US: US President George Bush yesterday signed a $400 billion Defence Authorisation Bill that ends a 10-year ban on research into low-yield nuclear weapons and provides $15 million for research on a new "bunker-buster" nuclear weapon.
Mr Bush later travelled to Colorado to visit families of US soldiers killed in Iraq, before starting a week-long Thanksgiving holiday.
The defence bill, which Congress passed earlier this month, repeals a 1992 US law banning research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons capable of destroying deep underground bunkers. In addition to providing $15 million for a new generation of low-yield nuclear bombs, the Bill includes $6 million for an initiative to enhance different types of radiation and $25m to prepare for a resumption of underground nuclear tests within 18 months of a presidential order.
The US ceased nuclear testing in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and signed a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1995.
The US is currently pressurising Iran and North Korea to halt any nuclear weapons programme and cited the danger of Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons in making the case for invading Iraq.
Mr Bush's visit to the families of military casualties comes after weeks of media criticism of the President for not attending the funerals of US soldiers killed in Iraq. Americans have been horrified by television pictures of the mutilated bodies of two soldiers killed in Mosul on Sunday and then beaten with concrete blocks, recalling the frenzied scene in Somalia in 1993 which turned American against military intervention there.
Also yesterday the US government released 20 prisoners from its post-9/11 internment centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but replaced them with 20 new inmates from unspecified countries, the Pentagon announced.