Nuclear “bunker busters” could destroy enemy hideouts hundreds of metres underground but, if the target is in an urban area, a strike could lead to more than a million civilian deaths, warns a report from the US National Research Council (NRC) issued on Wednesday.
"Using an earth-penetrating weapon to destroy a target 250 meters deep - the typical depth for most underground facilities - potentially could kill a devastatingly large number of people," said John Ahearne, chair of the report committee.
The report is unlikely resolve the heated debate over the Bush administration’s plans to develop a new Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator - a weapon hardened to penetrate deep into the ground.
The problem is that earth penetrators cannot plunge deeply enough into the ground to fully contain the effects of a nuclear blast, so casualties would be "for all practical purposes, equal to [those] from a surface burst of the same weapon yield”, the report suggests. That means surface casualties could be high.
And half of the 1000 “strategic” hardened or buried targets identified by the Pentagon are in urban areas, where the panel estimate death tolls would range "from thousands to more than a million, depending primarily on the weapon yield".
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