Enola Gay: Burnt flesh and other magnificent technological achievements

"Stephen Harding" wrote in message
...
Emmanuel.Gustin wrote:
Stephen Harding wrote:

snip


The Bush nuclear policy is not defensible, not on moral
grounds and not on grounds of self-interest. It is a prime
example of ideology-driven boneheadedness.

I'm not up on the details of current Bush nuclear thinking. I
feel any "expansion" of the possible use of nuclear weaponry is
generally not a good thing. There may be tactical value in their
use, e.g. as "bunker busters" going after Bin Laden in the caves
of eastern Afghanistan, but the political baggage of their use
makes it not worth it IMO.

Best to leave nukes in the "too terrible to use" category of last
ditch national defense, although humanity is almost certainly
doomed to experience their use by *someone* at *some* time again.

I just hope it will not be the US that uses them for a third time.

I am not sure that Mr. Gustin has accurately portrayed the situation vis a
vis the research into the feasibility and usefullness of the potential new
small nuclear weapons. From what I have read, the impetus behind this
research is to investigate their potential for use in a rather small niche,
which you accurately indicated is the destruction of very deep/hard critical
targets, especially those related to WMD's. Some claim that it is going to
be possible to develop a weapon that could be used against such targets with
relatively little collateral damage--relative, that is, to the alternatives.
These a (a) strike with a non-nuclear penetrator, which may or may not be
successful, and even if it is may result in significant downwind
contamination (it would not be able to neutralize chemical agents, for
example); (b) conventional ground attack to seize the objective, again with
the potential of significant downwind contamination, not to mention the
attendant casualties accompanying the combat operations. A small nuclear
weapon *may* offer an alternative to these options that eliminates the
potential of downwind contamination while also ensuring that the strike
accomplishes its primary objective of destroying the target. Granted, that
is a big "may"--which is why the R&D effort is required, to determine the
feasibility of the option in the first place. Lest anyone think that such an
R&D effort is a concrete committment to production and deployment of such
weapons, they should be reminded that the US has conducted numerous R&D
efforts that never resulted in weapons deployment.

As to the relationship between this new effort and Hiroshima/Nagasaki--there
is none. For gosh sakes, if we wanted to go out and start hurling nukes
around at targets willy-nilly, we could do so right now--we already maintain
weapons that have selectable yields as low as point-three kilotons,
according to the Nuclear Weapons Archive. How many of them have we used in
anger? How many cities have we nuked post-1945? None.

Brooks



SMH