Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 31
A light has come on at the Department of Energy.
Now the Republicans who represent Utah in Congress will no longer be blinded by party loyalty and will be able to see how both common sense and the interests of their state were against the misbegotten nuclear “bunker buster” project.
It was announced last week that the National Nuclear Security Administration, the part of the Department of Energy that designs the nation’s nuclear weapons, wants Congress to forget the earlier request for $4 million for bunker buster development.
The Bush administration still wants a weapon that can penetrate deeply fortified enemy command centers. But now the plan is to let the Pentagon invent it, and to blow up the bunkered bad guys with conventional explosives.
It’s not that some underground command centers, weapons labs, etc., won’t need eliminating. It’s just that it is tactically, politically and morally wrong to invent a new kind of nuclear weapon on a planet that already has far too many.
The desire for nuclear weapons is part of what defines a renegade nation. The fear that Iraq, Iran and North Korea have or want to have them is Exhibit 1 in the case for those nations constituting an Axis of Evil.
Why the administration and most of the Utah delegation ever thought the U.S. could claim either the moral or the tactical high ground by inventing a new weapon of mass destruction is unfathomable.
Utahns, given their history of downwind contamination from previous experiments, should especially fear any new rounds of nuclear testing in the desert Southwest. Yet, throughout the debate, only Rep. Jim Matheson, the delegation’s lone Democrat, could be heard to oppose it.
Not only would American pursuit of a new nuke encourage other nations to indulge their own nuclear aspirations, good arguments were also made that a nuclear bunker buster would not be more useful than a conventional version.
It wouldn’t necessarily be better at reaching its buried targets but, once it blew up, would be much more destructive of surrounding populations and buildings, loosing the same kind of firestorms and radiation associated with surface-detonated nukes.
Bad ideas like this have a habit of coming back. So we will have to make sure that this bad idea never busts out again.
