Bunker-Busting Bomb Prompts U.S. Discord: Upgraded Nuclear Capability May Prompt Russian Concern

Defense News — February 24-March 2, 1997

By Jeff Erlich — Defense News Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — The United States is ready to deploy a bunker-busting nuclear weapon that arms control watchdogs say is the first new bomb developed by the Department of Energy since the end of the Cold War.

The bomb, call the B61-11, is designed to strike command bunkers buried hundreds of meters below the ground and other deeply buried targets.

U.S. officials maintain the device simply is an existing B61 nuclear bomb is a new carrying case. "All we've done is put the components into a case-hardened steel shell that has the capability of burrowing quite a ways underground, through frozen tundra, though significant layers of concrete," Air Force Gen. Eugene Habiger, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in a Jan. 28 interview at his Offut Air Force Base, Neb., headquarters.

The conversion involved a new tail kit and nose cone for the bomb, an official with the Energy Department, which oversees nuclear weapons, said Feb. 18. "This is not new, in any way, shape or form," the Energy official said.

The bomb is needed, U.S. officials said, to replace the B53 bomb, which nuclear war planners use to target deeply buried Russian command and control facilities.

But independent arms control advocates said the B61-11 provided something new, or else why deploy it?" asks the Los Alamos (N.M.) Study Group, in a Feb. 10 paper, "B61-11 Concerns and Background."

New or not, Bill Arkin, an arms control consultant based in Pomfret, Vt., said developing a bomb to destroy buried Russian command and control facilities could be destabilizing. "What that signals to the Russians is far more detrimental than any gains it makes to deterrence," Arkin said Feb. 18.

By achieving what Habinger calls a "shock-coupling effect," the bomb directs the bulk of its energy downward, destroying everything buried beneath it to a depth of several hundred meters. Prior to its development, which was completed in December, the best earth-penetrating nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal was the B53, with a force equal to 9 million tons of TNT, which penetrates the earth by creating a massive crater, rather than the more precise blow the B61-11 is meant to deliver.

But the B53 cannot be carried by the B-2 bomber, and offers less assurance that it will destroy its target than does the B61-11, Arkin said.

The B61-11, which can be carried by a B-2, can produce explosions ranging from 300 tons of TNT to more than 300,000 tons, and therefore could be more appropriate for use against targets like Tarhunah, Libya, according to Bruce Hall of the international environmental group Greenpeace. According to U.S. officials, Tarhunah was the site of an underground Libyan chemical weapon plant under construction until late last year.

Bolstering the view that B61-11 was developed for non-nuclear targets are documents obtained from the Department of Energy under the Freedom of Information Act, Hall said Feb. 14 from his office here. These include a Dec. 18, 1995, letter from Thomas Seitz, acting deputy assistant secretary of energy for military application and stockpile support, to Harold Smith, then assistant to the defense secretary for atomic energy.

In this letter, Seitz said Energy Department officials were accelerating production of the B61-11 conversion kits to provide them "as soon as possible." Hall said the call for an accelerated schedule points to the U.S. officials considering its use against Tarhunah.

In the spring of 1996, Pentagon officials first said they were weighing the option of destroying Tarhunah with a nuclear blast, then later retracted this statement.