MILITARY BOONDOGGLES Reed raps Bush's pursuit of new nukes By Steven Stycos

The United States is researching new nuclear weapons, despite the efforts of US Senator Jack Reed. "We spent 50 years trying to raise the threshold [for using nuclear weapons]," Reed laments during a telephone interview, "and now thinkingly, and in some cases, I think unthinkingly, we’re beginning to lower the threshold."

Uniformed military leaders are not pushing the new weapons, relates Reed, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. With the increasing precision of guided missiles and bombs, Reed says, they see little need for them.

But Bush administration figures, like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Frec Celec, deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters, want new nuclear weapons for "ideology and politics," Reed says. They argue there should be no restraints on US-held weapons, the senator relates, and believe "the long time right-wing critique that arms control doesn’t work."

While he agrees that arms control does not always work, Reed sees great danger in Bush’s policy: Once a new breed of nuclear weapons is developed, others will copy the technology. It is also hard to convince volatile countries like India and Pakistan not to develop new nuclear weapons, Reed notes, when the US is pushing forward. For these reasons, Reed concludes, the American people will not be more secure if the US develops new nuclear weapons.

Reed has succeeded in slowing the rush for new atomic bombs. Last year, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, he convinced the Senate to kill funding for the robust nuclear penetrator, also known as the "bunker buster." The weapon would attach a conventional nuclear warhead to a burrowing device to blow up underground bunkers. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, however, endorsed the new weapon. A compromise that became law permits research on the bunker buster, but requires Congressional approval for development.

This year, the Bush administration pushed to repeal the 10-year ban on new nuclear weapons to research and build low-yield nuclear weapons. The small atomic weapons of five kilotons or less could blow up underground bunkers or aboveground targets. "When the administration talks about low-yield weapons," Reed commented in a press release, "the American people should hear ‘small apocalypse’ " And he adds, "There’s absolutely no military requirement," for small nuclear bombs.

But with the Republicans having won control of the US Senate last fall, Reed no longer chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee, and Bush got what he wanted from the Armed Services Committee in late May. A floor amendment to maintain the new weapon ban failed, on 43-51 vote. Both Reed and Senator Lincoln Chafee voted to keep the ban.

The next day, Reed proposed a weaker amendment to allow research, while barring development of low-yield nuclear weapons without Congressional approval. Reed’s amendment passed 96-0. "My desire would be to maintain the ban on new nuclear weapons," he explained in a press release, "but this amendment at least limits their ability to develop them."

If the Democrats controlled Congress, Reed theorizes, neither the bunker buster, nor the low-yield nuclear weapon, would have received any funding.