nuclear-news

With a new tail-kit to increase accuracy, the B61-12 will be an upgrade of a free-falling gravity bomb first built in the 1960s. President Barack Obama asked Congress to allocate $643.3 million for the project for fiscal year 2016. The total cost of refurbishing the bombs could exceed $10 billion.

After the U.S. successfully tested a non-nuclear version of the bomb in Nevada this summer, Russia’s deputy defense minister, Anatoly Antonov, decried the move as “irresponsible” and “openly provocative.”

A few months later, when a German TV station reported in September that the U.S. would deploy the bomb in Germany, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov shot back that such a move “could alter the balance of power in Europe.”

“And without a doubt it would demand that Russia take necessary countermeasures to restore the strategic balance and parity,” Peskov said at a press conference.

t’s important what impression potential adversaries get about what the U.S. is up to, said Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists, a national security group dedicated to preventing nuclear war.

“If they’re seeing us increasing the accuracy of our gravity bombs, will they conclude that we’re contemplating using nuclear weapons more readily in a conflict than otherwise?” Kristensen said. “It can have real significant implications for how nuclear weapon states perceive each other.”

Kristensen and other critics believe the B61-12 could violate the2010 Nuclear Posture Review, a pledge by the Obama administration that “life-extension programs” to modernize old nuclear weapons won’t result in new military capabilities.

“What they’re doing is taking a dumb bomb and turning it into a smart bomb and claiming that it’s not a new military capability,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director at Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a nonproliferation group. “It just doesn’t square with reality.”……

In an opinion column published Oct. 15 in The Washington Post, former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry and Andy Weber, a former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, urged Obama to halt the development of the cruise missile.

They also suggested a global ban on such weapons to prevent unintended escalation.

The problem is that other states wouldn’t have any way of knowing if a cruise missile that had just been launched had a conventional warhead or a nuclear warhead until it detonated, Perry and Weber wrote…..http://media.mcclatchydc.com/static/features/irradiated/Modernizing.html