[NukeNet] Experts Warn Of Accidental Nuclear War

[Bill Smirnow]

  Not to mention nuclear winter, "successfully"
covered up by the pwers with vested interests in
maintaining their nuclear arsenals and the lapdog
corporate media:
http://www.mothersalert.org/nuclearwinter.html

   http://www.mothersalert.org/nuclearwinter2.html


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/06/MNGF9LJSMM1.DTL



Experts warn of an accidental atomic war
Nuclear missile modified for conventional attack
on Iran could set off alarm in Russia

- Eric Rosenberg, Hearst Newspapers
Friday, October 6, 2006 San Francisco Chronicle

(10-06) 04:00 PDT Washington -- A Pentagon project
to modify its deadliest nuclear missile for use as
a conventional weapon against targets such as
North Korea and Iran could unwittingly spark an
atomic war, two weapons experts warned Thursday.

Russian military officers might misconstrue a
submarine-launched conventional D5
intercontinental ballistic missile and conclude
that Russia is under nuclear attack, said Ted
Postol, a physicist and professor of science,
technology and national security policy at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Pavel
Podvig, a physicist and weapons specialist at
Stanford.

"Any launch of a long-range nonnuclear armed sea
or land ballistic missile will cause an automated
alert of the Russian early warning system," Postol
told reporters.

The triggering of an alert wouldn't necessarily
precipitate a retaliatory hail of Russian nuclear
missiles, Postol said. Nevertheless, he said,
"there can be no doubt that such an alert will
greatly increase the chances of a nuclear accident
involving strategic nuclear forces."

Podvig said launching conventional versions of a
missile from a submarine that normally carries
nuclear ICBMs "expands the possibility for a
misunderstanding so widely that it is hard to
contemplate."

Mixing conventional and nuclear D5s on a U.S.
Trident submarine "would be very dangerous,"
Podvig said, because the Russians have no way of
discriminating between the two types of missiles
once they are launched.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the
project would increase the danger of accidental
nuclear war.

"The media and expert circles are already
discussing plans to use intercontinental ballistic
missiles to carry nonnuclear warheads," he said in
May. "The launch of such a missile could ...
provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic
nuclear forces."


Accidental nuclear war is not so far-fetched. In
1995, Russia initially interpreted the launch of a
Norwegian scientific rocket as the onset of a U.S.
nuclear attack.


Then-President Boris Yeltsin activated his
"nuclear briefcase" in the first stages of
preparation to launch a retaliatory strike before
the mistake was discovered.


The United States and Russia have acknowledged the
possibility that Russia's equipment might
mistakenly conclude the United States was
attacking with nuclear missiles.

In 1998, the two countries agreed to set up a
joint radar center in Moscow operated by U.S. and
Russian forces to supplement Russia's aging
equipment and reduce the threat of accidental war.
But the center has yet to open.

A major technical problem exacerbates the risk of
using the D5 as a conventional weapon: the
decaying state of Russia's nuclear forces.
Russia's nuclear missiles are tethered to early
warning radars that have been in decline since the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. And
Russia, unlike the United States, lacks sufficient
satellites to supplement the radars and confirm
whether missile launches are truly under way or
are false alarms.

The scenario that worries Postol, Podvig and other
weapons experts is what might happen if the United
States and North Korea come to blows and a
conventional D5 is launched against a target there
from a submerged Trident submarine. Depending on
the sub's location, the flying time to Russia
could be under 15 minutes so the Russians would
have little time to confirm the trajectory -- 
using decaying equipment -- before deciding to
launch a nuclear strike on the United States.

The D5 missile project involves the removal of
nuclear warheads from as many as two dozen D5
ICBMs that are carried aboard the U.S. fleet of 12
Ohio-class Trident submarines.

The Pentagon has the project on an accelerated
schedule, with the goal of fielding the weapons
alongside their nuclear variants in two years.
Each Trident submarine carries 24 D5 missiles, and
the plan calls for using two of those as
conventional weapons in each sub.

The rocket fired by a submerged submarine would
barrel up through the ocean powered by its
three-stage engine and rapidly ascend through the
atmosphere at speeds up to 20,000 feet per second
into outer space.

The warhead compartment of the missile would then
plummet back to earth, guided to its target within
about 50 feet by sophisticated sensors. Defense
officials believe it would gain enough speed and
force to penetrate underground command bunkers.


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