Sao Paulo
The United States government announced it will develop a new nuclear bomb to be used specifically against bunkers and underground command centers proliferating among its rivals in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
To that end, it will have a destructive capacity greater than that of the main freefall tactical model used by the country, which, along with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, is the largest nuclear power. Together they house almost 90% of the world’s weapons of this type.
According to an announcement by the Defense Department on Friday (27), the new weapon still requires congressional approval for its development. There is no estimated cost yet, but the goal is clear.
“The B6113 will be usable by modern aircraft, increasing deterrence of adversaries and confidence of allies by giving the President additional options against certain larger and tougher military targets,” the statement said. “It will replace some of the B617s in the current arsenal and should have similar performance to the B617, greater than that of the B6112,” the text completes.
The alphabet soup explains the equation. In the American name, B refers to a gravity bomb that is fired from aircraft and falls on the target with or without directional aid. The 61 is the model, in this case the year of its development (1961), while the 13 indicates the version.
The American arsenal of this type of weapon today includes five active models. The most modern is the B6112, whose production began two years ago and which costs almost R$ 150 million per unit. As tactical weapons aimed at destroying lowerpower military targets, as opposed to strategic weapons that attempt to end wars by wiping out entire cities, they are not subject to any control treaty and their total number is unknown.
The renowned FAS (Federation of American Scientists) estimates that perhaps 1,800 of the 5,244 US warheads (active, stored and retired) are tactical, 100 of them in bases of Washington’s six allies in the NATO military alliance in Europe.
Russia, the organization said, has a tactical arsenal of 2,000 bombs near its European borders. As a legacy of the Cold War, Moscow has a total of 5,889 nuclear weapons. At the beginning of the year, Putin canceled the last strategic warhead control treaty, New Start, but promised to maintain the current nominal limits, with around 1,550 units ready for immediate use.
Using nuclear rhetoric, the Russians tried to dissuade the West from supporting Ukraine in the war it started last year and also persuaded the country’s parliament to lift the outright ban on new nuclear tests the US has the treaty on this one Issue never ratified.
Finally, there is always speculation that the Kremlin could use a tactical weapon in the event of an imminent defeat in Ukraine. This year, Putin positioned such warheads in neighboring Belarus.
The mentioned B617 has an adjustable force estimated by analysts to be between 10 and 340 kilotons, slightly less than the Hiroshima bomb at 23 kilotons. The B6112 was designed to have a yield of just 0.3 kilotons (50 times less than the first weapon used in the war) to 50 kilotons (just over three Hiroshimas).
The smaller power counterintuitively made the B6112 a politically dangerous weapon because it was consistent with the 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review, which emphasized the use of smaller bombs and was interpreted as a tacit admission of their use in war.
When the U.S. attacked submarines armed with a lowpowered version of the W76 in 2020, Russia responded by saying it would consider any missile launches from those U.S. ships as a potential nuclear attack which, according to the country’s doctrine, means massive retaliation.
In fact, there is speculation that the new bomb could finally phase out the B83, a powerful gravity weapon (80 Hiroshimas) that is considered a relic of the Cold War because it only has one power without being used by bombers while also tactical weapons are carried by fighters such as the modern F35 or the old Panavia Tornado.
The focus of the new pump is on reinforced structures. Putin, for example, opened his new underground nuclear command center in Moscow in 2018, the year new weapons were introduced. Analysis of satellite images shows that China is dotting regions of the country with reinforced missile silos.
Not only nuclear powers, but also the smaller and more aggressive North Korea are in the crosshairs. Iran, which is technically one step away from being able to build its bomb, has several underground military development centers.
But it is the Chinese and their Russian allies who are the main recipients of American actions. Last week, the US Congress released a report estimating 500 bombs were dropped from Beijing, the world’s thirdlargest power. The FAS speaks of 320. The Pentagon, in turn, assumes that at the current rate the Chinese will have a nuclear force equivalent to that of Moscow and Washington in 2035.
This worries experts who are not suspected of being supporters of Putin or Xi Jinping. Andrew Facini (Strategic Risk Council, USA) wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, an American reference publication on the subject, that the US is taking risks with what he called an “obsession with Chinese capabilities”.
“By simply pursuing expanded capabilities, the United States could end up on the wrong side of the stabilityinstability paradox and risk escalation to nuclear war, whether intended or not,” he said. In his opinion, the way forward is to reduce tensions, not to create a fleet of nuclear submarines for Australia, as envisaged in the Aukus trilateral military agreement with the United Kingdom and the Oceanian nation.
This Monday (30), Russian Defense Minister Serguei Choigu explained at a military forum in China that the Aukus and the Quad alliance (USA, Japan, India and Australia) aim to wage wars in the AsiaPacific region, as well as movements against the North expand Korea. “After provoking an acute crisis in Europe, the West is trying to expand potential conflicts in the region,” he said, referring to the Russian narrative that the Ukraine war was defensive.