Out in the Nevada desert, while the CIA redoubled its efforts at Area 51 to develop ground sensor technology and infrared tracking techniques to learn more about underground facilities (which also requires the use of drones), the Department of Defense and the Air Force got to work on a different approach. In the 1980s, the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground. Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space and hit a precise target on Earth at ten thousand miles per second. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.
After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs. The unclassified version of the April 1999 report begins, “Underground facilities are being used to conceal and protect critical activities that pose a threat to the United States.” These threats, said JASON, “include the development and storage of weapons of mass destruction, principally nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons,” and also that “the proliferation of such facilities is a legacy of the Gulf War.” What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster—Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.
In January of 2001, the Federation of American Scientists reported their concern over the disclosure that the nuclear weapons laboratories were working on low-yield nukes, or “mini-nukes,” to target underground facilities despite the congressional ban against “research and development which could lead to the production by the United States of a new, low-yield nuclear weapon.” Los Alamos fired back, claiming they could develop a mini-nuke conceptually. “One could design and deploy a new set of nuclear weapons that do not require nuclear testing to be certified,” stated Los Alamos associate director for nuclear weapons Stephen M. Younger, asserting that “such simple devices would be based on a very limited nuclear test database.” The Federation of American Scientists saw Younger’s assertion as improbable: “It seems unlikely that a warhead capable of performing such an extraordinary mission as destroying a deeply buried and hardened bunker could be deployed without full-scale [nuclear] testing” first. On July 1, 2006, Stephen Younger became president of National Security Technologies, or NSTec, the company in charge of operations at the Nevada Test Site, through 2012.