Several readers have mentioned a piece that Bridge Colby and I wrote in The Diplomat (“How To Worry Kim Jong Il”) arguing that the Obama Administration should seriously consider modifying the B83 to hold at risk certain targets in North Korea.
After receiving a number of angry emails (and few thoughtful criticisms from good friends), I went back to reread the piece Bridge and I wrote. Allow me to make two observations: First, some people are over-reacting. Second, people are holding us to a higher standard than the one to which they hold the Obama Administration. That’s interesting.
It is difficult to write about a piece written with a co-author. One doesn’t want to speak for a co-author or revisit agreed language. In this case, however, the fact of my support for a modified B83 has drawn as much attention as the arguments themselves. So let me make a few arguments, while being clear that I am speaking for myself.
Revisting RNEP
Let’s take the politics out of this for a moment. Many people ask how our proposal differs from the Bush Administration’s Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), which seems to me to be a deliberate attempt to put politics in the center of the discussion. But fine, let’s say this is just like RNEP. Now, take poor old George W. Bush, preemption, his war against Iraq and everything else you don’t like about him out of the debate. What was RNEP?
RNEP was a study to see if one of two weapons, the B83 and the B61, could be modified to penetrate into hard rock. The RNEP study considered changes that might make the bomb casing stronger, lengthen the casing, or change the configuration of ballast. Changes to the Arming, Fusing, and Firing (AF&F) system were permitted; changes to the physics package were only permitted if they did not require underground nuclear testing for certification.
The changes in the existing B61 or B83 envisioned by RNEP were not nearly as dramatic as those envisioned for the WR1 — the Bush Administration’s Reliable Replacement Warhead design, which the Obama Administration has stated is not “new” under the definition in the Nuclear Posture Review — or any number of ongoing Obama Administration Lifetime Extension Programs including the B61 LEP and the common replacement for the W78/W88, none of which have resulted in outraged editorials about “new” nuclear weapons.
The RNEP debate in 2005 centered on a sled test, in which something like a B83 Joint Test Assembly would be slammed horizontally into hard rock. The Bush Administration hoped this would provide enough data to determine whether the concept was feasible.
I keep saying: If you object to this proposal on the grounds that it is new, then you have a problem with the definition of new nuclear weapons in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review. Take it up with Barack. If, on the other hand, you believe that the definition of “new” nuclear weapons is the correct one and should be emulated by other countries, then you have no grounds to object to the modification of an existing warhead to meet an existing military requirement without resort to testing.
A Deterrent Benefit
I don’t think Bridge and I argued that conducting a sled-test would solve all our woes with North Korea. I do think, however, that there is some deterrent benefit to being able to hold at risk Kim Jong Il’s leadership facilities and nuclear forces, some of which are likely located in hard and deeply buried facilities immune to conventional attack. Or, to be more precise, I believe deterrence suffers some difficult-to-measure harm from not being able to hold those targets at risk and that steps to remedy that gap may be more reassuring to South Korea than other proposals, such as the deployment of fighter-delivered tactical nuclear weapons that Gary Samore mentioned.
There are, of course, limits to benefits from nuclear earth penetrators. As David Wright has noted, we don’t even know if the modifications we propose would do the trick. The sled test, for instance, might well demonstrate that a B83 simply can’t be made to penetrate into hard rock. In that case, of course, there would be no sense in proceeding. Or perhaps the necessary modifications would be so great as to require a nuclear test. I would not proceed in that case, as the op-ed makes clear. But it seems very difficult to argue that we shouldn’t even conduct the sled test that would answer these questions. Perhaps, after all, a new casing would be feasible.
Extreme Circumstances
Another colleague angrily asked how we omitted any mention of fallout. Here I observe that my coauthor is more constrained in what he can and should say about yield and other technical characteristics of nuclear weapons. I would note that Linton Brooks, when asked “Is there any way an RNEP of any size that we would drop will not produce a huge amount of radioactive debris?” answered “No, there’s not. … I really must apologize … if we in the [Bush] administration have suggested that it was possible to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all fallout. … I don’t believe the laws of physics will ever let that be true.” I don’t see any reason to disagree with Linton’s statement about the terrible effects of using a megaton-class weapon against a target that would likely be located in or around an urban area. Nor do I see any reason to doubt David Wright’s observation that “the enormous amount of radioactive fallout a B83 earth-penetrator would create” would make it difficult to use such a weapon. We were quite explicit in stating that such a weapon would not be more usable than other nuclear weapons and that, given the obvious constraints on using any nuclear weapon, “the United States should make clear that it would also invest heavily in conventional penetrators and functional defeat approaches that would provide the president with credible, indeed more desirable, non-nuclear options for holding at risk targets in hard rock.”
But stating that a nuclear weapon might only be useful in the most extreme circumstances, the standard set in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, is not quite the same thing as saying it would never be useful or that the option would have no value at all. Of course it is hard to put a precise value on such a capability, but we attempted to balance the value of such a capability with nonproliferation concerns by eschewing both nuclear explosive testing and “new” designs as prohibited by Administration policy. If this Administration is seriously contemplating the deployment of B61s to South Korea, I think the balance we struck looks even less Strangelovian.
In Conclusion
There are other important arguments, but I’ve gone on at some length already. We can continue the debate in the comments and maybe even a second post. Of course, reasonable people might disagree with our judgment about the balance of deterrence and nonproliferation goals. I know some of my colleagues on this blog do. (Hey, we’re not Pravda, after all.)
I want close with what I think is a paradox. It sometimes seems to me that the only ethical justification for using a nuclear weapon would be in response to a nuclear attack and against a target was both essential and not vulnerable to any other type of weapon. (Perhaps you disagree on grounds that it is not the only justification; surely then it is the best.) If I try to imagine what sort of target that might be, only hard and deeply buried targets — targets such as a bunker housing a Kim Jong Il who has ordered the use of nuclear weapons or one sheltering his remaining nuclear forces — come to mind. Perhaps all nuclear weapons, then, are objectionable. That’s certainly a reasonable thing to believe. But if we admit the need for nuclear deterrence that in any way, shape or form isn’t pure city-busting, isn’t an earth-penetrating B83, the most controversial of all nuclear weapons, really the least objectionable?