Fred Kaplan (Slate): Low-Yield Nukes-Why spend money on useless weapons?

[Dudley_DUright]

A little-noted clause of the Fiscal Year 2004 defense bill, which both houses of Congress passed with barely a shrug last week, puts the United States back in the business—after a decadelong moratorium—of developing, testing, and eventually building a new generation of exotic nuclear weapons.

In its budget proposal earlier this year, the Bush administration asked for four things along these lines:

1) The repeal of a 1992 law banning the research and development of "low-yield" nuclear weapons (i.e., nukes with an explosive power of less than 5 kilotons);

2) $15 million for work on an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon (popularly known as a "bunker-buster");

3) $6 million for an "Advanced Concepts Initiative," in which the national weapons labs would once again explore special-effects nukes—for instance, nuclear weapons that, like the long-abandoned "neutron bomb," would enhance certain types of radiation; and

4) $25 million to gear up the weapons labs to the point where they could resume underground nuclear tests within 18 months after a presidential order to do so. (The United States unilaterally stopped nuclear testing in 1992, on orders of the first President Bush, then formalized the cessation in 1995 by signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.)

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2091531/