Tender Bombs?
U . S . Military Mulls
Weapons That Disable
Bunkers, Spare People
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Bleach, Foam, Ozone Get
A Look-Over; Creating
That Sticky Situation
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Little Bugs, Giant Menaces

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Could the U.S. bomb an enemy's chemical and biological weapons without killing everyone for miles around?

Not yet. But for the past four years, in a secure underground bunker here on Kirtland Air Force Base, a band of 11 engineers, scientists and researchers has been working to answer that question "yes." Its mission is to produce the first truly new weapon of the post-Cold War era, a bomb whose effectiveness is to be measured by how many people it doesn't kill -- while it destroys stockpiles of horror weapons.

"We're trying to move beyond just blowing the c--- out of stuff," summarizes Donald Erdmann, the chief "concepts collector" for the project, which has been conducted almost entirely in secrecy. The Air Force permitted a peek partly "to advertise to a future aggressor" that the U.S. is developing ways to counter biological and chemical weapons, says Maj. Gen. Thomas Neary.

CONTROLLED EXPLOSIONS

The glimpse gleaned from interviews with team members reveals just how daunting a challenge it is to make a weapon that can destroy another weapon without killing many people -- and without causing unexpected side effects. The project is set to end this fall as the team recommends specific weapons, whose development would be top secret.

The team seeks a weapon for a world in which America's most likely adversary isn't a superpower like the Soviet Union with 20,000 nuclear warheads but "rogue states," or even terrorists, brewing small amounts of lethal chemical or biological weapons. These new enemies require different approaches.

If the Cold War between the superpowers had ever turned hot, the Air Force had planned simply to blast Soviet arsenals of chemical and biological weapons with nuclear weapons. Civilian bystanders -- if any were left -- weren't a concern. Now, as the U.S. faces such weapons in more limited conflicts, the survival of civilians is a priority. Indeed, this weapon proposes to accomplish the opposite of the so-called neutron bomb, which was designed to kill people but leave buildings and infrastructure intact.

Surprisingly little is known about the effects of heat, blast and radiation on chemical and biological weapons. "Most of the studies by the Army and others had focused on how much of the stuff it takes to kill humans, not on how much it takes to kill the stuff," says nuclear engineer Mike Martinez, who leads the project, officially called Agent Defeat Weapon Concept Exploration.

PLUMBING FOR IDEAS

In late 1995, Mr. Martinez and his colleagues began casting about the "XFiles"-like world of secret-weapons researchers for ideas, putting out an allpoints bulletin to scientists, Energy Department engineers and Air Force weapons designers. Within weeks, proposals began pouring in. By mid-1996, the team had 58. Many sounded like science fiction-lasers aboard unmanned "drone" aircraft and high-frequency vibration bombs. But even the most outlandish ideas should be examined, Mr. Martinez ordered.

An early front-runner, from the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories at Kirtland, was a proposal for a bomb that would shoot quick-setting foam out its back as it hit. The foam was supposed to prevent deadly clouds of chemical gas and hot biological agents from being "vented" into the atmosphere through the entry hole.

But the concept stumbled on the physics of foams; they wouldn't expand fast enough to plug the hole before lethal bugs or gases were exploded through it. The team also noted that most laboratories and weapons bunkers have other holes -- doors, windows and air shafts -- through which the poisons could escape.

A related proposal called for bombing bunkers with supersticky foam that would seal their doors and prevent enemies from getting to the weapons. The U.S. military already uses such foam to slow down would-be intruders at nuclear-weapons depots. The foam idea was tossed out because the Martinez team agreed no determined foe could be kept out for long by foam, no matter how sticky.

Some chemical solutions offered hope. One, which Pentagon officials identified as liquid ozone, promised to neutralize almost every known biological and chemical weapon. But Mr. Erdmann shelved the idea because ozone has a very short shelf life, presenting a logistical nightmare.

Another idea called for using "superbleach," a highly concentrated version of the common household cleanser. It is murder on biological agents and promised some lesser effect on chemical weapons. But Mr. Erdmann found it unwieldy -- a "bugs-to-bleach" ratio of as much as 1-to-1 would be needed, requiring a squadron of huge C-5 cargo jets to get the "super-bleach" to the target. Another worry was that battlefield dust would absorb an indeterminable amount of the bleach bomb, allowing some of the biological agentsand a tiny amount can be lethal -- to survive and kill unsuspecting bystanders or American troops.

After review, only eight of the original 58 ideas had been discarded as totally farfetched. The remainder were put to three more tests: Was the cost prohibitive? What sort of military intelligence would have to be gathered to use the weapon and measure its effectiveness? Would the idea work against a wide enough array of chemical and biological agents?

LIMITS OF THEORY

Cost ruled out one of the team's favorite ideas, "Ace," for "Array of Conventional Explosives." Suggested by an Energy Department laboratory, it was designed to bury weapons stored deep underground.

Most potential adversaries hide their weapons of mass destruction in caves or underground bunkers. The Ace idea was to hit such targets with a ring of 20 or more deep-penetrating bombs carrying warheads that would explode simultaneously. This barrage would mimic the "ground shock" effects of a nuclear device, creating a localized earthquake that would collapse the entryways and tunnels of an underground weapons stockpile.

But analysis determined Ace would be difficult and expensive. To bury a target, everything would have to go right, which rarely happens in war. And execution would require dozens of munitions delivered by at least four B-2 "Stealth" bombers that cost $2.2 billion apiece.

The intelligence analysis saw another basic flaw: If the information on a given target was wrong -- say, if the Air Force's bombs were programmed to blow off at 100 feet below the surface but the chemical and biological weapons were actually stored at a shallower depth -- then a raid could blow off under the weapons. This would "spew them all over the countryside" with potentially a huge loss of life, concludes Mr. Martinez.

If explosives are the answer, the next problem is the impact on civilians nearby. What effect would a given weapon have on the weapons targeted -- would it kill half the anthrax, or 99% of it, or all of it? And, what effect would any leftovers, no matter how little, have on bystanders?

The team spent the bulk of its budget developing elaborate computer models showing how much of the agent would be destroyed, how much released into the atmosphere over how great an area for how long and how lethal that remainder would be. The system was dubbed "VIPER" for "Venting from Internal Pressure due to Energetic Reactions." Though not all the reactions technically involved energy, the name stuck, says project engineer Gilbert Garcia, because "it sounds cool."

The answers came encrusted in uncertainties. If you kill 80% of a smallpox stockpile, say, and singe the rest, how long will the surviving bugs live, and how nasty will those weakened bugs be? To the team this was the "nines" issue. "How many `nines' [of an agent] do you need to kill?" asks Mr. Martinez. "Ninety-nine percent? 99.9? Or 99.999? Because with some of them, a very small amount can still be lethal to humans."

By July 1997 the team had winnowed the original 58 ideas to 28. They subjected these to rigorous tests for effectiveness.

HOT PROSPECTS

One that had held promise was a flying ultraviolet laser that called for a two-pronged approach: Use a conventional bomb to blast a biological agent into the air, then quickly burn that cloud of viruses or spores with an airborne laser carried by a drone aircraft.

But the simulated laser worked better against viruses than against spores. Worse, some parts of the cloud obscured other parts, making it impossible to burn all the agent before it began to blow away. Computer models indicated that the battleground haze and smoke would exacerbate this "masking" problem. The idea was shelved as not viable for now.

After a third round of cuts, the surviving ideas were combined into eight considered viable, affordable and effective-six were new technologies, two were new ways to use existing technology.

These eight survivors, thought to be workable, are now being tested in boardroom "war game" simulations of attacks against four real-world targets in Iraq, North Korea and elsewhere. The games' purpose is to inject realism -- how would you actually do it? And, especially, what would happen if things went wrong?

But when proposals begin to look feasible, "they move into the black world," says Mr. Martinez, declining to answer further questions. Behind him on a shelf in the vault are 40 fat reports on the project, each marked in red "Classified."

Still, the logic of the team's work points to two likely possibilities. A hightech idea the team calls "the Buck Rogers solution" involves "emitters" -- a broad category covering everything from low-level radiation to extremely low-frequency vibrators that can break down the bonds of hazardous chemicals into harmless substances. Feasibility and expense are concerns, but this sort of solution is likely to be the long-term goal.

In the interim, the team probably will propose what they call "the Fred Flintstone solution," an allusion to the old TV cartoon. It calls for a one-two punchan incendiary bomb loaded with solid rocket fuel to hit a target and burn as much material as possible, followed a few minutes later by a heavy penetrating bomb to go off well under the weapons bunker, collapsing it on itself and burying whatever remains.

But even this quick-and-dirty solution is "harder to do then you think," warns Mr. Martinez. Experts worry that the flash from a single bomb may last only a few seconds-not long enough to kill biological agents or disassociate chemical bonds. Defense Department experts say that a "heat spike" of at least 2,000 degrees for one to two minutes is needed to do that. Since the U.S. doesn't have a bomb now that can maintain that sort of "sustained burn," the idea is to do it with two -- which means pilots would need to get two bombs to the same place near the same time.

And partial success could make gathering postbombing intelligence hard: If only one bomb worked, the target would look the same from the air -- a blackened, twisted mess -- but most of the anthrax, say, might have survived. To tell whether the necessary heat spike had been generated, the team may propose a third step-having a drone aircraft circle and measure the postattack temperature.

The final step in the project will be to anticipate moves an adversary might make to defeat the new U.S. weapon. If it became clear that a U.S. attack depended on, say, boiling off an enemy's chemicals or biological agents, the adversary could parry by surrounding its weapons with thousands of gallons of water to absorb much of the heat. Similarly, the "Fred Flintstone" approach of fire and rubble might encourage adversaries to store weapons in the open air, where it is harder to sustain high temperatures. Yet open-air sites would be easier to hit with cluster bombs and other weapons -- one reason the U.S. wants to keep adversaries guessing.