Like an idiot, I read the newspaper. These two quotes in particular, both found on page A11 of the 17 Sep 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I feel compelled to share with you. First, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, opines:

The idea of being able to use a redesigned nuclear weapon to keep a terrorist from hitting us with a nuclear weapon is something we've got to come to grips with because it's part of the war on terrorism."

Presumable he's speaking of the money the White House and Pentagon want to develop new "bunker-buster nukes." These are small nuclear warheads that can be put on earth-penetrating weapons in order to destroy underground facilities. There are several drawbacks to this research.First, we continue to undermine our position on global disarmament if we spend more money on our own nuclear weapons. Some may argue that "evil" countries like Iran and North Korea won't stop just because we stop, and that is probably true, but it's probably also true that when we build more nukes, they feel threatened and build more nukes. The disparity in our responses to Iraq (no nukes, no threat, easy victory, hence we invaded) and North Korea (nukes, real threat, no prospect of genuine victory, hence we try to pay them off while pretending not to be paying them off, even though that's really the best strategy for the world to pursue, because that was Clinton's strategy and therefore inherently evil and wrong) make it pretty clear to everybody in the world that the only hard deterrent to a US invasion of your country is to possess nuclear weapons.

Notwithstanding the "evil" countries, plenty of other countries, such as the Ukraine, have foregone nuclear weapons, probably because most Ukranians aren't insane. If we want to be safe in this world, we need for most people to be not insane and not provoked to do insane things. US nuclear weapons development provokes people, and could make not-directly-threatening countries continue to develop things, which can then get stolen, sold, or re-purposed after a revolution.

Notwithstanding this political arguments against renewed nuclear research, there's the slight problem that "bunker-buster" nukes can't actually work, as proven by the laws of physics. In brief, a bunker-buster is meant to kill people who are hundreds of feet underground, where any other method of attack would amount to doing an excavation project while under fire from hard cover- ie, many dead people on both sides. First, you drop a bomb on the enemy's dirt or concrete roof. Powered by gravity and being pointy and dense, the bomb digs though the earth. Then a small nuclear warhead detonates, making a crater. The current research involves making better bombs and making warheads that can endure the trip and still detonate.

First problem: radioactive waste. Proponents argue that there won't be any outside the bunker, because the warhead detonates underground. Setting aside groundwater contamination issues, there's the slight problem of the hole that the bomb made, a tunnel which points right up to the air and out which a fair amount of exploded radioactive stuff will presumably jet. You can poke a straw in a water balloon if you want to see how a pressurized fluid reacts to escape hatches.

Second problem: Getting depth. Since earth is big and heavy and dense, explosions tend to go sideways, not down - path of least resistance. (See previous water balloon experiment.) So craters tend to be much wider than they are deep. This means that nuclear warheads don't actually make deep craters. And it turns out that small warheads, the kind that fit on earth-penetrating bombs, the kind that don't trigger Chernobyl-style fallout disasters, don't make craters deeper than a hundred feet or so. Even when detonated underground, so that there is pressure from above, they mostly explode sideways and up. We know this experimentally - there is a section of the US Southwest with an awful lot of shallow craters, surrounded by fences and mutant plants.

So if the explosion isn't going to get you much depth, you need the bomb to burrow a lot. Unfortunately, the physics of pointy things going into big flat hard things ends up putting a limit of a hundred feet or so on depth. Even if you put a rocket on the back of the bomb, it just won't go much deeper. And while not going much deeper, it will pulverize itself, which is bad for delicate machinery like nuclear warheads.

So with all this together, a bunker-buster nuke, which will provoke hostile governments to build more nukes, encourage neutral ones to develop more, discourage non-proliferation forces, and make it more likely for nuclear weapons to be actually used, thus making it more likely for bigger nuclear weapons to actually be used, will destroy enemy bunkers down to 200 feet or so. This is the power that Graham thinks will somehow keep a terrorist from hitting us with a nuclear weapon. That's right: they won't nuke us, because we'll be able to blow up their shallower caves, if we can find them.

And also I am starting to wonder, how many more years will it be before people will stop ending sentences with "... part of the war on terrorism?" It took a decade or more for people to abandon the war on alcohol, but that may not be a useful data point because my question is linguistic: the 18th Amendment doesn't actually say "war on alcohol"; you don't really hear about the war on poverty any more; we're still talking about the "war on (other) drugs" decades after it became an obvious failure. I'm guessing we get to play "war on terror" for ... 20 more years?

(Look up Ted Postol if you want to read more on bunker busters and why they can't work.)

The second quote I want to share with you needs no analysis; it stands quite well on its own as a statement of monumental idiocy:

I think the real problem is politics. We can manage our forests and we must manage our forests. The truth is, some in the opposition think the forests can take care of themselves (and to) just let them be. -- G.W. Bush