Recipe for a nuclear disaster

“While Washington remains astir over allegations of Chinese nuclear espionage, the
embattled
Energy Department next month will deliver to the Air Force the first rebuilt versions of
America’s most powerful nuclear warhead, the W-87, 15 years old and now certified to be
effective for 25 more.” This was the lead paragraph in an article by Walter Pincus in The
Washington Post May 22.

Even in a town agog at the sight of pedigreed anti-war liberals demanding the forceful
introduction of ground troops into Serbia, the strikingly friendly report introduced by the above
quote is a stunner. After all, it will be remembered that Walter Pincus is the veteran – and
profoundly anti-nuclear – Post journalist whose critical reporting in the late 1970s helped prevent
U.S. deployment of the so-called “neutron bomb.”

(Interestingly, the communist Chinese evidently had no such aversion to utilizing an
“enhanced
radiation” weapon – one that accomplished its military objectives without the kind of physical
destruction typical of even small-yield nuclear devices or, as Mr. Pincus colorfully put it at the
time, that “killed people while saving the buildings.” China is believed to have stolen the design
for the American neutron bomb, among others, and is said to be deploying components of this
device as part of its aggressive nuclear build-up.)

In fact, the enthusiasm Walter Pincus seems to evince for the introduction of an upgraded
version
of the nation’s “most powerful warhead” is not as bizarre as it appears at first blush. His May 22
article is but the latest in a number of news items he has reported that bear the unmistakable
fingerprints of the Clinton administration’s spinmeisters.

This conclusion arises not merely from the partiality most in the Washington press corps
have
admitted feeling for this Democratic president. Mr. Pincus and his wife, a Clinton political
appointee, are also authentic, long-time Friends of Bill and Hillary. And few prominent national
reporters have been more unabashed than he in his efforts to help with the administration’s
damage-control operations in the national security and intelligence arenas he covers.

Needless to say, there are few areas where the Clinton team has needed as much help in
“manning the pumps” as with respect to the scandal over Chinese penetration of the Energy
Department’s nuclear weapons laboratories and theft of their exceedingly sensitive secrets. The
Sunday talk shows last weekend were riddled with mounting bipartisan criticism – including calls
for the resignation of the attorney general and full accountability for others involved in what is
generally agreed to be the most damaging acts of espionage against this country in its history.
Such criticism can only intensify after today’s release of the in-depth report on China’s
technology acquisition efforts, a report adopted unanimously by a House select committee
chaired by California Republican Rep. Christopher Cox.

What could be more helpful than an article showing that, “while Washington remains astir
over
allegations of Chinese espionage” (itself an extraordinary understatement of the political
environment), the nation’s nuclear business is still being attended to by Energy Secretary Bill
Richardson?

Far from comforting, Mr. Pincus’ report should be deeply distressing to those now
awakening to
the full implications of President Clinton’s disastrous stewardship of the U.S. deterrent. It is
alarming that the Energy Department is certifying as “effective for 25 more years ” nuclear
weapons that have been remanufactured, but not tested via underground detonations. A telltale
sign was the fact that the only source cited by Mr. Pincus as affirming the safety and reliability of
such an approach is Stan Norris, an anti-nuclear activist at the Natural Resources Defense
Council.

No one should be under any illusion. Modern thermonuclear weapons are among the most
complex and temperamental of machines. Our decades of experience with these devices tells us
that replacing aging parts – to say nothing of more substantial updating of components in a
weapon like the MX missile’s W-87 warhead – introduces changes whose effect on performance
cannot be reliably predicted by even the most sophisticated of computer simulations. We have
tried to do without testing in the past and routinely discovered problems, even catastrophic ones,
only after the weapons were subjected to underground tests.

There is only one reason why the United States is poised to deploy nuclear weapons whose
redesign has never been subjected to the only sure proof, an actual underground detonation: The
Clinton administration is determined to ensure that the United States never conducts another
nuclear test. Toward that end, it not only declared in 1993 an open-ended moratorium on such
tests; it has also signed a controversial Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that would, if
approved by the Senate, make that moratorium permanent.

With each passing day, the risks of this approach are increasing. This is especially true as the
U.S. deterrent arsenal becomes increasingly comprised of weapons that are either nearing or
exceeding their design lifespans or that have been refurbished without tests to confirm that they
will actually work. Presumably, this is why for the first time under this president a nuclear
weapons lab director has recently stated that, but for the CTBT, present circumstances would
prompt him to recommend that nuclear tests be conducted to maintain confidence in the nation’s
arsenal.

Dedicated denuclearizers inside and out of the Clinton administration may find such a
deliberate
erosion of our deterrent posture to be desirable. Once alerted to the attendant risks, however,
most Americans and their elected representatives will probably not think this any better an idea
than the administration’s willful inattention to protecting our secrets from foreign spies. It can
only be hoped that the result of all these scandals will be a renewed effort by Congress to provide
the needed adult supervision to those charged with maintaining the nation’s nuclear security.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is the president of the Center for Security Policy and a columnist for The
Washington Times.