Bush will use nukes simply because he is convinced that he is following Jesus's orders. Is this the man we want with his finger on the nuclear button?
Friday, 7 March, 2003, 21:13 GMT
US seeks tactical nukes
By Steve Schifferes
BBC News Online in Washington Even as the US Senate approved a new nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia, the Pentagon was asking Congress for authority to develop a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons.
<snip>
The Bush administration has told Congress that it wants to spend $21m to develop the nuclear earth penetrator, which could be used against potential enemies who bury their war-making facilities underground.
These could include North Korea, which is suspected of hiding its nuclear production sites in areas carved out of mountains.
Everet Beckner, deputy head of the National Nuclear Security, said that the research "might culminate in an integral flight or laboratory test".
The new bomb would be based on the one remaining US tactical nuclear weapon, the B61, with a strengthened nose cone to allow it to penetrate frozen soil or rocks.
Additionally, the Bush administration plans to ask Congress to lift the ban on the development of even smaller nuclear weapons, with yields of under five kilotons, which could be used against above-ground weapons production facilities.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2830933.stmOur Hidden WMD Program
Why Bush is spending so much on nuclear weapons.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, April 23, 2004, at 3:41 PM PT
The budget is busted; American soldiers need more armor; they're running out of supplies. Yet the Department of Energy is spending an astonishing $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons this year, and President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. This does not include his much-cherished missile-defense program, by the way. This is simply for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production of nuclear bombs and warheads.
Measured in "real dollars" (that is, adjusting for inflation), this year's spending on nuclear activities is equal to what Ronald Reagan spent at the height of the U.S.-Soviet standoff. It exceeds by over 50 percent the average annual sum ($4.2 billion) that the United States spent—again, in real dollars—throughout the four and a half decades of the Cold War.
There is no nuclear arms race going on now. The world no longer offers many suitable nuclear targets. President Bush is trying to persuade other nations—especially "rogue regimes"—to forgo their nuclear ambitions. Yet he is shoveling money to U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories as if the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War still raged.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2099425/Published on Wednesday, July 9, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Fallout from Bush's Tactical Nukes on the American West
by Alex Roth Bush's nuclear policy, like Richland High's mascot, is a bizarre throwback to a bygone era, familiar in the American West, when the government thoughtlessly promoted military technology as a cure-all for ethical and diplomatic challenges. Typical of that era's approach was a plan called Project Chariot (part of "Operation Plowshare"), which would have detonated multiple nuclear weapons off Alaska's northwest coast to create an artificial deepwater port. The plan persisted for four years, until 1962, despite the vigorous objection of inhabitants terrified by the ghastly damage the blasts and radiation would have inflicted on people and ecosystems.
Other examples are more widely known, including the high cancer rates among Utahans living downwind from the Nevada Test Site, where some 900 nukes were exploded during the Cold War. Even some residents of Richland, Wash., ("Go Bombers!") are alarmed by the 55 million gallons of radioactive waste buried at Hanford in leaking underground containers, awaiting federal cleanup.
With this sort of history so common and close at hand, we in America's nuclear heartland see right through Bush's new tactical (if not tactful) nuclear initiative. Call it "Operation Oblivious Texan," forsaking as it does precise, smart bombs for massively destructive stupid ones, a dumbing-down of Bush's arsenal to match his diplomacy.
Bush's surreal atomic contradictions reflect the logic of Dr. Strangelove's generation: He wants to curtail nuclear proliferation by proliferating nukes, wants to minimize the threat of nuclear war by making nuclear weapons more practical to use and seems to be enforcing his international consensus against weapons of mass destruction in part by implicitly threatening to nuke the uncooperative.
The research Bush ordered will be conducted at the Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico, and the Livermore lab, east of San Francisco. All three of these facilities continue to send deadly detritus from past bomb research to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project site near Carlsbad, N.M., where it will be stored for the next 10,000 years. To cope with the extreme, ultralong-term hazard, a group of anthropologists, linguists and other experts was convened in the early 1990s. Their job was to devise universal warning signs for the dump that people will heed after our language and civilization are forgotten -- a task as surreal as a varsity jacket emblazoned with a mushroom cloud.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0709-06.htm 
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