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Excerpts: For example, one simple way for
an adversary to make discrimination impossible is to put the warhead inside a
balloon and deploy it with many additional balloons of different sizes and
surface coatings.(...). Since there would be no way to know why this was so,
there would be no way to know which balloons were empty and which contained
warheads-and discrimination by the kill vehicle's infrared telescope would be
impossible.
This is the central point that backers of missile defense have not been
able to circumvent.
U.S. Nuclear Plan Sees New Weapons And New Targets, NYTimes 
Excerpts: But the report also
indicates that the Pentagon views nuclear weapons as an important element of
military planning.
It stresses a need to develop earth- penetrating nuclear weapons to destroy
heavily fortified underground bunkers, including those that may be used to
store chemical and biological weapons. It calls for improving the intelligence
and targeting systems needed for nuclear strikes and argues that the United
States may need to resume nuclear testing.
Call For New Breed Of Nuclear Arms Faces Hurdles, NYTimes
Excerpts: First, a small
nuclear device, perhaps smaller in explosive power than the Hiroshima bomb, is
not necessarily easy to build. Nuclear arms can be enormously complex and
fragile - akin to personal computers - and making them sturdy enough to
explode only after smashing through layers of solid rock and concrete could
prove a daunting task.(...)
"The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which
rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly
fallout,"
Nuclear Arms For Deterrence Or Fighting?, NYTimes
Excerpts: The Pentagon's new
blueprint on nuclear forces has raised the question whether the Bush
administration is lowering the threshold for using nuclear arms.
In its Nuclear Posture Review, the Pentagon cites the need for new nuclear
arms that could have a lower yield and produce less nuclear fallout. The
weapons, the Pentagon said, could be designed to destroy underground
complexes, including stores of chemical and biological arms. The targets might
be situated in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya or North Korea, a reorientation away
from cold war scenarios involving Russia.
U.S. Tries To Dampen Fear Abroad On Policy, NYTimes
Excerpts: "I think this will
be shocking to most people here," said Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute
of International Relations at Qinghua University in China. "The Bush
administration seems determined to go back toward a cold war strategy."
(...)
That notion of a new American unpredictability flowed through many of the
foreign responses.
One expert said the disclosure was likely to prove a severe embarrassment
to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who has given blanket support to the
American antiterror strategy.
