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FYI
The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Science Policy News
Number 77: June 19, 2003

Senators Debate Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons Initiative

Part 1 of 2

The debate on the Senate floor was more temperate than the House
debate, but the opinions as strong when senators considered the
merits of maintaining current restrictions on research and
development of new low yield nuclear weapons.  Senate debate on an
amendment offered by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Edward
Kennedy (D-MA) ran over 45,000  words.  The Senate rejected their
amendment to retain the restrictions by a vote of 51-43.

Selections from the remarks of Senator Feinstein and Senate Armed
Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) follow:

SENATOR FEINSTEIN:

"President Bush is right when he says the greatest threat facing the
United States lies in the global proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction and terrorist access to these weapons. But by adopting a
new approach to national security in the wake of 9/11 that stresses
unilateralism and preemption and increases U.S. reliance on nuclear
weapons, I am deeply concerned that this administration may actually
be encouraging the very proliferation we seek to prevent.  This
bill, left intact, clearly opens the door to the development of new
nuclear weapons and will, if left as is, begin a new era of nuclear
proliferation, as sure as I am standing here.

"A couple of weeks ago, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
talked with the Democratic Senate Caucus and she said something
interesting. She said, in all of American history, there never has
been a greater change in foreign policy and national security than
between this administration and the last one.  Indeed, I deeply
believe this bill places America at a crossroad in the conduct of
foreign policy, and how we determine nuclear weapons policy will go
a long way to determining whether we control nuclear proliferation
or expand it. This bill will expand it. Let there be no doubt.

"To my mind, even considering the use of these weapons threatens to
undermine our efforts to stop proliferation. In fact, it actually
encourages other nations to pursue nuclear weapons by emphasizing
their importance.  For decades the United States relied on its
nuclear arsenal for deterrence only. In the symmetric world of the
Cold War, we faced the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons and a
conventional military that was stronger than ours. Nuclear weapons
were used to deter not only a nuclear attack on our homeland but
also a conventional attack against our allies in western Europe and
Asia.

"Today the Soviet Union is gone, but the world is not a safer place.
Rather, we have seen new nuclear states emerge--India, Pakistan, and
lately North Korea. As we continue to prosecute the war on terror,
it should be a central tenet of U.S. policy to do everything at our
disposal to make nuclear weapons less desirable, less available, and
less likely to be used.

"This bill will do exactly the opposite. Instead of ratcheting back
our reliance on nuclear weapons, this administration is looking for
new ways to use nuclear weapons and to make them more usable. Does
anyone in this Chamber doubt that others will follow? I do not. The
administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released in January of
2002, did not focus solely on the role of nuclear weapons for
deterrence. It stressed the importance of being prepared to use
nuclear weapons in the future. In fact, the review noted that we
must now plan to possibly use them against a wider range of
countries.

"The Nuclear Posture Review said that we need to develop new types
of nuclear weapons so we can use them in a wider variety of
circumstances and against a wider range of targets such as hard and
deeply buried targets or to defeat chemical or biological agents.

"And indeed, a few months after issuing the Nuclear Posture Review,
President Bush signed National Security Presidential Directive 17,
saying the United States might use nuclear weapons to respond to a
chemical or biological attack.

"In the past, U.S. officials have only hinted at that possibility.
But this administration has made it formal policy. In doing so, it
has telegraphed the importance of nuclear weapons and the
administration's apparent willingness to use them.

"In the legislation before us today, there is language requested by
the administration asking Congress to repeal the Spratt-Furse
provision--a decade old law that bans research on weapons with
yields of 5 kilotons. Now, that is a third the size of the bomb used
at Hiroshima.

"I believe Spratt-Furse is an important prohibition with positive
security equities for the United States. Since it has been in
effect, no nation has developed lower yield nuclear weapons.  This
administration wants to repeal Spratt-Furse for one reason, and one
reason only: to build new nuclear weapons, particularly for missions
against the hardened bunkers that rogue states may be using to store
chemical and biological weapons.

"By seeking to build nuclear weapons that produce smaller explosions
and develop weapons which dig deeper, the administration is
suggesting we can make nuclear weapons less deadly. It is suggesting
we can make them more acceptable to use. But there is no such thing
as a clean nuclear weapon that minimizes collateral damage.

"Consider the following facts: According to a Stanford physicist,
Sidney Drell, destroying a target buried 1,000 feet into rock would
require a nuclear weapon with the yield of 100 kilotons. That is 10
times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

"According to Dr. Drell, even the effects of a small bomb would be
dramatic. A 1-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet
underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero in New York
and eject 1 million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air.
According to models done by the Natural Resources Defense Council,
detonating a similar weapon on the surface of a city would kill a
quarter of a million people and injure hundreds of thousands more.

"So there really is no such thing as a 'usable nuclear weapon.'"

"This is a big vote. This is a vote that opens the door. How we can
repeal language that says to all the world the United States is not
in the nuclear development business, I do not know, but I find it
absolutely chilling and even diabolical, particularly when we preach
to other nations.

"At a time when we brand as evil certain countries based in part on
their pursuit of nuclear arms and weapons of mass destruction, we
must be careful how we consider our own options and our own
contingencies regarding nuclear weapons. So I urge my colleagues to
think very carefully about the implications this defense bill is
going to carry throughout the world.

"The 10-year old prohibition on study, on testing, and on developing
nuclear weapons is going to be thrown out the window, and it is a
major signal that the United States is going to get back into the
nuclear arms business."

 - Continued -

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