Modernized B61 Bomb Lowers Nuclear Threshold

The new capabilities of the modernized B61-12 nuclear bomb have been getting a lot of press lately, particularly since the first drop test of the bomb (without nuclear explosive package) on July 1. Revealnews.org, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, posted a long investigative report which makes the case that the new capabilities that are being integrated into the B61-12 actually risk lowering the nuclear threshold.

The first part of the report argues that the genesis of the B61-12 project was a deal that President Obama made with Senate Republicans to get Senate ratification of the New START treaty. It also describes a cozy relationship between the weapons labs, the contractors that manage them, and Congress, especially the Congressional delegation from New Mexico, where the Sandia and Los Alamos labs are located. In combination, all of this means hundreds of billions of dollars going to the labs to build weapons that Obama said, in his 2009 Prague speech, he wanted to rid the world of. In 2010, Obama agreed to commit $85 billion in nuclear weapons modernization over a decade in order to get Republican support for New START, but that price tag has since gone up to an estimated $348 billion over ten years. The B61-12 program accounts for $10.4 billion of that, and is the largest project currently underway at Sandia, accounting for a third of its budget, this year.

The report concludes with the military dimensions of the new weapon, including points that people like MIT professor Theodore Postol and the Federation of American Scientists’ Hans Kristensen have been making about it, that because of its design, it will have the effect of lowering the nuclear threshold:

The Obama Administration and the Defense and Energy Departments claim that the B61-12 is not a new weapon, only an upgraded version of an old weapon and therefore, it doesn’t violate any commitments about nuclear weapons that the U.S. has made over the past couple of decades. “The tail kit provides the ability to get more accuracy,” says Sandia engineer Phil Hoover, who is charged with integrating the tail kit and other new components into the bomb. “We’re reducing the potential for collateral damage.” This kind of guided system, he continued, is “consistent with our digital aircraft today.”

The “digital aircraft” that Hoover is referring to is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will replace older aircraft not only in the U.S. Air Force, but also in the air forces of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey—NATO countries that are part of NATO’s nuclear mission.

“If the Russians put out a guided nuclear bomb on a stealthy fighter that could sneak through air defenses, would that add to the perception here that they were lowering the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons?” asked Kristensen. “Absolutely.”