What they are doing is testing how a "mini-nuke" bunker buster will act. Fisrtly, will it have the desired effect on the target, secondly what will be the range of the fallout.
Not all nuclear detonations create fallout. To create fallout, the nuclear fireball has to touch the ground, but to destroy a bunker, you need a surface or subsurface detonation. If the nuke is buried deep enough none of the fallout will escape into the atmosphere, but if it is too shallow, then it will create huge amounts of fallout.
The problem is, earth penetrators don't dig very deep:
Destroying a target buried 1,000 feet into rock would require a nuclear weapon with the yield of 100 kilotons. That is 10 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Even the effects of a small bomb would be dramatic. A 1-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated 20 to 50 feet underground would dig a crater the size of Ground Zero in New York and eject 1 million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the air. Detonating a similar weapon on the surface of a city would kill a quarter of a million people and injure hundreds of thousands more.
Nuclear weapons cannot be engineered to penetrate deeply enough to prevent fallout. Based on technical analysis at the Nevada Test Site, a weapon with a 10-kiloton yield must be buried deeper than 850 feet to prevent spewing of radioactive debris. Yet a weapon dropped from a plane at 40,000 feet will penetrate less than 100 feet of loose dirt and less than 30 feet of rock. Ultimately, the depth of penetration is limited by the strength of the missile casing. The deepest our current earth penetrators can burrow is 20 feet of dry earth. Casing made of even the strongest material cannot withstand the physical forces of burrowing through 100 feet of granite, much less 850 feet.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/rnep.htmSo, while Bush and gang talk about the "safe use" of "mini-nukes" that fact is there is NO safe use. No earth pentrators can dig deep enough to prevent huge amounts of fallout, and the depths they CAN dig to require HUGE nukes to destroy a bunker built to withstand such strikes.
So what they are doing with this test is seeing just how far the fallout will go. They KNOW they can't prevent fallout, but if they only target bunkers far enough away from populated areas, then the effects of the fallout can be minimised. At least thats what they hope.
The reality is, they can NOT make mini-nuke "bunker busters" that destroy the target. The most they can hope for is to drop such a weapon at all the known entrances and cut off access to the bunker for some period of time. In the meantime they will have unleashed far greater fallout than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki explosions, because they were airbursts set off at a height designed to prevent the fireball touching the ground.
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