'Bunker buster' report draws fire

An American attack with a "bunker buster" nuclear weapon could cause "from hundreds to over a million" casualties, a report by the National Academy of Sciences concludes.

The report brought immediate reaction from Utah activists who worry about the Defense Department testing the devices at the nearby Nevada Test Site.

Bunker busters — formal name: "nuclear earth-penetrators" — are weapons that would be able to slam into underground facilities. A debate has raged over whether the government would seek to test the bombs at the Nevada Test Site.

The new NAS study, "Effects of Nuclear Earth-Penetrator and Other Weapons," says many of the more important strategic "hard and deeply buried" targets are beyond the reach of conventional explosive penetrating weapons and can be at risk of destruction only by nuclear weapons.

Not all such sites that are known or identified could be destroyed "by one or a few nuclear weapons," however, it added.

Experience and predictions indicate the bunker busters "cannot penetrate to depths required for total containment of the effects of a nuclear explosion," the study adds.

The number of casualties from an earth-penetrator weapon detonated at a few yards' depth is, "for all practical purposes, equal to that from a surface burst of the same weapon yield," NAS concluded.

If the United States were to attack a chemical weapons facility, civilian deaths from the effects of the nuclear weapon itself are likely to be much greater than that from dispersal of the chemical weapons. But if the target is a germ warfare facility, releasing as little as 0.1 kilogram of anthrax spores will result in a number of fatalities comparable to those from a 3-kiloton nuclear bunker buster, it says.

A nuclear weapon exploding in a densely populated urban area will always result in a large number of casualties, adds the NAS.

The report left Utah anti-nuclear activists shaking their heads.

Jay Truman of the group Downwinders criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for seeking to revive the bunker-buster program. According to the Reuters news service, the defense chief pressed Congress as recently as Wednesday to fund the research.

If the program begins, it could bring about testing of the nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site, said Truman. He charged that Rumsfeld was "busy asking Congress for funds to start the process to breed a new generation of us," he wrote in an e-mail, referring to downwinders.

"There are enough downwinders already. We do not need anymore," he added.

An activist with the Healthy Environment Alliance of Utah also expressed opposition to developing a nuclear penetrator bomb.

"The bunker buster is a costly weapon, both in terms of taxpayer dollars and in terms of the innocent lives that would be lost if the weapon were actually used," said HEAL's Vanessa Pierce.

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