(4)
"Third Generation" weapons that focus nuclear energy into killer beams traveling thousands of miles through space. The dream apparently still lives: The 1994 DOE budget provided for advanced study of a Third Generation-type high-power radio frequency warhead, meant to fry enemy electronics (and people) with microwaves beamed to earth.

The same budget shows entries for the development of three other new nuclear weapons systems, including a precision low-yield warhead. This would be a "low-collateral damage. . .flexible bomb for the B-2" bomber, according to Air Force documents. Last year, a Livermore weaponeer appeared on CNN television discussing a low-yield "earth penetrating" nuclear weapon that could blast, say, Saddam Hussein's bunker without eradicating all of Baghdad. Activists goaded Congress to outlaw lab work on such "bunker-busters"--but only for a year.

And this year? An unfazed Bomb Design Tribe and its Pentagon allies duly erased low-yield weapons from the 1995 DOE budget, asking instead for money for "engineering development and technology demonstrations of new weapon systems [including an] ICBM replacement warhead, gravity-bomb studies, and enhanced safety warheads for the Navy."

These nuclear weapons projects are, of course, only those that are a) far enough along to have their own names and budgets, and b) not among "black budget" projects considered too secret even to be listed. An idea gets to this stage only after much experimentation, so the Bomb Design Tribe continues to push, Cold War or no, for new design and testing tools.

Here's where the National Ignition Facility and its $3 billion's worth of cousin projects fit in. With actual nuclear test explosions outlawed, weaponeers want to use superlasers and other aids to produce the effects of nuclear reactions. In short, the tribe wants new capital equipment in order to advance the cutting edge of its business. Finished, NIF will be the largest single military project ever built at Lawrence Livermore, and a magnet for more weapons talent, money, and work. 