Clare Short Suspends Aid to Tanzania

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Clare Short Suspends Aid to Tanzania

Exploding the Myth about Low-Yield, Earth Penetrating Nuclear Weapons

Response of DPRK to US Nuclear Threats
Spokesman for DPRK Foreign Ministry on US-South Korea Joint Military Exercises

International Development Secretary Clare Short has frozen payment of a £10 million aid package to Dar es Salaam. It was reported on Wednesday in The Guardian that she decided to suspend the aid package pending an independent international review of whether a decision to buy an air traffic control system is appropriate for "one of the world's poorest countries". The Department for International Development (DfID) confirmed that the payment had been withheld pending a report into whether Tanzania had breached its commitments to alleviate poverty through its acquisition of the £28 million system.

The decision to grant British aerospace monopoly BAE Systems an export license to sell the system to Tanzania is said to have been opposed in December by Clare Short and Gordon Brown. Clare Short denied that her decision to delay the £10 million of aid was an attempt to reopen the argument on the award of the original export licence. "There is no cabinet rift. The export licence has been granted," she said in a statement. "The decision to delay the release of budgetary support pending a review of Tanzania's air traffic control system was based on Tanzania's commitment to poverty reduction." However, the newspaper report said that the International Development Secretary was furious during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday night, as her colleague from the DTI backed the deal.

The government apparently ignored a World Bank advice against the deal and approved the sale of the equipment to Tanzania last December using the argument that it would save some 250 British jobs. According to The Guardian, Clare Short argued that the decision to go ahead with the deal on such a basis "puts British commercial interest ahead of Labour's commitment to reducing poverty in Africa".

Clare Short has argued that the Tanzanian government could use the money for the provision of basic services such as health, education and clean water. The report says a team from the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) reviewed the situation and concluded that Tanzania could buy a better system for a quarter of the price the British government is demanding.

According to the newspaper, Tanzania has no option but to press ahead with the purchase, as it is legally unable to break the contract. Clare Short and her officials are said to be raising serious questions about how the Tanzanian government spends British aid money!

Meanwhile in the House of Commons, the Chairman of the committee that examines arms deals has also indicated that he will be asking for an investigation into the deal. "I want to set up a full inquiry into the Tanzanian air traffic control deal. We need to examine exactly how this decision was made and the issues surrounding sustainability and ordering military equipment," the MP queried.

The affair presents a snapshot into the predatory and enslaving relations that the British government establishes on the African continent, as well as elsewhere. The price paid by Tanzania for the air traffic control system is roughly the same as the amount of Britain’s debt-relief grants to the same country.

The system had already been built by BAE Systems on the Isle of Wight, and the deal is being underwritten by a £40m loan from Barclays Bank. Even the World Bank had criticised the deal, saying that the system "is primarily a military system and can provide limited support for civil air traffic control purposes. The purchase of additional equipment would be required to render it useful for civil air traffic control".

However, it was reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon had all argued for the deal. This throws light on the Prime Minister’s remarks about Africa being a "scar on the conscience of the world". Needless to say, the deal will add to Tanzania’s debt burden and do nothing to help the half of its population lacking clean water, or the one in four of its children who, because of poverty, die before the age of five.

One must assume that the licence to BAE Systems to sell the system to Tanzania means that the Export Licensing Criteria were met. Criterion eight of these states that, before issuing an export licence, account will be taken of the "compatibility of arms exports with the technical and economic capacity of the recipient country", with this information to be gathered from bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF. Clearly, the adverse information and advice gathered concerning Tanzania did not overcome BAE’s lobbying in this instance.

An Export Control Bill is presently going through the House of Lords, being currently at the Committee stage, having received its second reading there and completed its Commons stages, before becoming law. As it stands, it does not mention sustainable development as a matter for consideration before an export licence is granted. The Bill seems to be more concerned with "weapons of mass destruction" and the problem of "terrorism", while serving the vested interests of the arms manufacturers and the financial oligarchy. In other words, the Bill is an example of the self-serving attitude of the government on this, as on other, issues.

Meanwhile, it is the poor countries of the world, who have suffered colonial and imperialist plunder, who are footing the bill. In this case, Tanzania is paying twice, once for the systems deal and again by being denied crucial aid. It highlights again the role of the British government in forcing through such deals, which was underlined during the Mittal affair, when it was made more than clear that Tony Blair and other government members make it a point of honour to act as salespeople for the monopolies in their trips to the four corners of the globe. So do the benefits of "globalisation" stack up for the impoverished nations and peoples of the world.

In the light of the US plan under its NPR to use smaller tactical nuclear weapons for "limited nuclear attack" in a bid to attack underground targets that cannot be destroyed with conventional weapons, WDIE is posting this article by Dr. Robert W. Nelson, Federation of American Scientists. It appeared in Issue Brief Volume 5, Number 7, of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, April 17, 2001.*

DESPITE THE GLOBAL sense of relief and hope that the nuclear arms race ended with the Cold War, an increasingly vocal group of politicians, military officials and leaders of America's nuclear weapon laboratories are urging the US to develop a new generation of precision low-yield nuclear weapons. Rather than deterring warfare with another nuclear power, however, they suggest these weapons could be used in conventional conflicts with third-world nations.

In reality, adding low-yield warheads to the world's nuclear inventory simply makes their eventual use more likely. Furthermore, a 1994 law currently prohibits the nuclear laboratories from undertaking research and development that could lead to a precision nuclear weapon of less than 5 kilotons (kt), because "low-yield nuclear weapons blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war".

Last year, Senate Republicans John Warner (R-VA) and Wayne Allard (R-CO) buried a small provision in the 2001 Defence Authorisation Bill that tried to circumvent these earlier restrictions. Although the language in the final Act was watered down, the Energy and Defence Departments are still required to undertake a study of low-yield nuclear weapons and other weapons that could penetrate deep into the earth before detonating so as to "threaten hard and deeply buried targets". Legislation concerning research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons will likely be proposed again this year.

Some politicians imagine these nuclear weapons could be used in small-scale conventional conflicts against rogue dictators, while leaving most of the civilian population untouched. It is, however, a myth that nuclear weapons could be used in ways that minimise their "collateral damage" so much as to make them acceptable tools to be used like conventional weapons.

The use of any nuclear weapon capable of destroying a buried target that is otherwise immune to conventional attack will necessarily produce enormous numbers of civilian casualties. No earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the 15 kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly fallout.

As Congress understood in 1994, by seeking to produce usable low-yield nuclear weapons, we risk blurring the now sharp line separating nuclear and conventional warfare, and provide legitimacy for other nations to similarly consider using nuclear weapons in regional wars.

Conventional Earth-Penetrating Weapons
The Pentagon already has a number of conventional weapons capable of destroying hardened targets buried within approximately 50 feet of the surface. The most well known of these is the GBU-28, developed and deployed in the final weeks of the air campaign in the Gulf War. The Air Force was initially unable to destroy a well-protected bunker north of Baghdad after repeated direct hits. The 4000 lb GBU-28 was created from a very heavy surplus Army eight-inch gun tube filled with conventional explosive and a modified laser guidance kit. It destroyed the bunker, which was protected by more than 30 feet of earth, concrete and hardened steel.

The precision, penetrating capability, and explosive power of these conventional weapons has improved dramatically over the last decade, and these trends will certainly continue. Indeed, the GBU-37 guided bomb, a successor to the GBU-28, is already thought to be capable of disabling a silo based ICBM – a target formerly thought vulnerable only to nuclear attack. In the near future, the United States will deploy new classes of hard target penetrators which can land within one to two meters of their targets.

The B61-11 Nuclear Bomb
Mini-nuke advocates argue that low-yield nuclear weapons should be designed to destroy even deeper targets. The US introduced an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon in 1997, the B61-11, by putting the nuclear explosive from an earlier bomb design into a hardened steel casing with a new nose cone. The deployment was controversial because of official US policy, established by President Bush in 1992, not to produce new types of nuclear weapons. The DOE and the weapons labs have consistently argued, however, that the B61-11 is merely a "modification" of an older delivery system, because it used an existing "physics package".

The earth-penetrating capability of the B61-11 is fairly limited, however. Tests show it penetrates only 20 feet or so into dry earth when dropped from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Even so, by burying itself into the ground before detonation, a much higher proportion of the explosion energy is transferred to ground shock compared to a surface bursts. Any attempt to use it in an urban environment, however, would result in massive civilian casualties. Even at the low end of its 0.3-300 kiloton yield range, the nuclear blast will simply blow out a huge crater of radioactive material, creating a lethal gamma-radiation field over a large area.

Containment
In addition to the immediate effects of blast, air shock, and thermal radiation, shallow nuclear explosions produce especially intense local radioactive fallout. The fireball breaks through the surface of the earth, carrying into the air large amounts of dirt and debris. This material has been exposed to the intense neutron flux from the nuclear detonation, which adds to the radioactivity from the fission products. The cloud typically consists of a narrow column and a broad base surge of air filled with radioactive dust which expands to a radius of over a mile for a 5 kiloton explosion.

In order to be fully contained, nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site must be buried at a depth of 650 feet for a 5 kiloton explosive and 1,300 feet for a 100-kiloton explosive. Even then, there are many documented cases where carefully sealed shafts ruptured and released radioactivity to the local environment. Even if an earth-penetrating missile were somehow able to drill hundreds of feet into the ground and then detonate, the explosion would likely shower the surrounding region with highly radioactive dust and gas. Even a 0.1 kt burst must be buried at a depth of approximately 230 feet to be fully contained.

The most optimistic assumptions, however, limit the penetration depth of any earth-borrowing missile to less than a hundred feet or so – substantially less than the depth required to contain even a low-yield nuclear explosion. The missile must protect the warhead and its associated electronics from the impact shock while it burrows into the ground. This limit is based on fundamental physics and material properties that are unlikely to change significantly, even with additional research and development. It is simply not possible for a kinetic energy weapon to penetrate deep enough to prevent widespread and intense local radioactive fallout from the nuclear explosion.

The Weapons Labs, "Mini-Nukes," and the CTBT
The most vocal proponents of new small-yield weapons come from the nuclear weapons laboratories. In a March 28, 2000, speech to the Nuclear Security Decision-makers Forum, Sandia Lab Director Paul Robinson asserted that: "The US will undoubtedly require a new nuclear weapon ... because it is realised that the yields of the weapons left over from the Cold War are too high for addressing the deterrence requirements of a multi polar, widely proliferated world. Without rectifying that situation, we would end up being self-deterred."

One interpretation of this statement is that the laboratory staff and leadership simply feel threatened by the current restrictions on their activities and want to generate a new mission (and the associated funding) to keep them in operation indefinitely. Some nuclear weapons designers feel particularly threatened by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), since it will probably limit them to maintaining the stockpile of weapons already in the US arsenal. The labs desire the challenge of designing new nuclear weapons, simply for the scientific and technical training the effort would bring. Hence, there is tremendous pressure to create a new mission that justifies a new development programme.

On the other hand, it seems unlikely that a warhead capable of performing such an extraordinary mission as destroying a deeply buried and hardened bunker could be deployed without full-scale testing. First, even if the missile casing were able to withstand the high-velocity ground impact, the warhead "physics package" and accompanying electronics must function under extreme conditions. The primary device must detonate and produce a reliable yield shortly after suffering an intense shock deceleration. Second, there must be great confidence that the actual nuclear yield is not greater than expected. Since the natural energy scale for a fission nuclear weapon is of order 10 kt, much lower yield weapons must be sensitive to exacting design tolerances; the final yield is determined by an exponentially growing number of fission-produced neutrons, so the total number of neutron generations must be finely-tuned. Given that these weapons may be used near population centres, it thus seems highly unlikely that designers could certify a low-yield warhead without testing it.

The end of the Cold War should allow us to place further limits on the development of new types of nuclear weapons and on use of all nuclear weapons. Attempts to develop a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons would only make nuclear war more likely, and they seem cynically designed to provide legitimacy to nuclear testing. Such an approach would prompt nuclear arms competition, decrease rather than increase our national security, and undermine US and international non-proliferation efforts.
*This Issue Brief is a shortened version of the article Low-Yield Earth Penetrating Nuclear Weapons from the FAS Public Interest Report, Vol. 1, 2001. Robert W. Nelson is a theoretical physicist who is on the research staff of Princeton University and a consultant to FAS.

The newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Rodong Sinmun, has denounced the US for persistently talking about a "threat" from north Korea, while itself being the one which is upsetting the strategic balance of the world and threatening peace and security.

The newspaper wrote on March 19: "Pursuant to an extremely self-righteous policy, the US is going ahead with its plan to establish the National Missile Defence System (NMD), throwing away the international treaty it signed like a pair of worn-out shoes.

"The NMD is the source of the deepest concern in the international arena. This is because it is a dangerous move, which may disturb the world strategic stability and spark a new arms race. That is why the world is unanimous in censuring the NMD.

"Under this situation the US felt an urgent need to invent a pretext to soothe the world protest and denunciation. So the US is clamouring about ‘threat of missiles’ from the DPRK, a long bankrupt fiction."

The Jurists Association of the DPRK issued an indictment on March 16, addressed to progressive people and conscientious lawyers of the world, against the Bush administration. The indictment said:

"Today the United States is resorting to high-handed and arbitrary practices everywhere in the world in pursuit of hegemony. This is not only contradictory to the aspiration and desire of humankind to establish an international order of peace, progress, reconciliation and co-operation but also a criminal act of wantonly violating the international law.

"The US is gravely breaching the principles of respect for state sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs, the principles recognised as the supreme principles governing the international relations.

"From the onset of its coming to power, the Bush administration has openly interfered in internal affairs of other countries, placing its partisan and individual interests above the international law under the pretext of the ‘top priority to national interests’.

"It is listing those countries that go against the grain with it as members of ‘axis of evil’. This is an expression of the most blatant violation of the dignity of sovereign states and interference in their internal affairs in the history of international relations."

The indictment continues: "The US criminal acts of trampling underfoot the sovereignty of other countries and interfering in their internal affairs find a vivid expression in the fact that it is applying economic sanctions against other countries while hurling mud at their policies by invoking its domestic laws as it pleases.

"It is wantonly violating the principle of territorial integrity and the principle of banning threat by force of arms and use of armed forces, the cornerstone of international peace and stability.

"The reckless war policy of the Bush administration reduced Afghanistan to ashes and left many civilians dead and wounded, bringing dark clouds of war to Central Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia and other parts of the world."

It adds: "It is not only wantonly violating the international law but unhesitatingly encouraging such former war criminals as Japan to repeat their crimes following the US strategy for world domination.

"The US is grossly violating the principle of respect for international commitments and duties on which international relations are based.

"The Bush administration unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 ABM treaty, refused to implement the ‘Kyoto protocol’ and adopt a protocol on the convention on biological weapons and violated the Geneva convention on treating Afghan POWs, defying the unanimous protest of the international community."

The Jurists Association of the DPRK expressed the expectation that all judicial organisations and lawyers of the world would merge their voices with the just voices of the world public denouncing the US criminal acts.

In a signed commentary on March 16, Rodong Sinmun points out that the US administration recently ordered a three-year research to develop nuclear weapons capable of destroying the deep tunnels and cave complexes with powerful shock waves enough to crush structures deep in the earth.

According to the recently disclosed secret report on the "nuclear posture" released by the US Department of Defence, the newspaper says, the Bush administration designated at least seven countries including the DPRK, Russia and China as the targets of its nuclear attacks and decided to develop smaller tactical nuclear weapons for "limited nuclear attack". All these facts go to clearly prove that the US is chiefly to blame for a nuclear threat and it is the most heinous enemy of humankind who threatens the world peace and harasses its security.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK issued a statement on March 18 denouncing the United States and the South Korean warmongers for their projected joint military manoeuvres. The statement reads in full:

The US-South Korea "combined forces command" recently announced that large-scale joint military manoeuvres, a combination of "reception, staging, onward movement and integration" (RSOI) and "Foal Eagle", would be staged across South Korea from March 21 to 27.

To be involved in the exercises slated to take place under the simulated conditions of a war are tens of thousands of US forces present in South Korea, forces from the US mainland and its bases in Japan, Guam and other areas and the bulk of the South Korean armed forces.

We cannot but take a serious note of the fact that the US is going to stage the largest-ever joint military exercises surpassing the ill-famed "Team Spirit" joint military exercise in scale with the whole area of South Korea as an operational theatre at a time when a scenario for nuclear attack in which the DPRK is made the target of nuclear assault is floated in the US these days after Bush proclaimed this year as a "year of war" and listed the DPRK as a member of the "axis of evil" and whipped up war hysteria at the front and at US bases during his recent visit to South Korea.

The joint military exercises to be staged by the Bush administration are all-round war exercises aimed to put the "plan for pre-emptive strikes" on the north into practice and very dangerous war gambles to seize the chance to provoke a nuclear war.

The present US administration's hard-line and hostile policy toward the DPRK has thus turned into a policy of war against it.

As a result, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has now gone beyond the limits of danger and turned into a touch-and-go situation.

Facts go to clearly prove that "resumption of dialogue" much touted by the Bush administration is nothing but a deceptive trick to cover up their sinister war plan.

The South Korean bellicose forces joining the US in the war exercises targeted against fellow countrymen is a hostile act diametrically running counter to the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration in which the north and the south committed themselves to reconciliation and unity of the nation.

No one can predict how adversely these war manoeuvres will affect the inter-Korean relations.

The US is well advised to properly understand who is its opponent and behave with discretion.

The DPRK neither wants war nor avoids it but has a will and strength to mercilessly strike and wipe out any aggressors no matter where they are coming from.

The people's army and people of Korea keep themselves fully ready to cope with the prevailing serious situation. If the enemy ignites a war of aggression against the DPRK in the end, it will wipe out the aggressors to the last one and achieve the historic cause of national reunification without fail.