Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

bunker buster experiment

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Published on Saturday, 31 December 2005 10:52

The final agreement on the US nuclear weapons budget shows that an experiment to test the impact of the proposed bunker-buster bomb will be carried ou t, despite Congress withdrawing overall funding for the project. The test will involve slamming a mock bomb into a wall. It was to have been carried out at the Sandia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, but has been moved to a Defence Department facility. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said: \"There will be money for a conventional test, and we had a—and I’ve been worried that they were going to try to do the nuclear—the nonnuclear test at Sandia, and I got a problem with that because—and I won’t go into why, but there’s, in my opinion, a violation of the law or the understanding or the protocols on building a wall that got built out there and so I don’t think we should use that wall at this time for this stuff and it sends the wrong messages. And we have a commitment from the secretary of energy that he will not allow that test at Sandia. And I don’t care where else they do it, as long as they do it at a DOD site because I think that if they do it at a DOD site, that sends the right messages that it’s not a nuclear test and I think if they do it at a national lab, it sends the wrong problems.\"