department of Defense.

The Defense Authorization Act for FY 2003 mandated
that a study be performed on the health and
environmental impacts of an RNEP weapon.  A National
Research Council "Committee on the Effects of Nuclear
Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons" conducted this
study.  Fifteen experts from the university, private,
and national laboratory communities served on this
committee, chaired by John F. Ahearne of Sigma Xi. 
The committee released its study
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/11282.html ) in a
prepublication format in late April.

The study cites an estimate by the Defense
Intelligence Agency that there are approximately
10,000 hard and deeply buried targets in the potential
U.S. adversaries.  Of these, about 20% "have a major
strategic function," of which more than a hundred
could be targeted by an RNEP weapon.  These facilities
are used to protect leaders, key personnel, weapons,
equipment, and other assets and activities.  Some of
the facilities are located in the basements of
multistory buildings in cities.

Much of the study is fairly technical.  The committee
summarized their findings in nine "most important
conclusions," which are available at this NAS site:
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/11282.html
Among them are the following:

"Many of the more important strategic hard and deeply
buried targets (HDBTs) are beyond the research of
conventional explosive penetrating weapons and can be
held at risk of destruction only with nuclear weapons.
 Many - but not all - known and/or identified hard and
deeply buried targets can be held at risk of
destruction by one or a few nuclear weapons."

"Current experience and empirical predictions indicate
that earth-penetrator weapons cannot penetrate to
depths required for total containment of the effects
of a nuclear explosion."

"For attacks near or in densely populated urban areas
using nuclear earth-penetrator weapons on hard and
deeply buried targets (HDBTs), the number of
casualties can range from thousands to more than a
million, depending primarily on weapon yield.  For
attacks on HDBTs in remote, lightly populated areas,
casualties can range from as few as hundreds at low
weapon yields to hundreds of thousands at high yields
and with unfavorable winds."

"For urban targets, civilian casualties from a nuclear
earth-penetrator weapon are reduced by a factor of 2
to 10 compared with those from a surface burst having
25 times the yield."

###############
Richard M. Jones
Media and Government Relations Division
The American Institute of Physics
fyi at aip.org    http://www.aip.org/gov
(301) 209-3094
##END##########


+++++++++++++++++++
"Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea and never shrinks back to its original proportion." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

-- John
John Jacobus, MS
Certified Health Physicist
e-mail:  crispy_bird at yahoo.com

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