Senate Armed Services chairman John Warner said the bipartisan vote “sends a strong signal throughout the world that we are unified” in what he called “the war against terrorists.” Some U.S. officials have floated the prospect of using such “mininukes” to bomb nuclear power facilities in north Korea and other countries targeted by Washington.

The $400 billion military budget contains an authorization for testing of two new types of weapons: “low-yield” nuclear weapons of five kilotons or less, and “high-yield” arms aimed at destroying heavily fortified bunkers—the so-called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.

Five kilotons is about one-third the force of the bomb the U.S. government used in 1945 to destroy Hiroshima, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Today Washington, the world’s number one nuclear power, maintains an arsenal that includes nuclear weapons with a blast force of several hundred kilotons.

U.S. spending on nuclear weaponry will jump to $6.4 billion this year, doubling the figure from a decade ago. The increased funding will go toward the purchase of new plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, to restart production of tritium—a gas that increases the force of thermonuclear explosions—and to upgrade nuclear facilities such as Lawrence Livermore in California and Los Alamos in New Mexico.

The International Herald Tribune reported in a May 27 article that the Pentagon Nuclear Posture Review, a classified document provided to Congress in 2002, called for a new crop of smaller arms “to defeat emerging threats such as hard and deeply buried targets,” like the fortified bunkers built by the Iraqi army.

The new weapons, the Pentagon report states, could be used against “relocatable targets.” Through radiation and intense heat, such weapons could be used to destroy caches of biological and chemical weapons of opposing armies.

U.S. administration officials, the article continues, view the current nuclear stockpile as “intended to deter a large power like the Soviet Union,” but think such bombs would create too much “collateral damage” and therefore carry too high a political price if used against a smaller country.

The Nuclear Posture Review listed seven nations—China, Russia, Iraq, north Korea, Syria, Iran, and Libya—against whom it recommended the White House be prepared to use nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon report gave several scenarios in which the use of nuclear firepower should be considered: in order to back Israel in a war with its neighbors, against China in a conflict with Taiwan, and to defeat north Korea in a war on the Korean peninsula.

Washington has been getting around the 1994 ban on research and development of new nuclear weapons by classifying its testing as procedures to “modify” existing arms. Sandia Corp., a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, for example, in 2001 patented an earth-burrowing “penetrator” that could be equipped with a nuclear device. Company president Paul Robinson boasted that “by putting a nuclear warhead on one of those weapons instead of high explosives, you would multiply the explosive power by a factor of more than a million.”  
 
 
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