Thankfully, the Bush administration is defiant of the axiom, "If the sheriff rides unarmed, the outlaws will, too." Unfortunately, the technological development of weaponry is anyone's game; if the free world does not remain at the forefront of nuclear explosive research, someone will - probably those who would seek to use the devices for offensive leverage, not as a last-resort preventative measure. Says USA Today:
..."Icecap," the test of a bomb 10 times the size of the one that devastated the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945, was halted when the first President Bush placed a moratorium on U.S. nuclear tests in October 1992. The voluntary test ban came two years after Russia stopped its nuclear tests.In the 11 years since, the United States has worked to halt the spread of nuclear weapons around the world and has often touted its own self-imposed restraint as a model for other nations.
Last year the White House released, to little publicity, the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review. That policy paper embraces the use of nuclear weapons in a first strike and on the battlefield; it also says a return to nuclear testing may soon be necessary. It was coupled with a request for $70 million to study and develop new types of nuclear weapons and to shorten the time it would take to test them.
The lack of attention paid may have well been attributed to the fact that most Americans prefer their country to maintain military superiority in all respects. The bomb-cutting game, after all, was simply a dance we played with the Soviets. Now that the Bear is gone, "mutual gestures" with Russia are largely irrelevant - the worst fear today being that her orphan cubs are hawking atomic material because it sells better on the black market than hammer-and-sickle-stamped tractors.
The United States is not in a strategic position where the destruction of an industrial center, such as Hiroshima or Nagasaki, is remotely necessary. Big bombs are deterrent - enter Reagan's brilliant "mutually assured destruction." Future uses of nuclear energy's effortlessly destructive potential come in small packages: tactical nukes.
The main reason offered by the Pentagon is that "rogue" nations such as North Korea, Iran and Libya have gone deep, building elaborate bunkers hundreds of feet underground where their leaders and weapons could ride out an attack by the biggest conventional weapons U.S. forces could throw at them. U.S. officials also theorize that the vaporizing blast of a nuclear bomb might be the only way to safely destroy an enemy's chemical or biological weapons.The Pentagon says developing new nuclear weapons makes sense in a dangerous world. "Without having the ability to hold those targets at risk, we essentially provide sanctuary," J.D. Crouch, an assistant secretary of Defense, told reporters earlier this year.
[...]
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says nuclear weapons could be crucial tools for destroying chemical and biological weapons stocks without causing wider harm.
"In terms of anthrax, it's said that gamma rays can ... destroy the anthrax spores, which is something we need to look at," Myers told reporters at the Pentagon on May 20. "And in chemical weapons, of course, the heat (of a nuclear blast) can destroy the chemical compounds and make them not develop that plume that conventional weapons might do, that would then drift and perhaps bring others in harm's way."
I put my stake on the answer to Iraq's weapons riddle in highly scattered and easily concealed components couched in clandestine, underground sites. That's Saddam's trick. Nations that are not confronted with authoritative scrutiny, however, would not be required to necessarily dissemble weapons stockpiles and industry; such sites, therefore, would be perfect for the consummate extirpative power of small-scale nuclear bombs.
Incidentally, one must admire the tenacity of journalists to qualify the morality of a nation by placing rogue status under quotations.
And of course, the usual counterargument from the usual sources:
[O]thers argue that moving toward a new generation of nuclear weapons, instead of improving conventional and non-nuclear ways to attack deep targets or chemical weapons sites, is fraught with danger."They are opening the door to a new era of a global nuclear arms competition," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. "As we try to turn the tide of nuclear proliferation, the last thing we should suggest is that nuclear weapons have a role in the battlefield, and these weapons are battlefield weapons. This is a serious step in the wrong direction."
Director Kimball should have made his statement to prevent competitive accoutering some millenia ago, when one fur-cloaked homo sapiens knocked his neighbor on the back of the head with a leg bone. Arms races never stop - certainly not with dictators, whose power rests solely on the broadcast of violence, yet dotting the globe. The free world needs a leg up. See the sheriff proverb above.