I tried to find a quick excerpt from this essay that could peak interest and summarize the argument but the whole thing is quite informative.. I recommend reading it all the way through.
Dr. Bruce G. Blair, Center for Defense Information President and former ICBM launch control officer, examines U.S. nuclear policy and asks: what is the real driving force behind the administration’s chase for bunker busters and mini-nukes?
– For those that can’t wait for the punch line, this is it (read the essay so you can take it in context):
I'm one of the people who could wait so i read the punchline. It makes perfect sense to me. Millions and millions of dollars and thousands and thousands of hours and hundredes and hundreds of labour have been employed. How then can a civilisation turn its back and say...hmm well actually we'll just send everyone home and shelve Richard Feynman's manuals.
Of course it would be a sin against humanity to allow our knowledge to atrophy, but that is not what is being argued. The argument is that our science does not need to manifest itself in the manner that we are currently forcing it. We don't need nuclear bunker busters, now or in the future. There are better applications for our knowledge. In my opinion, such simplistic things as bunker busters would atrophy our knowledge more than anything for it is stagnation. We need progressive research, it wouldn't be harmful to humanity if the product actually has a non-military application as well...
The security case for mini-nukes is so weak as to suggest perhaps a different motive. In Fort Greeley, Alaska, the administration is slapping up an “operational” national missile defense site that no president in his right mind would ever seriously rely on to intercept an incoming missile. It does, however, intercept the hated ABM Treaty, justifying and solidifying the president’s withdrawal last year. Perhaps mini- nukes have a comparable purpose - to manufacture a need to end the moratorium on nuclear testing initiated by Bush’s father in 1992 and to formally repudiate the hated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996.