- Following the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center
and Pentagon, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was questioned on
ABC television's This Week program about the possible use of tactical
nuclear
weapons in the expected conflicts to come.
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- In practiced Pentagonese, Rumsfeld deftly avoided
answering
the question of whether the use of tactical nuclear weapons could be ruled
out.
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- Though large "theater" thermonuclear devices
-- doomsday bombs -- don't fit the Bush administration's war on terrorism,
smaller tactical nukes do not seem out of the question in the current
mindset
of the Defense Department.
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- The most likely candidate is a tactical micro-nuke called
the B61-11, an earth-penetrating nuclear device known as the "bunker
buster."
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- The B61-11 was designed to destroy underground military
facilities such as command bunkers, ballistic missile silos and facilities
for producing and storing weapons.
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- However, it could be used against the warren of tunnels
and caves carved under the Afghan mountains that are often cited as a
potential
refuge for the U.S. government's prime suspect, Osama bin Laden.
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- The B61-11's unique earth-penetrating characteristics
and wide range of yields allow it to threaten deeply situated and otherwise
indestructible underground targets from the air.
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- The 1,200-pound B61-11 replaces the 8,900-pound,
nine-megaton
B53 device, a bomb initially designated as an earth-penetrating
weapon.
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- The B53 is deliverable only by enormous and vulnerable
B-52 bombers. By contrast, the relatively diminutive B61-11 can be
delivered
by the stealthier B-2 bomber, or even by conventional fighters such as
the F-16.
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- The B61-11 is designed to burrow through layers of
concrete
by way of a "shock-coupling effect."
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- The design directs the force of the B61-11's explosive
energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of
several hundred meters, according to a story in the March 2, 1997 issue
of Defense News.
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- The B53, on the other hand, with a force equal to 9
million
tons of TNT, penetrates the earth simply by creating a massive crater,
rather than the more precise downward blow of the B61-11.
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- The B61-11 is the most recent nuclear device added to
the U.S. nuclear arsenal since 1989.
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- It was developed and deployed secretly, according to
a story from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The U.S. military
sneaked
it past test and development treaties, as well as public and congressional
debate, by defining the B61-11 as an adaptation of a pre-treaty technology
rather than a new development.
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- Depending on the yield of the bomb, the B61-11 can
produce
explosions ranging from 300 tons of TNT to more than 300,000 tons. This
is significantly less than the B53, but still far larger than even the
greatest conventional non-nuclear device in U.S. stockpiles. And it is
several times more powerful than the atomic weapons dropped on Japan in
1945.
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- Studies by the Natural Resource Defense Council estimate
that more than 150 B61-11s are currently in the U.S. arsenals, scattered
among NATO aircraft carriers and planes on bases in Germany, Great Britain,
Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Netherlands and Greece.
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- Many B61-11s were withdrawn from Europe during the '90s
and are now stored at Kirtland and Nellis Air Force bases in the United
States.
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- According to a desk release from the U.S. Air Force's
Public Affairs office, tests of the earth-penetrating capabilities of the
B61-11 were completed on March 17, 1998, in frozen tundra at the Stuart
Creek Impact Area, 35 miles southeast of Fairbanks, Alaska.
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- Two unarmed B61-11s were dropped to test their
ground-penetration
capability. The tests were designed to measure the nuclear bomb casing's
penetration into frozen soil and the survivability of the weapon's internal
components.
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- A team excavated the two unexploded dummy bombs and took
careful measurements of their angles and depth of penetration into the
soil, which were 6 and 10 feet, according to the Air Force. The shells
were sent back to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico for full
analysis
of how the simulated internal components fared in the impact.
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- The B6-11's casing didn't rupture in any of the tests,
including drops through concrete from 40,000 feet. All bomb casings were
recovered 100 percent intact, according to the release.
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- Any debate inside the corridors of power about using
tactical nukes will be heightened by the intelligence buzz surrounding
bin Laden's possible ownership of Russian nuclear "suitcase"
bombs purchased from Chechen mafia.
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- Those weapons are said to be hidden in deep caves and
fortified tunnels in remote regions of Afghanistan.
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- Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the discussion of ways
to eradicate this potential nuclear threat -- while simultaneously
destroying
bin Laden and his teams -- may have led to talk about tactical weapons
that can destroy even heavily fortified underground shelters.
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