Forward Observer: Penetrating Debate

President Bush's new request for money to study building a nuclear weapon that could penetrate the earth to kill enemy commanders in their bunkers deep underground is already politically radioactive within four congressional committees and will soon mushroom into a wider debate.

Bush and company contend the nukes should at least be looked at as a way of destroying enemy command posts and ammunition storage dumps buried so deep that nothing now in the arsenal can reach them. Opponents counter that pursuit of a nuclear bunker buster, even without a commitment to build one, would give other nations an excuse to leap over the firebreak separating conventional and nuclear weapons -- a leap that would endanger everyone on the planet, given the administration's recent admission that any nuke exploding underground would hurl deadly radioactive fallout into the air above.

Congress, during last-minute wheeling and dealing last year, struck out the study money Bush wanted for the nuclear bunker buster, formally called RNEP for Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. Bush gained political strength in Congress in the last election, but he has lost some significant debating points because his own expert on the bunker buster has just acknowledged there is no way to keep its fallout sealed inside the earth.

The first big effort in this Congress to deny Bush the $8.5 million bunker buster money in his fiscal 2006 budget request --$4 million in study money for the Energy Department and $4.5 million for testing RNEP for the Air Force -- is a letter now circulating through the House for signatures. Among the drafters are Democratic lawmakers on committees that will have the first crack at the bunker buster money, including Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts from the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Ellen Tauscher of California from the Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington from the Appropriations Committee.

It is signed by more than 60 lawmakers so far and is addressed to the chairmen and ranking members of the House Armed Services and Appropriations committees. The letter, obtained by CongressDaily, urges the panels to eliminate Pentagon funding for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and other new nuclear weapons.

"The United States faces a serious national security threat from the proliferation of nuclear weapons materials and technologies, most notably in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran," the lawmakers write. "We believe that the pursuit of new nuclear weapons such as RNEP sends a dangerously mixed signal to the rest of the world and erodes our non-proliferation credibility."

Tauscher, whose amendment to strike RNEP money from the Pentagon budget last year failed, 214-204, said in an interview she is not against giving the president a new weapon that would hold deep underground facilities at risk, but believes the mission could be accomplished with conventional explosives. It was Tauscher who drew the recent admission from Linton Brooks, Bush's administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration within the Energy Department, that no nuclear bunker buster could be made to keep fallout within the earth.

"I really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in the administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fallout," Brooks told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee early this month. "I don't believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true. This is a nuclear weapon that is going to be hugely destructive over a large area" if it goes off underground.

Brooks added: "No sane person would use a weapon like that lightly. The administration believes, and I personally believe, that this study should continue. But I do want to make it clear that any thought of [developing any] sort of nuclear weapons that aren't really destructive is just nuts."

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, said in an interview that while he will assist fellow House Democrats in trying to nip the nuclear bunker buster in the bud this year, "it's going to take a member of the majority party to stop it." The Republican with the power and conviction to do that, he said, is House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman David Hobson, R-Ohio.

Hobson led the successful fight to delete bunker buster money last year and still sees no need for the weapon. He told the Arms Control Association last month that "neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of Energy has ever articulated to me a specific military requirement for a nuclear earth penetrator."

Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who sits on the Armed Services Committee, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Appropriations Committee, also have the bunker buster in their sights.

Against that backdrop, Brooks, the president's point man on the issue, said he thinks "that the world's only superpower would be ill advised to be in a position where there is something that we can't hold at risk somehow, because I think that weakens deterrence. But that's the debate we need to have."

That debate soon will be in full swing.