 B-1 bomber being loaded with “bunker busters.” Photo: Cherie A. Thurlby/Rex Features |
The Nevada Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is to be the scene of a huge explosion in June. [The test has since been delayed (June 8) — click here for an update.] The blast—code-named “Divine Strake”—will be 50 times larger than the military’s largest conventional weapon, the Massive Ordinance Air Blast Bomb. It is likely to be the biggest controlled conventional explosion in military history. The blast, originally scheduled for June 2 but delayed due to an environmental lawsuit, will still be many times less powerful than the smallest weapon now in the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
The test entails detonating 700 tons of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil above a buried limestone tunnel to measure damage done to the tunnel interior. The mixture to be used is similar to the bomb that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, except the Nevada bomb will use 280 times as much material.
“It seems like what they’re doing is trying to use the explosive power to shake the interior into pieces, rather than sending an earth penetrator down to dig it up,” said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert with the Federation of American Scientists. “What it apparently does is envision the use of [a] nuke on the surface, and that is a very dirty business, because it sucks up the material and throws it into the atmosphere.”
Equipment inside and near the tunnel will monitor damage and ground shaking from the blast. Dust from the mushroom cloud, which could reach heights of 10,000 feet, will also be tracked.
Pushing for ‘low-yield’ warheads
Policy analysts in and out of the Bush administration have pushed for the United States to develop low-yield nuclear weapons. In 2001, the National Institute for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank, called for new nuclear warheads to be developed for “bunker busting”—penetrating heavily armored or fortified positions.
Bush also called for the repeal of a 1994 Congressional ban on the development of low-yield mini-nuclear weapons. Congress repealed the ban in 2003, allowing research of low-yield nuclear weapons but requiring specific approval by Congress before engineering or other work on mini-nukes can begin.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon denies that Divine Strake has anything to do with nuclear testing. “This is a test to have better predictive tools to defeating hardened and underground targets,” says David Rigby, spokesman of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency. “It is not a precursor to a nuclear test. It is not a nuclear test.” (Las Vegas Sun, April 4, 2006)
While Divine Strake is not officially a nuclear test, it has a great deal to do with developing new “bunker buster” nukes, charges the Federation of American Scientists in an April 4 statement.
According to revelations by investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, Iran could become the first target for these weapons.
According to Hersh, “the Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2006)
Why ‘bunker buster’ nukes?
There are several reasons why the Bush administration is pushing ahead with developing new “bunker buster” nukes. Conventional “bunker buster” missiles such as the GBU 28, which was developed on a crash basis for “Operation Desert Storm,” cannot destroy hardened targets deep underground. And the Bush administration claims that countries such as North Korea and Iran are burying nuclear facilities deep enough underground to be invulnerable to conventional attack.
 Testing of “MOAB” bomb at Eglin Air Force Base Armament Center in Florida, March 11, 2003. Photo: AFP Photo/DOD |
In addition, the imperialist establishment has long been frustrated by the impracticality of using existing nuclear weapons, owing to the political and environmental costs and enormous collateral damage that would be incurred.
According to FAS, the GBU 28 “bunker buster” missile was put together in record time for attacks on “multi-layered, hardened underground targets” in Iraq during the first Gulf War. Tests proved that the bomb could penetrate 20 feet of concrete and 100 feet of earth.
Conventional “bunker buster” bombs were also used at the start of the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq ahead of the ground invasion in March 2003. The aim was to kill Saddam Hussein and other top leaders of the government and knock out various “command and control” bunkers. The Pentagon claims that the attacks on the top Iraqi leadership failed due to “faulty intelligence.”
The United States also has a tactical nuclear “bunker buster,” called the B61-11, in its weapons stockpile. Its earth-penetrating capability was tested during the first Bush administration and deployed in 1997 under Bill Clinton. The B61-11, dropped from a B-2 bomber, can carry a nuclear charge with anywhere between a 1-kiloton (1,000 tons of TNT) and a 300-kiloton yield. By comparison, the bomb used on Hiroshima had a yield of approximately 15 kilotons. The shock wave from such an intense underground explosion would cause damage deep in the earth and could destroy even a well-fortified bunker.
The B61-11 would leave an immense crater and spew a huge amount of radioactive fallout into the air. Millions of people living downwind of the blast, including in neighboring countries, would be affected.
The B61-11 is politically problematic for the U.S. establishment because of the enormous collateral damage that would result. In addition, use of the B61-11 would violate an effective international taboo on use of nuclear weapons. The Bush administration gives every indication of wanting to overturn this taboo. They may well hope that the development of a “mini-nuke” will do the trick. Hence the decision to carry out a test like Divine Strake.
Switching to ‘mini-nukes’
Since dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, the imperialists have been constrained from further nuclear strikes against other countries. In view of the efforts now being made to develop mini-nukes, the Bush administration seeks to cast aside these restraints and add a weapon to their nuclear arsenal that they can actually use.
In an article dated August 6, 2003, entitled “Mini-nukes on U.S. agenda,” BBC world affairs correspondent Paul Reynolds reported on a secret conference to be held at StratCom, the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command in Nebraska. The meeting, called the “Stockpile Stewardship Conference,” grew from a re-assessment of U.S. nuclear strategy in the post-Cold War era.
According to Reynolds, “Some 150 top scientists and senior officials will meet at the Offutt Air Force Base. According to an agenda leaked earlier this year by an anti-nuclear group, one of their panels will tackle the issue of mini-nukes.”
Reynolds reports that this “Future Arsenal” panel will examine “requirements for low-yield weapons, EPW’s [earth penetrator weapons], enhanced radiation weapons, [and] agent defeat weapons.”
“Decoded, this means nuclear devices that produce small amounts of radiation, earth-penetrating weapons to attack underground bunkers, larger devices with greater radiation effects and weapons to destroy chemical and biological agents,” he concludes.
Socialism or barbarism
The German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg, in her famous Junius Pamphlet written while she was in prison during World War I, quotes Friedrich Engels as having once said: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.”
Luxemburg asks rhetorically, “What does this ‘regression into barbarism’ mean?” She answers: “The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration—a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international [working class] against imperialism and its method of war.”
Modern capitalist society still stands at the crossroads so eloquently described by Luxemburg: the victory of socialism or a great cemetery.
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
