Bye bye bunker buster.

Byline: The Register-Guard

When it comes to the long-term survival of the human race, nothing beats witnessing an event that has the potential to nudge the hands of the Doomsday Clock a little farther away from midnight. The Bush administration's recent move to abandon research into a nuclear bunker-buster warhead has to have been worth 15 seconds or so of additional time on the ticker.

For those who are rolling their eyes and thinking the Doomsday Clock is a Cold War relic, consider this: The clock currently reads seven minutes to midnight, with midnight being the annihilation of humankind in a nuclear holocaust. Seven minutes to midnight is where the clock was set when it was first unveiled in 1947 by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. Pretty unimpressive progress on reducing the threat of nuclear war in 58 years.

The Doomsday Clock has been reset 17 times since its debut, moving as close as two minutes to midnight in 1953, when the United States and the Soviet Union both tested thermonuclear weapons within a nine-month period, and as far as 17 minutes from midnight in 1991, when the two superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

With the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear adversaries and the Bush administration's shameful withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the clock lost all the ground it had gained over the decades and by 2002 was back to seven minutes to midnight.

It's almost certain that if the Bush administration had pressed stubbornly ahead with plans to develop the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and other new tactical nuclear weapons, the clock would have moved closer to midnight. Believe it or not, the administration's apocalyptic lust for new nukes isn't the worst of it: National Security Presidential Directive 17 put the whole world on notice that the United States would engage in a first use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological attack.

Playing on public fears in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Bush and the Pentagon have driven home the message that biological and chemical weapons pose a grave enough threat to the American people to justify a nuclear response. But there is never any acknowledgement of the almost incalculable difference in destructive and lethal impact between chemical agents and nuclear weapons.

The Robust Penetrator is a frightening example of the development of a weapon for a specific tactical mission without regard for the catastrophic collateral damage that could be caused by its use. With a few modifications, an existing 1.2-megaton nuclear bomb could be made to burrow deep underground before exploding. That would give the U.S. military the capability to take out hardened and deeply buried targets such as command bunkers or underground storage sites containing chemical or biological agents.

But a nuclear bunker buster isn't a surgical strike smart bomb. No nuclear earth penetrator can plunge deep enough to contain the nuclear fallout. Even the strongest casing will crush itself by the time it penetrates 10 feet to 30 feet into rock or concrete. A recent study by the National Academy of Sciences pointed out that fallout from a nuclear bunker buster explosion could spread over 1,000 miles and kill up to a million people.

Defeat of the nuclear bunker buster is a credit to the unrelenting efforts of nonproliferation activists and stalwart congressional opponents such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. But particular applause should go to Rep. David Hobson, the Republican chairman of the House Energy and Water Appropriations Committee. Hobson fought successfully to strip funding for the bunker buster from several Bush budget proposals, bucking the powerful Republican leadership in the House.

As heartening as it is to see the bunker buster bite the dust, it's not going to buy a lot of time on the Doomsday Clock. Some 30,000 nuclear weapons remain in existence, with about 10,000 of them in the hands of the U.S. government.

Thousands of nuclear weapons and tons of weapons-grade material remain unsecured in an economically weak Russia. Iran and North Korea belligerently proclaim their commitment to developing nuclear weapons. Tensions are still perilously high between India and Pakistan.

These are not hypothetical threats, but neither are they beyond the reach of real reduction. The United States must once again take the lead - by example - in international treaty efforts to reduce stockpiles of existing weapons, help to secure and reduce Russia's nuclear inventory and prevent the spread of weapons material and technology to other nations.