Pentagon Considers New Weapons
Homeland Defense E-Alerts
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ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the Pentagon looks for ways to neutralize chemical or biological weapons underground, it is considering development of a warhead that would surround them with a hard or sticky foam rather than blow them up.
Another possibility is a non-exploding warhead that spreads flammable materials to incinerate biological agents.
Both approaches are still on the drawing board. They would be alternatives to conventional high-explosive warheads, which might allow contaminants to escape, threatening civilians or U.S. troops.
``It's not as simple as blowing it up,'' said Stephen Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon office charged with assessing and countering weapons of mass destruction.
David Wright, a weapons expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he had not heard of the concept of attacking chemical or biological agents with foams or flammable materials. He said, however, that it seemed questionable whether such warheads could penetrate far enough into buried facilities.
In an interview Wednesday with a group of reporters, Younger said that if a facility containing the chemical or biological agents was large enough that U.S. commanders decided it had to be destroyed rather than temporarily neutralized, then a deep-penetrating nuclear weapon might be used.
The Pentagon has asked Congress for $15 million in its 2003 budget to study such a weapon, called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. It would burrow into the earth and detonate, transmitting a large fraction of the energy from the nuclear explosion to the ground. That would create a strong seismic shock wave that could destroy or damage the buried target, experts say. Critics, however, argue that use of such a weapon would create an intense and deadly radioactive fallout.
The question of how to neutralize or destroy bunkers containing chemical, biological or nuclear materials has gained urgency as the Bush administration contemplates the possibility of using military force to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was actively developing nuclear weapons and possessed chemical and biological agents that could be used as weapons.
Younger said that although the United States does not know what kinds of weapons Saddam may have developed since United Nations inspections ended in 1998, it is a ``reasonable assumption'' based on his track record that the Iraqi leader either has or is pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq claims it has no weapons of mass destruction.
The United States also is concerned about the pursuit of chemical and biological weapons by other countries, such as North Korea and Iran. President Bush has said those countries might provide such weapons to al-Qaida or other terrorist organizations for use against the United States.
The Pentagon is contemplating other unpleasant scenarios that could emerge in Iraq or elsewhere, Younger said.
One possibility: a U.S. satellite detects a Scud ballistic missile, possibly armed with biological agents, being readied for launch. What could the United States do to stop it if there were no U.S. strike aircraft nearby and ready?
In the future, an answer might be to strike with a non-nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile, which has the advantage of very high speed. For now, all of the United States' ICBMs on land and at sea are armed with nuclear warheads. To switch some to non-nuclear roles would create political issues; launching one in a crisis would raise fears in Moscow and elsewhere that a nuclear war was under way.
Younger's agency also is working on other kinds of advanced non-nuclear weapons. He said experiments have been done on arming a Hellfire air-to-ground missile with a thermobaric warhead, which ignites an explosive mist which sends a powerful shock wave through a cave or tunnel, annihilating everything and everyone inside.
Such a weapon is likely to be ready for use ``in fairly short order,'' Younger said without being more specific.
At least one thermobaric weapon was used by the Air Force in Afghanistan, but it has never been developed in a warhead small enough to fit onto a Hellfire missile. Although the Hellfire normally is launched from a helicopter, some have been fired in Afghanistan from Predator unmanned drones.
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