Posted on 10-8-2003
'Dr
Strangeloves' Meet to Plan New Nuclear Era
By Julian Borger, The Guardian, 7 August 2003
US government scientists and Pentagon officials will
gather today behind tight security at a Nebraska air force base
to discuss the development of a modernized arsenal of small,
specialized nuclear weapons which critics believe could mark
the dawn of a new era in proliferation.
This is a confab of Dr Strangeloves. The fact that the
Pentagon is barring the public and congressional staff from
this key meeting on US nuclear weapons policy suggests that
the administration seeks to discuss and deliberate on its policies
largely in secret.
The Pentagon has not released a list of the 150 people at the
secret meeting, but according to leaks, they will include scientists
and administrators from the three main nuclear weapons laboratories,
Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore, senior officers from the air
force and strategic command, weapons contractors and civilian
defense officials.
Requests by Congress to send observers were rejected,
and an oversight committee which included academic nuclear experts
was disbanded only a few weeks earlier.
The purpose of the meeting, at Offutt air force base,
only became known after a draft agenda was leaked earlier this
year, which included discussions on a new generation of low-yield
"mini-nukes", "bunker-buster" bombs for
possible use against rogue states or organizations armed with
nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
The session will also debate whether development of the
weapons will require the White House to end the US moratorium
on nuclear testing declared in 1992.
Major Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, said: "We
need to change our nuclear strategy from the cold war to one
that can deal with emerging threats."
He said the administration remained committed to the
test moratorium (the US has not ratified the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty, but has pledged to observe it). But he said: "The
meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy
of the [nuclear] stockpile."
While insisting that it has no plans to resume testing,
the administration has asked Congress for funds for a project
that would cut down the amount of time it would take for the
cold war-era test site in Nevada to start functioning again.
Yesterday, a steady stream of men in summer suits and
uniforms arrived at Omaha airport, to be met by welcoming parties
of air force officers and taken to the Offutt base, 10 miles
to the south in the small town of Bellevue.
The lushly-landscaped base, where the gray shell of a
B-52 bomber has been mounted behind a screen of fruit trees,
sits atop a labyrinth of high-tech bunkers from where strategic
command is poised, 24 hours a day, to fight a nuclear war. It
inspired the setting for the 1964 film Dr Strangelove. It is
where President George Bush was flown on September 11 2001,
when it was thought that the terrorist attacks could be part
of a sustained onslaught on the US.
The place and time of the Offutt meeting is infused with
apparently unintended historical irony. The visitors arrived
on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and the last will
be leaving on Saturday, the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki.
The B-29 planes which dropped those nuclear bombs, Enola Gay
and Bock's Car, were both built at Offutt.
The use of those weapons marked the beginning of the
cold war and the first nuclear age. Today's meeting, many observers
believe, could mark the start of a second.
"This is a confab of Dr Strangeloves," said
Daryl Kimball, head of the Arms Control Association, a national
non-partisan membership organization dedicated to working for
arms control.
"The fact that the Pentagon is barring the public
and congressional staff from this key meeting on US nuclear
weapons policy suggests that the administration seeks to discuss
and deliberate on its policies largely in secret."
The uncanny echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not
go unnoticed by a handful of Catholic protesters from Iowa who
have gathered at Offutt to mark the anniversaries for the past
25 years.
Blasphemy
Father Frank Cordaro, the leader of the protest group,
said: "This is an American blasphemy to life and to God.
They are going to violate another treaty by developing small
nuclear weapons. We had made the promise not to do these weapons,
but this sole superpower is just ignoring the non-proliferation
treaty. That's madness."
Today's meeting traces its origins to a report by the
National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) published in January
2001 as the Bush administration took office. The report argued
for a "smaller, more efficient, arsenal" of specialized
weapons. Some deeply buried targets, it argued, could only be
destroyed by "one or more nuclear weapons". Only by
developing these new weapons could the US maintain its deterrent,
it said.
Paul Robinson, the head of the Sandia weapons laboratory,
who is attending the Offutt meeting, believes that America's
new adversaries would be more successfully deterred if the line
between conventional and nuclear weapons was blurred.
Senior jobs
He argued in a recent commentary in the Albuquerque Tribune
that "military strategy is evolving to consider combinations
of conventional and/or nuclear attacks for pre-emption or retaliation."
Many of the NIPP report's authors went on to take senior
positions in the administration, including Linton Brooks, head
of the national nuclear security administration which oversees
new weapons projects, Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security
adviser, and Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for
intelligence.
The report became the basis for the administration's
Nuclear Posture Review in late 2001 which contemplated the use
of nuclear weapons pre-emptively against rogue states, to destroy
stockpiles of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
The officials involved in compiling both documents will
play a prominent role at Offutt, but scientists and officials
with dissenting views have not been invited.
"I was specifically told I couldn't come,"
a congressional weapons expert said.
Greg Mello, the head of the Los Alamos Study Group, a
watchdog organization, said: "There will be tons of contractors
there from the weapons labs and the weapons plants. Contractors
can come, but Congress can't."
The Pentagon insists that today's meeting is technical
rather than policy-making, but critics are concerned that it
is being used to build up momentum behind the development of
the weapons, despite opposition from Congress.
"I'm suspicious that further down the road, they're
going to say 'this was decided at Offutt', or 'this comes out
of the recommendations at Offutt', a congressional staff member
said.
|