Pentagon end-run around nuke test ban

By Leslie Feinberg, Workers World

“Divine Strake”—the strange name for a scheduled test blast of 700 tons of explosives on Western Shoshone land on June 2—is nothing but a Pentagon end-run around the ban on nuclear weapons testing. It is scheduled at a time when a wing of the U.S. military and political establishment is considering the use of a new generation of tactical nuclear “bunker-bus ters” that they hope can drill far deeper underground into case-hardened facilities.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported in the April 17 edition of the New Yorker magazine that the Pentagon brass are arguing about whether or not to drop such a “bunker-buster” bomb on Iran’s main centrifuge plant at Natanz, some 200 miles south of Tehran.

The Federation of American Scientists announced on April 3 that Divine Strake “was designed to simulate the effects of just such a bomb.”

This use of conventional explosives to test capabilities for a tactical nuclear strike is a mighty rattling of Pentagon sabers. Washington proved its willingness to do the unthinkable when it dropped atomic bombs on the civilian population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the only country to ever detonate these powerful weapons—in an attempt to exert the military, economic and political hegemony of U.S. finance capital over the planet.

Today, as resistance to the imperialist empire mounts—from Baghdad to Caracas, from Pyongyang to Tehran—Washington is seeking to develop even more weapons of mass destruction.

The National Strategic Gaming Center of the National Defense University (NDU) at Fort McNair—which trains senior Pentagon officers—is planning an “exercise” targeting Iran’s nuclear energy capabilities on July 18, six weeks after Divine Strake.

The Divine Strake test blast “could be a move to threaten Iran, North Korea or any other regimes that the United States is not pleased with,” concluded Anatoly Tsi ganok, head of Russia’s Center for Military Forecasting. He added that Divine Strake test could also be regarded as an attempt to demonstrate U.S. military superiority over Russia and China. (Novosti, March 31)

Quarrel over tactics, not strategy

Federal officials and the U.S. corporate media continue to repeat Washington’s assertions that the humongous explosion scheduled for June 2 is not another step towards what would be an illegal renewal of nuclear weapons testing. That’s a hard promise to swallow.

“The test is aimed at determining how well a massive conventional bomb would perform against fortified underground targets,” stated the March 31 Washington Post.

But according to the April 11 Las Vegas Sun, “Critics are scoffing at the Bush administration’s claims” that Divine Strake “is unrelated to the effort to build a nuclear bunker-buster.”

Divine Strake would detonate 700 tons of heavy ammonium nitrate saturated with fuel oil emulsion—the equivalent explosive power of 593 tons of TNT. The test would be the largest controlled conventional blast in military history and the biggest overall weapons test since the Cold War. Its explosion would create a 10,000-foot mushroom cloud and shake the surrounding earth at roughly 3.1 to 3.4 on the Richter scale while gouging a 36-foot-deep crater.

To grasp its sheer destructive capabilities, the resulting explosion would be some 280 times bigger than the one that gutted the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Divine Strake is not a step towards a new conventional weapon. The most gigantic and powerful conventional wea pon in the Pentagon arsenal is MOAB—short for “Massive Ordnance Air Blast”—which weighs in at 21,000 pounds, far less than the 700 tons of explosive material to be gathered together and blown up on June 2. The B-2, with its immense bomb bay, can only carry a weapon of some 40 tons.

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)—a euphemistically named Penta gon combat support agency—openly stated in its budget for the fiscal year 2007 that Divine Strake would “develop a planning tool that will improve the war fighter’s confidence in selecting the smaller proper nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage.”

Then on April 10, DTRA officials did an about-face, claiming that the description about the “smaller proper nuclear yield” has changed. Divine Strake is now only a test for conventional weapons, they maintained.

The disagreement in the Pentagon over what has been characterized as the “Rumsfeld” hard-line strategy is not a dispute between doves and hawks. Both wings of this buzzard are in a dispute over which tactics will be most effective to maintain world hegemony.

Western Shoshone call for resistance

Divine Strake also shows utter contempt and disregard for the Western Shoshone.

The DTRA claims that “No adverse impact on the environment or health of exercise participants or local residents is anticipated.”

The Western Shoshone vehemently disagree. At stake is the land, water and air that sustains them, as well as their sovereignty, self-determination and treaty rights.

Official figures released by the Centers for Disease Control show that at least 15,000 people died as a result of nuclear testing at the same U.S. military site between 1945 and 1992.

With the Pentagon pressing for the June 2 test, the Nevada environmental group Citizen Alert has sent a letter to the departments of Defense and Energy charging that the 700-ton explosion risks spewing surface radioactive contamination from past bomb tests into the air. The blast site is also less than 90 miles northwest of urban Las Vegas.

The U.S. military has conducted 1,050 tests of nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands and in Nevada, Utah, Mississippi and other states since 1945. The last underground test was in 1992; the last atmospheric detonation was in 1963.

Sounding like a Dr. Strangelove, DTRA head James Tegnelia boasted to the French Press Agency March 30, “I don’t want to sound glib here but it is the first time in Nevada that you’ll see a mushroom cloud over Las Vegas since we stopped testing nuclear weapons.” He said that “Divine Strake” would be the “largest single explosive that we could imagine.”

A Western Shoshone delegation traveled to Geneva in March to win support from the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). On March 10, CERD officials publicly called on Washington to “freeze,” “desist” and “stop” the threat to carry out its weapons testing on Western Shoshone land and its attempts to build a high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.

“Our people were forcibly removed from their homes at the Nevada Test Site where the Western Shoshone had lived for thousands of years, without being told that our lands would be used for testing of nuclear weapons,” stated Thomas Was son, chair of the Winnemucca Indian Colony. “After destroying our lands and causing untold death and human misery with their radiation, the U.S. government now wants to do the same thing again. They must be stopped, for the good of the Western Shoshone and all people.” (desertnews.ocm, April 23)

lfeinberg@workers.org