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United States II: Conservatives Outline Need for Low-Yield Warheads Two conservative commentators this week called for the United States to build new “bunker-busting” nuclear weapons to help destroy weapons of mass destruction (see GSN, Aug. 8). In an opinion piece published yesterday in USA Today, former U.S. House Speaker House Newt Gingrich said the United States should develop low-yield nuclear weapons to have the capability to destroy deeply buried WMD facilities. As tunneling technology continues to improve, rogue states such as Iran and North Korea will develop new ways to hide “weapons-of-mass-death” facilities beyond the range of conventional weapons, said Gingrich, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Bunker-busting nuclear weapons would be able to penetrate deep underground to hit and destroy such facilities, he said. Gingrich said existing nuclear warheads could not be used to destroy deep-buried targets. New low-yield weapons could destroy such targets with only a minimum of collateral damage, as opposed to current warheads, he said. In his piece, Gingrich also suggested that new low-yield nuclear warheads would go beyond the deterrence purposes of the current U.S. nuclear arsenal. “This would be a weapon designed to be used,” Gingrich said. “It would not simply be a weapon of deterrence, as current nuclear weapons are,” he added (Newt Gingrich, USA Today/Yahoo!News, Aug. 14). In a commentary released Monday, Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation also advocated developing low-yield nuclear weapons, saying such weapons would be especially effective against biological weapons. While conventional munitions may be able to destroy a biological weapons facility, they also carry the risk of spreading biological agents, Spencer said. A low-yield nuclear weapon would be able to both destroy the facility and incinerate biological agents, preventing their release, he said (see GSN, Aug. 11). Spencer also called on Congress to increase funding for research into new nuclear weapons. He noted the efforts in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to reduce such funding in the fiscal 2004 energy appropriations bill (see GSN, July 17). “The Bush administration has requested essential levels of funding for feasibility studies that would begin to define the role that nuclear weapons should play in the 21st century,” Spencer said. “Congress should meet, or exceed, those funding requests,” he added (Jack Spencer, Heritage Foundation release, Aug. 12).
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