According to the Oakland Tribune (December 11,
2003), Brooks has been busy pressuring the country’s
nuclear labs to ramp up work on new nuclear weapons designs
ever since President Bush signed a bill in November 2003
that repealed a 1993 ban on designing low-yield nuclear
weapons, a goal that had been outlined in the Nuclear
Posture Review. The Tribune reported that in
a leaked memo from Brooks to lab directors, the nuclear
weapons executive wrote: “I expect your design teams
to engage fully with the Department of Defense to examine
advanced (thermonuclear) concepts that could contribute
to our nation’s security. Potentially important
areas of such research include agent defeat [bombs directed
at chemical and bio weapons] and reduced collateral damage.
. . . In addition, we must take advantage of this opportunity
to ensure that we close any gaps that may have opened
this past decade in our understanding of the possible
military applications of atomic energy—no novel
nuclear weapons concept developed by any other nation
should ever come as a technical surprise to us.”
Commenting on the memo, Frank von Hippel, a physicist
and arms control specialist at Princeton University’s
Program on Science and Global Security, told the Tribune: “This
is really very distressing. They’re saying, ‘Go
after it, guys. We’re back in the fifties. Come
up with all the crazy ideas you can—if there are
any crazy ideas left out there.’ This is fossil
Cold War mentality surfacing again.”
In July 2003, the Guardian ( London) reported
that Brooks’ National Nuclear Security Administration
quietly disbanded an advisory board just ahead of a closed-door
meeting at a U.S. Air Force base in Nebraska that was
to address the possible resumption of nuclear testing
and the development of a new generation of so-called mini
nukes and bunker-buster bombs. According to some advisory
board members, the decision to abandon the board seems
to have been made by Brooks. Sydney Drell, a respected
physicist and arms control expert, told the Guardian that
the board’s charter “was not renewed. I presume
they did not value us or found us a nuisance. An independent,
tough advisory board is very important in having a strong
[nuclear] stockpile programme. ... They just didn’t
call us. We didn’t hear from them.” A few
months earlier, Drell had cowritten with another advisory
board member an article for Arms Control Today criticizing
the government’s nuclear weapons plans: “Rather
than moving to develop new nuclear weapons, the United
States should push to strengthen the nonproliferation
regime through example and through stronger compliance
measures directed at those who flout its basic purposes.” (8)
Commenting on the rationale behind developing so-called
low yield nuclear weapons, Brooks said, “We need
to make sure our weapons will in fact be seen by other
countries as a deterrent. One element of that is usability.
If nobody believes there is any circumstance where you
will use the weapon, it is not a deterrent.” (3)
Brooks and the National Nuclear Security Administration
are also involved in efforts to develop so-called bunker-busting
nuclear bombs, including the proposed Robust Nuclear Earth
Penetrator Weapon, a low-yield bomb that is supposed to
be able to burrow deeply enough into the ground that most
of the fallout would be contained. However, Brooks was
recently forced to disabuse Congress of any notion that
radioactivity would be substantially minimized by the
weapons. In testimony in March, Brooks said: “I
really must apologize for my lack of precision if we in
the administration have suggested that it was possible
to have a bomb that penetrated far enough to trap all
fallout. . . . I don’t believe the laws of physics
will ever let that be true.” (9)
