Study says earth-penetrating nuclear weapons could kill more than a million people

WASHINGTON - Earth-penetrating nuclear weapons can destroy hard-to-reach underground facilities but could also kill more than a million people on the surface if used in heavily populated areas, an official US study has concluded.
The congressionally-mandated study comes as US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is pressing Congress for 8.5 million dollars to study the feasibility of designing nuclear weapons casings hard enough to bore through rocket and concrete before detonating.
Conducted by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the study found that earth-penetrating nuclear weapons could effectively destroy deeply buried bunkers with a smaller bang than nuclear weapons detonated on the surface.
But said John Ahearne, head of the committee that produced the report, "Using an earth-penetrating weapon to destroy a target 250 meters deep -- the typical depth for most underground facilities -- potentially could kill a devastatingly large number of people."
Many of the more important strategic hard and deeply buried targets are beyond the reach of conventional weapons and can only be held at risk with nuclear weapons, the report said.
Earth-penetrating weapons are being considered because they can destroy facilities deep underground using up to 25 times less energy than a nuclear weapon detonated on the surface, according to the report.
But they cannot be detonated deeply enough to avoid mass casualties on the surface, according to the study.
"For attacks near or in densely populated urban areas using nuclear earth-penetrator weapons on hard and deeply buried targets (HDBTs), the number of casualties can range from thousands to more than a million, depending primarily on weapon yield," the report said.
"For attacks on HDBTs in remote, lightly populated areas, casualties can range from as few as hundreds at low weapon yields to hundreds of thousands at high yields and with unfavorable winds," it said.
Destroying a bunker buried 200 feet (roughly 70 m) underground would require a 300-kiloton earth-penetrating weapon. But a one-megaton weapon would be needed to destroy a target 300 feet (100 m) down, the study said.

04/28/2005 16:06 GMT