Low-Yield Nuke Road Test
By J. Daniel Janzen

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Walking through my suburban neighborhood one recent afternoon, I drew somewhat more attention than usual. Drivers slowed their cars as they passed, some staring openly, others pretending not to look. A couple of kids stopped their bikes to ask about the large wheeled cart I was pushing, its sides emblazoned with fallout symbols. While I answered their many questions, a small group of protesters chalked the outlines of human bodies on the pavement around me. I took it all in stride. After all, I was the first person on my block with nuclear capability.

When the Senate voted to lift the decade-long ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons, some critics predicted that such a lowering of the atomic threshold would court disaster by making the unthinkable thinkable. Members of the defense community countered that today's more dangerous world made low-yield nukes all the more essential. Once again, it has fallen to the independent media to discover the reality behind the hyperbole and educate the public about this vital issue.

Respecting the vast influence of the free press in our democracy, the Department of Defense often courts key journalists in hopes of winning their support in matters of special national importance. Skeptical by nature and objective by duty, we accept the high level of access we are granted while insisting on the right to report the truth as we find it.

In my role as this magazine's senior military affairs correspondent, I've commanded an Abrams tank in combat conditions, landed on the deck of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier in dense fog and logged more than 10,000 miles in a Humvee — not the civilian Hummer, mind you, but the real, military-issue kind. Still, nothing could have prepared me for my experiences road-testing the new low-yield nuclear arsenal.

"'Cha got there?" my neighbor asked over the back fence.

"Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator," I told him. "You may know it as the Bunker-Buster."

"Huh," he said, affecting nonchalance.

I looked past him at the gopher tracks that crisscrossed his yard, same as my own. "Seems like they do more damage every day," I said. "This should take care of it." While my neighbor watched, I calibrated the RNEP's warhead for the appropriate depth, then initiated the detonation sequence. "You might want to put these on," I said, handing him a spare set of tinted goggles.

A week later, the gophers had not returned. "Poison pellets prob'ly woulda worked in another couple weeks," my neighbor muttered, but we both knew the truth.

One argument in favor of low-yield nuclear weapons is their effectiveness in destroying stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons without the kind of widespread contamination that might follow a conventional strike. While the unavailability of such weapons makes this theory difficult for a civilian to verify, I conducted a test using the closest possible approximation: a nearby marsh notorious as a mosquito breeding ground. Word of my project had somehow leaked, and a large number of high school students, many of them female, gathered around me as I prepared the WMD Neutralizer. After cautioning them strongly to stay low and shield their eyes, I fired the charge. The explosion was brighter than a thousand suns, and I was moved to recall a passage from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds," I murmured, my combat helmet silhouetted against the angry orange glow of a small mushroom cloud.

Only twice have nuclear weapons ever been used in combat; in both cases, entire cities were destroyed. With low-yield nukes, this need no longer be the case, and an area no larger than the campus of a suburban high school can be vaporized with no significant damage to the surrounding community. I learned firsthand the practicality of just such a surgical strike following a recent baseball game in which the Buck Creek H.S. Eagles ran up the score on the Columbus North Panthers in contradiction of any sense of sportsmanship. Previously, Columbus North supporters had been limited to hard words, clenched fists and the occasional aluminum bat in defense of their basic human rights. Now, the tyranny of Eagles coach Herman Topper is a thing of the past.

To those critics who suggest that the introduction of any size of nuclear weapon into a conflict would lead to escalation and catastrophe, I would simply state that no retaliation appears to be forthcoming from the ashes of Buck Creek H.S.

As the week drew to a close, it was with reluctance that I returned the now-depleted low-yield arsenal to my Department of Defense liaison. But with disarmament came wisdom. I'd come to understand that, far from representing an unconscionable danger to human survival, nuclear weapons are in fact our birthright as Americans — at least, those of us with the strength and moral courage to wield them.

To be sure, micro-proliferation will bring about many changes, both domestically and abroad. But to this correspondent's mind, they will be changes for the better — and the national debt of gratitude to our Department of Defense will grow that much greater.

E-mail J. Daniel Janzen at dan at clownyard dot com.

— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)