While telling Iran not to make Nukes, U.S. still develops more
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3613966
By Sanford Gottlieb
Even as he was telling Iran not to produce nuclear weapons,
President Bush was urging Congress to pay for a
new nuclear weapon designed to destroy underground
military facilities.
No less than a conservative Republican from Ohio,
Rep. David L. Hobson, has thwarted Bush's push for the
bunker-buster for the past two years.
What worries him most about this weapon, Hobson has said,
"is that some idiot might try to use it."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Senate
subcommittee in April that 70 countries are pursuing
"activities underground."
"We don't have a capability of dealing with that,"
he testified. "We can't go in and get at things in solid
rock underground."
Rumsfeld suggested he needs the relatively small bunker-buster
to avoid using "a large, dirty nuclear weapon."
Yet at the time of his testimony, Rumsfeld probably saw
a study from the National Academy of Sciences estimating
that the small bunker-buster, if used in an urban area,
could cause more than a million deaths.
Pursuit of the bunker-buster and Rumsfeld's testimony
confirm the administration's shift away from nuclear
deterrence toward possible use of nuclear weapons in war.
Under Bush's doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. Strategic Command
(STRATCOM) has added missions to its war plans.
STRATCOM's global strike plan foresees the use of
nuclear weapons to pre-empt an imminent threat
from weapons of mass destruction or to destroy
an adversary's WMD stockpiles.
The Pentagon's draft "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations"
describes these new missions. The draft was discovered on the
Pentagon Web site in September by Hans Kristensen,
now with the Federation of American Scientists.
When Kristensen shared his find with the media,
the draft disappeared from the Web site.
But STRATCOM's war plans remain in force.
"You may win this year," Rumsfeld told Hobson in 2005,
"but we'll be back."
Meanwhile, Congress has mandated that any future
earth-penetrator weapons must be based on
conventional explosives.
The Pentagon had hedged its bets. In 2004, the
Defense Department awarded a contract to Boeing
to design and test a huge conventional bomb,
to be known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator.
It would be the biggest conventional bomb in the
U.S. arsenal, capable of demolishing "multistory buildings
with hardened bunkers and tunnel facilities."
So why has the administration been pressing for a
nuclear version?
The United States still has a massive Cold War arsenal.
About 5,000 hydrogen bombs and warheads are deployed on
intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and
bombers; another 5,000 are held in reserve.
In addition, 600 to 700 tactical nuclear weapons are
ready for battlefield use. Russia has fewer than
5,000 H-bombs deployed but many thousands more in
reserve, and 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons.
Many Russian nuclear weapons are not fully secured.
Britain, France, China and Israel have several
hundred nuclear weapons each.
India and Pakistan are slowly building their arsenals.
In addition to the bunker-buster, the Bush administration
wants new nuclear warheads to replace old ones.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the
Arms Control Association, is doubtful. He thinks the
replacement process could be a back door to
new warhead concepts, not what's needed when trying to
persuade Iran to keep out of the nuclear club.
A more meaningful approach, says Kimball, would be to
slash the swollen U.S. and Russian arsenals.
Yet under the Treaty of Moscow, by 2012, both
nuclear behemoths could still deploy 2,200
long-range nuclear weapons, not counting those
in reserve and tactical arms. The world will
still bristle with the most destructive of
weapons of mass destruction 22 years after
the Cold War's end.
That's not a prospect likely to dissuade the
insecure leaders of Iran.
Gottlieb, a former executive director of the
National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, is
the author of "Defense Addiction: Can America Kick the Habit?"
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Rumsfeld, one step closer to putting his finger on the button:
Rumsfeld Outsources Pentagon - Makes a Grab for Direct Military Control:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/politics/18forces.html
WASHINGTON, March 17 — A classified Pentagon study analyzing
the effectiveness of Special Operations forces has found that
the military's counterterrorism effort is hampered by
bureaucratic duplication, officials said, citing in particular
an overlap between new government centers.
The report included one radical proposal:
It advocated relocating to Washington the headquarters
of the Joint Special Operations Command, which runs all
of the "special-mission units" that carry out the
most secret attacks against terrorists and work to
halt the proliferation of unconventional weapons.
It proposed that these highly trained units then be
put under Mr. Rumsfeld's direct, personal control.
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