NEW YORK - Disarmament advocacy groups in the United States scored a major victory this week as Congress decided not to provide any funds for research on a new nuclear weapons program for the coming financial year.

The decision was announced Tuesday by Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, which is engaged in negotiations on the budgetary allocations with the House of Representatives.

"Negotiators working toward an agreement on funding for the Department of Energy next year have agreed to drop funding for continued research on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) project at the request of the National Nuclear Security Administration," said Domenici.

The Administration was asking for $4 million for research on RNEP, also known as "nuclear bunker busters" and "mini-nukes," for the fiscal year 2006, but the House rejected it.

The bunker buster is defined by experts as one with an explosive yield of 5,000 tons of TNT, or one-third the size of the bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.

The Senate subcommittee's decision has been welcomed by peace activists and disarmament advocacy groups.

"This is a major victory for a saner nuclear policy," said Ivan Oelrich of Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a Washington, D.C.-based independent think-tank. "Abandoning RNEP is a big step toward a more rational, safer nuclear policy."

"The elimination of funding for the nuclear bunker buster has been one of the top priorities of the arms control and national security community this year," John Isaacs, senior policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, added. "This is a significant victory for us."

Many independent nuclear scientists consider bunker busters to be dangerous, ineffective, and unneeded. These weapons are not particularly effective at destroying deep underground tunnels, as the proponents of new nuclear policy believe, they say.

Recently, the National Academy of Sciences reported that even megaton bombs could not reliably destroy tunnels more than 300 meters deep. Nations around the world have started putting critical facilities underground in response to precision-guided weapons that virtually made all fixed surface targets vulnerable.

Critics of the bunker buster program argue that any nation that can dig under a hundred meters of hard rock can dig under a kilometer of hard rock. "U.S. nuclear policy simply has no remaining role on the battle field of the future," says Oelrich.

Others fault the U.S. nuclear policy on moral and political grounds.

"We must abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue weapons of mass destruction yet morally acceptable for others to rely on them for security--and indeed to continue to refine their capacities and postulate plans for their use." Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), argued in a recent statement.

ElBaradei's bold and obvious remarks on the U.S. intentions to build a new generation of nuclear weapons earned him the wrath of the Bush administration, which unsuccessfully opposed his reappointment as IAEA chief. ElBaradei and many developing nations are demanding that all declared nuclear weapons states, such as the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., and China, must make drastic cuts in their nuclear arsenals, but their calls for disarmament initiatives have been opposed by Washington.

Despite the end of the Cold War, both the United States and Russia continue to possess thousands of nuclear weapons. Many disarmament groups agree that the lack of political will in Washington and Moscow to introduce major cuts in their arsenals motivate others to pursue nuclear weapons programs.

Despite strong criticism at home and abroad, the Bush administration, however, seems to be in no mood to reverse its plans to build bunker busters.

"The focus will now be with the Defense Department and its research on earth penetrating technology using conventional weaponry," Senator Domenici said, adding that the National Nuclear Security Administration wanted this research to "evolve around more conventional weapons rather than tactical nuclear devices."

With this department change in policy, he said, "we have agreed not to provide the Defense Department with funding for RNEP."

The Republican senator said he expects that the final Energy and Water Appropriation Bill would include language addressing RNEP and the Defense Department capabilities developed at Sandia National Laboratories.

Regardless of whether the bunker buster plans continue or not, arms control advocacy groups regard the transfer of the program from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense in itself as a major step forward.

"The decision to kill the nuclear bunker buster funding is a significant victory for those working for reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons and ending their role as a national security tool except to deter a nuclear attack," said Isaacs.

Copyright © 2005 OneWorld.net.

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