Neutron bomb waiting, readv to go

Press, 20 August 1981, Page 12

Neutron bomb waiting, readv to go

By

HAROLD JACKSON,

Washington, in “The Guardian,”

London

. The/ idea. of. the neutron bomb goes back to 1955. The North.-Atlantic military planners held a war game that -.year under the chilling title ‘ "Carte Blanche.:’ Massive retaliation, was still official doctrine for nuclear warfare and the exercise assumed that 335 atomic warheads would be fired in the first two days of the battle.

In the’subsequent analysis it was reckoned that 268 of them would have landed on West Germany, leaving 1.5 million people dead and 3.5 million injured. It marked the beginning of the end for massive retaliation and the start of the search for a “clean” bomb — one that could inflict more damage on the enemy than on friendly civilians. The' Pentagon has been single-mindedly pursuing that aim for the past 25 years and the Reagan decision to go ahead with production of the neutron weapon is little more than overt acceptance of the status quo. For all practical purposes, the military has been pushing ahead with the project regardless of what politica'ns may have been saying. The original notion was conceived with the development of the hydrogen bomb. A neutron weapon is, in essence, an H-bomb with its jacket off.

The core of both is much the same but. where the H-bomb has an outer casing of Uran-ium-238 — to produce a fission explosion after the original fission-fusion — the neutron weapon omits this stage. The result is a massive release of high-energy neutrons with very little blast.

The results were spelled out in United States Army field manual 100-5. published in July 1976. A one-kiloton neutron artillery shell can release about 8000 rads. “An active soldier suddenly exposed to 3000 rads,” the manual noted, “could become incapacitated within 3-5 minutes. He may recover to some degree in about 45 minutes but. due to vomiting, diarrhoea, and other radiation sickness symptoms, he would only be -partially effective until he dies within about a week.”

The weapon's range could be restricted to a radius of about 2300 metres, which made it politically attractive. But research after the various Hbomb tests also showed the enormous advantage it offered against one of the most worrying threats in central Europe, the huge Soviet superiority in tanks.

Any armour is fairly resistant to the heat and blast of a standard nuclear explosion and Soviet designers had also made their vehicles proof against

radioactivity. Not only were the -crews shielded but the tanks were tightly sealed, with their internal air pressure higher than that outside. Where there might be leaks, this ensured, that air would flow away from the crew, carrying external radioactivity with it. There is no such protection against heavy, neutrons. The tests showed that being surrounded by armour only reduced the radiation reaching the tank crews by about 20 per cent — irrelevant at the dosage from a neutron weapon. They also revealed that inter action with metal generated gamma rays was an additional hazard.

The practicability of the technology brought in the era of “flexible response" in the mid-sixties. In the words of a study by the Congressional Budget Office. “The basic idea is that a strategic nuclear response to Soviet aggression would be intuitively more plausible if tactical nuclear weapons had already been used and failed to halt a Soviet attack.”

The money to develop the weapon was already being given to the Pentagon, though few knew about it. Secret reports by the Atomic Energy Commission (A.E.C.) and by its successor, the Energy Research and Development Administration (E.R.D.A.) showed tnat the project had been funded from 1963. By 1974, the

A.E.C. had put in a request to Congress for $904 million to pay for the production of 2000 205 mm shells. Production, of course, is the last link in the research and development chain. In 1975 the Defence Secretary, Mr James Schlesinger, mentioned development of “enhanced radiation” weapons in a report to Congress, but it was little noticed at the time. The Army manual came out in 1976, again apparently unremarked. By 1977, however, a major row broke out when it was revealed that the 1978 budget for the E.R.D.A. included a sum for the production of the weapon. The money had actually come from the Pentagon which funds any military projects carried out by the E.R.D.A. Congress buried it in a budget which covered money for public water supplies, power projects. and civilian nuclear energy. President Carter said he had no idea it was there, but the furore in Europe obliged him to take a public stance on the issue. After wavering and dithering, he decided not to deploy the weapon in Europe. But he did order the design of new warheads which could rapidly be converted to neutron weapons. He also authorised production of the necessary components.

Two years ago, the Senate Armed Services Committee complained that the compon-

ents were not in production and this year's fiscal authorisation for the Energy Department (which is now responsible lor all atomic matters) oroered production to start. The amount of cash allocated, however, was kept secret. In reality. the Pentagon had been pursuing this course all along and had received special supplies of tritium for the' W.70-3 Lance missile warhead and for the W.70-9 one-kiloton 2Usmm Howitzer projectile.

The components were ready and waiting at the Energy Department's Pantex plant near Amarillo. Texas, all that was needed was the formal goahead, which the White House has now given, for their assembly. Last year, in apparent anticipation of the decision, the department had sought an increase of $l5 million for the plant's operating budget. The only surprising aspect of the announcement by the White House was that anyone was surprised.

President Giscard d'Estaing had announced in June last year that the French had tested a neutron bomb. The Russians — even before the statement by the French Minis-

ter of Defence - had dropped heavy hints that thev had the capacity. The weapon firs in>o the new American strategic doctrine enunciated as one of President Carter’s last a< ts in office, that Soviet milnarv targets will be the priority tor attack in any nuclear exchange. With the Pentagon pushing hard, with everyone else getting in on the act, and with Mr. Reagan's natural predilections, the decision was inevitable.

The question no-one seems to have asked is whether the weapon is quite what it maxhave seemed in the early sixties. A study of the 1973 Middle East War, carried out by the Stockholm Institute, suggests there are far less controversial ways of knocking out Soviet armour. Syria attacked the Israelis in the Golan Heights with. 12IK) Russian-made tanks. With the use of modern preci-sion-guided weapons "all were stopped before they got more than ten miles, by perhaps onehundredth the number of troops that would be available to N.A.T.O. forces." You can buy 50 of those missiles for the price of one neutron shell — and keep the Europeans off vour back.

Also on this page: the political complications besetting the neutron bomb.