Nevada Testing and Nuclear Warfare

[Update: I've re-ordered this post so that the discussion of a prominent but unintentionally misleading post on Daily Kos is at the bottom rather than the top because I want to make sure that as many people as possible read about the nuclear implications of this weapons testing.]

On June 2, the Pentagon is going to detonate 700 tons of conventional explosives underground in Nevada to find out what it will happen to the surrounding rocks.

Why would we need to know what would happen if we dropped 700 tons of bombs into a hole in the ground and detonated them? A C-5 cargo jet can carry 120 tons It would take six of them to carry all that. Somehow, I don't think Bush is planning on sending six cargo planes into Iran (or anywhere else, for that matter) and having them dump all their cargo into a pre-dug hole in the ground like we're doing in Nevada. So why would we be doing this test? Why would we want to know what happens when 700 tons of explosives go off in a hole in the ground? A lot of people have already provided the answer: this is a faux nuclear test. A way of doing a "nuclear test" without actually doing a nuclear test. And not just any nuclear weapon. As many people have correctly noted, we're talking about nuclear bunker busters. And why are we doing this now? As an exercise in saber-rattling. This probably has two purposes. First, to scare Iran. And second, as a trial balloon for the American public. If there's no resistance to his clear intention to use these weapons, Bush will interpret that as a go-ahead. We should do everything we can to make sure that doesn't happen.

The appeal behind nuclear bunker busters is pretty simple. These weapons have low yields ("low" meaning "equivalent to between 300 and 300,000 tons of TNT" for the B61-11, many times more powerful than our highest-yield conventional explosives) but because they burrow, they can still destroy underground sites (like those in Iran). Surely that's better than using an old B53 "city-buster" (equivalent to nine million tons of TNT) and turning the whole region into a crater deep enough to hit the bunker, right? I suppose, but for reasons I'll outline below, a bunker buster (affectionately called a "mini-nuke" by its lovers) is much more likely to be used than any other nuclear weapon, and why it's so dangerous to be throwing these things around, even as threats.

Before we go any further, I should point out that regardless of the Pentagon's claims to the contrary, these are not "clean" weapons (as if there could be anything "clean" about an instrument of mass murder). There are a lot of conflicting reports about them (sort of like the "conflicting reports" on global warming or evolution), but I haven't seen any serious analysis (as opposed to assertions) that say these things can burrow deep enough to prevent massive civilian deaths. Thanks to a study by the Federation of American Scientists, we've known for years now that "No earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the Hiroshima weapon. The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with especially intense and deadly fallout." A 1-kiloton explosion—a third of one percent of the B61-11's potential yield—could only be contained if the weapon penetrated 450 feet. The B61-11 only penetrated twenty feet in testing in Alaska. And there's a chance that it won't penetrate at all. According to Aviation Week and Space Technology, (6/9/1997, not online), if the bomb isn't released under just the right conditions, it will "skip" and end up on the surface. It's actually worse than that: the article quotes an expert as saying "it is not designed for massive rocks. It's primarily a dirt penetrator. We can handle a foot of concrete, [but] two feet hasn't been investigated." It's even worse than that, because the explosion will spread whatever it's dropped on throughout a large area. And if the prospects of millions of Iranian, Pakistani, and Indian deaths doesn't bother you (because you're Michael Savage), try this: bombing chemical plants in the first Gulf War seems to have caused severe health problems for our own soldiers, many of which continue to this day. If for some reason you decide not to read anything else, please read this Kos diary and this flash animation on the subject. The destruction caused by these weapons—and the shame we should feel if our country uses them—is the key issue.

That said, I think we'll all agree that actually using these weapons should be a last resort at best. But there are critically important reasons that we shouldn't even be threatening to use them. The "Los Alamos Study Group and the Brookings Institution called the B61-11 bunker buster "provocative from an arms control and nonproliferation perspective" both because it circumvents the spirit of the Nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and because it'll scare the shit out of foreign governments. And the last thing we need is for Syria to decide that it has to go the North Korean route to avoid getting attacked in 2008.

And it's not just pre-nuclear powers, either. Here's what Peace Research (can't find it online) said about these sorts of weapons—which are small enough to be carried in an F16 or B2 stealth bomber—in 1999. "If B-2 bombers are deployed to bases and start flying missions with nuclear weapons, they might trigger an accidental nuclear war. If Russia and other countries are not allowed time to evaluate whether a threat is real or not, it could increase the danger of nuclear missiles being launched in error." According to PR Newswire (also not online) on April 29, 1998, "this scenario almost played out to horrifying results in 1995 when a U.S. scientific rocket launched from Norway led to activation of the nuclear suitcases carried by the top Russian command... It took eight minutes for the Russian leadership to determine the rocket launch was not part of a surprise nuclear strike... just four minutes before" their standard launch-on-warning protocols allowed them to "counterattack" by wiping the United States off the map. Presumably we would retaliate against their retaliation. The article cites Colin Powell, who says that according to his experience in war games, there could literally billions of casualties.

Also, these weapons undermine the "unthinkability" of nuclear war. They seem to make "limited nuclear exchanges" and "clean" "surgical strikes" with nuclear weapons become possible. As I mentioned above, the smallest of these weapons overlap with our biggest conventional weapons. They can even be dropped by F-16s and stealth B2 Bombers. It's so easy. Why would we want that kind of flexibility when we can already wipe any country we want off the map in a half hour? Because unlike our weapons during the Cold War, when using nuclear weapons was supposed to be a last resort after we'd already been attacked, these weapons were built to be used aggressively. We can claim that they're "clean" and "targeted" and pretend that makes a difference. But the fact remains, any nuclear weapon does profound violence. It's instant mass murder. Perhaps even genocide. It's virtually the definition of indiscriminate killing. Their use is the most immoral act imaginable, the hardest one to justify. It makes a whole region uninhabitable, devastating the environment. It would destabilize every balance of power on Earth as decades of work to make the world safer collapse overnight. Congress actually explicitly recognized that these weapons make nuclear war more likely, and according to the American Federation of Scientists, they "prohibited the nuclear laboratories from undertaking research and development that could lead to a precision nuclear weapon of less than 5 kilotons (kt) because "low-yield nuclear weapons blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.'" Now that we have these weapons, what exactly is going to stop Bush from using them? It's not like 30 years of arms control or acts of Congress or "international law have stopped him from doing whatever he wanted in the past.

Lastly, even if by some miracle, they aren't used now, the Los Alamos/Brookings article I linked to above points out having this shiny, new (but untested) weapon at the heart of our global strategy would "likely result, over time, in calls for the resumption of nuclear testing." The American Federation of Scientists went one step further, arguing that "attempts to develop a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons would only make nuclear war more likely, and they seem cynically designed to provide legitimacy to nuclear testing. Such an approach would prompt nuclear arms competition, decrease rather than increase our national security, and undermine U.S. and international non-proliferation efforts." Maybe nuclear testing would be a good thing (probably not), but we should actually be having the debate instead of allowing the Pentagon and defense contractors to illegally change the equation. And yes I do mean "illegally." As I mentioned before, these things were developed illegally The Brookings/Los Alamos article says that "Development of this weapon was approved outside the regular budget process and without congressional debate, by means of secret letters to key committee chairmen, raising constitutional questions."

Remember—fighting this test is critical to preventing all of this. Everyone, do your part.


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Part 2: Daily Kos and others need to make prominent corrections
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At 10:17 AM this morning, "RenaRF" made an honest mistake. She saw Randi Rhodes' misleading discussion of a planned conventional test in Nevada that could make vertical nuclear proliferation more likely. Because Rhodes' discussion was extremely confusing, (intentionally misleading, perhaps?) I don't blame her for the mistake. I did a double-take myself when I saw it on Crooks and Liars. Five minutes after she posted, someone corrected her. It's not nuclear, it's conventional.

About five minutes later, Rena responded with a "groaaan." The context isn't clear, but given that it was indented after the correction, it appears that she read it. I don't know. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt. Regardless of the reason, the post still had NUCLEAR in the title and talked about detonating "what appears to be a nuclear bunker buster in Nevada in June." About a half hour later, another commenter noted that it was conventional, not nuclear, and Rena responded by changing the title (but not the content) of the post. Her only retraction was buried under something like sixty posts, so hardly anyone would see it. The text of the post, which referred to detonating "what appears to be a nuclear bunker buster in Nevada in June," remained. As a result, there was continued confusion and at some point during the day, her post was "recommended" all the way up to the front page by readers. It was also posted at My Left Wing (where it is entirely uncorrected as of 8:00 PM Eastern time) and possibly elsewhere. Randi Rhodes' comment probably confused everyone that saw it, but thanks to the blogosphere, thousands more people have been misled.

This is a big deal.

Those of us that oppose this test is going to get our shit kicked out of us in debates if we don't correct this fast. For a few reasons. The first is the literally thousands of people that will start an argument about a nuclear test and then look like asshats when it turns out it's not nuclear. When your allies look stupid, you look stupid. I guarantee you that the warmongers on the other side will use this confusion as a rhetorical weapon against any criticism of the test's connection to a possible nuclear strike on Iran. I can hear Rush Limbaugh sneering at us now. But this isn't a battle we can afford to lose. This test, even though it doesn't involve nuclear weapons directly is a giant step towards that end. Bloggers that oppose this test have a major responsibility to do damage control and set things straight before people wake up tomorrow morning and start losing debates on this. Fixing the existing posts is not enough. People won't see it unless it's on the front page of the blog. There should be no shame in this: it was clearly an honest mistake under the circumstances, one that I could easily see myself making. The most important thing is the debate.

Now please let me explain why this test is so bad. I will be drawing in part on something I posted at MLW before I realized how far the confusion had spread.

Categories: nuclear, bush, military, war, iran, web,