LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – Nearly six decades after American scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer detonated the world’s first nuclear device in the White Sands desert south of here, the United States has come to another important turning point in its long relationship with nuclear arms.

Congress this session will take up the question of whether the United States should continue its post-Cold War policy of lowering its military nuclear profile or instead embrace a new Bush administration program to research and develop a family of tactical nuclear weapons intended for use against terrorist enclaves and rogue nations.

The Bush plan initially was expected to sail through the Republican-controlled Congress, but it has foundered at least temporarily because of bipartisan opposition on a key appropriations subcommittee headed by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio.

“What worries me most about the robust penetrator,” Hobson said at a recent National Academy of Sciences symposium, referring to one of the weapons under consideration, “is that some idiot might try to use it.”

In marked contrast to its Senate counterpart, led by nuclear arms champion Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., Hobson’s subcommittee has eliminated all funding for Bush’s new nuclear arms program as proposed in an Energy Department spending bill.

The Bush White House wants Congress to appropriate $27.6 million for the “robust nuclear earth penetrator” or “bunker buster” bomb in the new fiscal year, along with $9 million for tactical nuclear weapons research and $30 million to prepare for resumption of atomic testing. The fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

Congressional authorization for these programs was approved by the House and Senate. But because the Department of Energy runs the nuclear weapons programs, the spending bills securing the money must go through the two energy appropriations subcommittees instead of the more hawkish defense appropriations subcommittees.

The Senate subcommittee approved the funding. But in the House, Hobson’s panel eliminated funding for the new weapons, instead increasing money for dismantling of nuclear weapons and nuclear lab security. Now a conference committee must try to work out a compromise.

Among the proposed devices would be “advanced concept” nuclear weaponry that could include lower-yield, tactical nuclear munitions such as those the United States once stockpiled in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Tactical nuclear weapons are short-range, have less fallout and are intended for battlefield use, as opposed to the mass destruction of “strategic” missile warheads deployed essentially as deterrents to enemy nuclear attack.

Among the most controversial of the weapons contemplated is the bunker buster, which could be used against suspected underground enemy weapons labs or the subterranean redoubts of terrorists and rogue dictators.

The administration argues that the funding is needed to determine whether such weapons would be feasible and to provide this president or his successors with new options for confronting threats. For now, the money would be only for research, the administration says.

“We’re not going to restart the arms race,” said Linton Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs U.S. nuclear weapons programs. “We’re not going to resume nuclear testing. We’re not going to develop any new missiles.”

But critics fear that the weapons’ relatively limited radioactive fallout, coupled with the “pre-emptive war” doctrine adopted by the Bush administration, might invite the first hostile use of nuclear weapons since atom bombs were dropped on Japan in 1945.

Opponents also assert that U.S. development of new nuclear weapons would prompt other nations to do the same, provoking a new arms race at a time when the United States is urging North Korea and Iran to halt their nuclear programs.

“The international credibility of the U.S. is already in tatters,” said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass. “Now the Bush administration wants to continue pursuing new kinds of nuclear weapons like the nuclear bunker buster while simultaneously telling other countries not to. That’s like preaching temperance from a bar stool.”

During a recent visit to the United States, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov voiced similar concerns.

“We are pretty well aware of those plans, and we sometimes discuss those plans during frank discussions with members of the Pentagon,” Ivanov said. “We take those plans with a high degree of caution and prudence. This could be a case of letting the genie out of the bottle.”

But Brooks, the National Nuclear Security Administration chief, said the money at this point would fund nothing more deadly than preliminary studies. He decried “unfortunate rhetoric – some on the Hill and some elsewhere – that suggests this is some bad new nuclear arms race, some effort to lower the nuclear threshold.”

At a recent briefing, Brooks said he expects presidents to take nuclear warfare seriously no matter what the weapon.

“I think that crossing the nuclear threshold remains one of the most awesome decisions any president will ever make, and I don’t know that anything we’re doing will make that any easier a decision,” he said. “What we’re doing is trying to preserve options, that if a future president decides we need some capability to deter, we’ll have the technical wherewithal to do it.”

Markey and others counter that the White House’s five-year spending plans for the bunker buster call for funding of nearly half a billion dollars – enough to carry the weapon into the development stage.

Brooks painted a picture of the weapon as potentially playing a vital part in deterrence.

“We want, in some hypothetical future confrontation with a hypothetical generic dictator, to make it absolutely clear that he doesn’t have an invulnerable sanctuary,” Brooks said. “We can take this energy (the robust nuclear earth penetrator) and hole it. … We can do it while minimizing, not eliminating, collateral damage, and therefore you should not believe you have any sanctuary.”

At their peak, the United States and Soviet Union each had more than 30,000 warheads, but both stockpiles have declined significantly, starting in 1965.

According to Joseph Martz, deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Applied Physics (X) Division, the exact number of currently deployed American warheads is classified, but the official estimate is 1,700 to 2,200.

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The Los Alamos lab controls about 80 percent of the U.S. stockpile, which contains a mix of seven types of bombs and missile warheads belonging to the Air Force and the Navy.

“We had 27 different deployed systems in the 1970s,” Martz said.

Relatively low-radiation tactical nuclear weapons are nothing new. The United States for years depended on the “Atomic Annie” or “Atomic Cannon” – 155 mm howitzers and long-range 8-inch field guns equipped with shells containing nuclear warheads – as a deterrent and last-ditch defensive weapon against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.

But U.S. stockpiles of atomic artillery shells were ordered destroyed by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, and the last one was dismantled last year. The Davy Crockett missile, an atomic weapon launched from a Jeep, also has been discontinued.

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Plans call for conversion of the B-61 nuclear gravity bomb for use as a “bunker-busting” penetrator. Brooks describes this not as creating a new nuclear weapon but as providing an existing weapon with a new capability.

The penetrator has sparked controversy not only because of fears that it could be misused or trigger a new arms race but also because it is not clear how effective it would be. According to a report by the Congressional Research Service, even high-yield nuclear weapons might not work against a deeply buried, hardened bunker.

And as critics point out, low-yield tactical weapons produce some radioactive fallout. A U.S. nuclear attack on an enemy bunker situated near a populated area could cause a tremendous number of casualties.

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In a report from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, Princeton University physicist Robert Nelson warned: “A 1 kiloton earth-penetrating “mini-nuke’ used in a typical Third World urban environment (such as Baghdad) would spread a lethal dose of radioactive fallout over several square kilometers, resulting in tens of thousands of civilian fatalities.”

Tactical nuclear weapons have a destructive power ranging from .1 kiloton, the equivalent of 100 tons of TNT, to 1 megaton, or 1 million tons of TNT. The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a force roughly equivalent to 12,000 tons of TNT.

Tactical nuclear weapons are not covered by any nuclear arms treaty. The United States began eliminating such weapons under the first President Bush, and the Soviet Union followed.

The plan now advanced by the White House would remove a congressionally imposed 1993 ban on research into new tactical nuclear weapons.

Underground testing of nuclear weapons was halted more than a decade ago; the Bush plan also calls for an increased readiness program that would permit the United States to restart nuclear testing within 18 months.

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(c) 2004, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-09-13-04 0622EDT