Amerikaanse Nucleaire Wapens

De Amerikaanse auteur Benjamin Phelan schrijft in Harper's Magazine: 'Debunking the nuclear "bunker buster." According to Defense Department estimates, there are perhaps 10,000 underground military installations in the world. Most, no doubt, are crude ammo dumps, but some are literally subterranean fortresses. The most dazzling is the complex beneath Russia's Yamantau Mountain, begun under Brezhnev but completed only recently; tunneled sideways into the Urals southeast of Moscow, the complex sits below thousands of feet of quartz, insulated from an American ICBM attack. China, too, has an extensive system of underground bunkers and command shelters, including hundreds of fortified missile silos, complete with living quarters, that are scattered throughout its 3.7 million square miles. In North Korea the reliance on tunnels and bunkers is even more obsessive. Underground weapons factories there are believed to employ as many as 20,000 workers; the nation has tunneled under the DMZ and into South Korea, has dug in upward of 10,000 pieces of artillery along the border, and even has built underground airstrips. Iran possesses an underground uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz that can be expanded or altered in secrecy. Libya's vast chemical-weapons plant at Tarhunah, though now apparently in disuse, is still standing, still underground, and could be quietly reopened by a lapsed Qaddafi. Without satellite surveillance showing its construction and burial, the world might still be ignorant of Syria's As-Safirah chemical-weapons factory. These installations, and countless others unknown around the world, constitute the last class of targets that America's current arsenal cannot credibly threaten with swift annihilation. Since the Cold War, the U.S defense community has become obsessed with the problem of bunkers and how to destroy them. The solution put forward has, of course, been expensive new weaponry. Soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration made a push for new nuclear programs, the most conspicuous of which was the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), designed to destroy deeply buried bunkers. During the first presidential debate this fall, John Kerry made much of his opposition to the program. "Right now the President is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to research bunker-busting nuclear weapons," he said. "We're telling other people, ÔYou can't have nuclear weapons,' but we're pursuing a new nuclear weapon that we might even contemplate using. Not this president. I'm going to shut that program down, and we're going to make it clear to the world we're serious about containing nuclear proliferation." But Kerry's gesture, while well intentioned, was largely empty. The United States already has a nuclear bunker-buster, the B61-11, which was tested during the first Bush Administration and deployed in 1997 under Bill Clinton. In the eyes of potential adversaries, the B61-11 is inherently a weapon that, in Kerry's phrase, "we might even contemplate using": alone in our vast nuclear arsenal, the B61-11 is tailored not to deter a full-on attack by a large nuclear competitor but to preemptively strike a smaller state. If, as Kerry rightly argues, the RNEP is a provocation to non-nuclear states in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, it is hardly more so than the bunker buster we already possess.
Were the effectiveness of bunker busters to be demonstrated, the weapons might conceivably be worth the risk and expense. But in fact, even a cursory consideration of the science shows that bunker-busting nuclear weapons are a wasteful and dangerous delusion.' Lees verder:
http://www.harpers.org/BuriedTruths.html Of: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006O.shtml