The United States Cannot Maintain a Safe, Reliable and Effective Nuclear Deterrent Without Nuclear Testing

(Washington, D.C.): One of the early agenda items for the next President will be the matter of what to do about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — an accord that was negotiated and signed by Bill Clinton in 1996 but considered to be so fatally flawed that it was rejected by a majority of the U.S. Senate in 1999.

The CTBT will require priority attention even if, as seems likely at the moment, the 43rd President is not Al Gore — who explicitly promised, if elected, to try to ram the CTBT through the Senate as his first order of foreign policy business. George W. Bush, who expressed his opposition to the Treaty when it was being considered by the Senate, must nonetheless address this accord as soon as possible for two pressing reasons:

1) Notwithstanding blithe assurances by the Clinton-Gore Administration and other CTBT proponents, the U.S. nuclear deterrent cannot be sustained indefinitely without a resumption of nuclear testing; and

2) the Administration has stealthily proceeded with the Treaty’s implementation, as though the Senate had approved its ratification, rather than rejected it. As a result, the United States is being inexorably drawn into legal, technical and political arrangements that will make it difficult, if not as a practical matter impossible, for the next President to resume nuclear testing if and when he decides to do so.

The New York Times Confirms Critics’ Warnings about Stockpile Stewardship

Incredibly, the gravity of the problem confronting the Nation’s nuclear forces was documented in a lengthy article in today’s New York Times¹. The following are among the more noteworthy points made in the course of the Times‘ documentation of the inadequacies of the Administration’s so-called Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) (Emphasis added throughout):

• The SSP is not up to the job. “Since [1992, when the United States began a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing], the Nation has evaluated the thousands of warheads in its aging arsenal in a program called science-based stockpile stewardship, using computer simulations, experiments on bomb components and other methods to assess the condition of the weapons without actually exploding them.

  “Program officials have been confident that the stockpile is safe and secure and that the stewardship program can fully maintain the weapons. Now, however, some of the masters of nuclear weapons design are expressing concern over whether this program is up to the task. Concerns about the program take a variety of forms, including criticisms of its underlying technical rationale and warnings that the program’s base of talented scientists is eroding….”

• “A stewardship program with no testing is a religious exercise, not science,’ said Dr. Merri Wood, a senior designer of nuclear weaponry at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Wood said that as the weapons aged, it was becoming impossible to say with certainty that the stockpile was entirely functional. I can’t give anybody a safe period,’ she said of the possibility that some weapons could become unreliable. It could happen at anytime.‘”

  “Dr. Charles Nakhleh, another weapons designer at Los Alamos, said doubts about the stewardship program were widespread among weapons designers. The vast, vast majority would say there are questions you can answer relatively definitively with nuclear testing that would be very difficult to answer without nuclear testing,’ he said.”

• The arsenal was built for a limited shelf-life. “The program is a fiendish technical challenge, and even its backers concede that science-based stockpile stewardship can never offer the certainty of the big explosions. The thousands of bombs in the stockpile are highly complex devices. Each is made up of a forest of electronics and missile components surrounding a sort of atomic fuse, or primary,’ that holds chemical explosives and a fission bomb containing a fuel like plutonium. In addition, there is a secondary,’ whose thermonuclear fusion reaction is set off when the primary explodes.

  “Most of the weapons in the stockpile were not built with longevity in mind. It was expected that they would be replaced by a continuing stream of new and improved designs, checked in tests until weapons production abruptly stopped in 1992. But the basic design of the newest of the bombs, a version called the W-88, received crucial tests in the 1970’s and was fully designed by the mid-1980’s. Production of the weapon ended by 1991. The oldest of the bombs date from 1970.”

• Uncertainties abound. “Assessing the changes can be bewilderingly difficult. The degradation turns symmetrical components shaped like spheres or cylinders into irregular shapes whose properties are a nightmare to model in computer simulations. Inspectors, who typically tear apart one weapon of each design per year and less intrusively check others, find weapons components deteriorating in various ways because the materials age, and because they are exposed to the radioactivity of their own fuel. Even tiny changes in those materials can lead to large changes in bomb performance, weapons designers say.”
• Whistling past the graveyard. “Supporters of the program say that regular inspections of the weapons will turn up any serious problems as the stockpile ages and that those problems can be addressed. You’ll get the warning bell and you’ll know what to do,’ said Dr. Sidney Drell, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who led a study in 1995 that underlies the stewardship program. Dr. Drell said he remained optimistic about scientists’ ability to limit that element of doubt, which he called genuine and serious.’

  “But other experts at the nation’s weapons laboratories are challenging this view. Designers say the sensitivity of the bombs to slight changes means that age could modify the bombs so that they do not work as they are supposed to. While program supporters believe those problems can be found and fixed, virtually everyone agrees that if any major redesign is needed, those new bombs could not be certified as reliable under the current program.

  “Dr. Harold Agnew, a former director of Los Alamos, said that to consider putting those things in the stockpile without testing is nonsense.'”

• Decline is inevitable. “In a blink, I would prefer to go back to testing,’ said Dr. Carol T. Alonso, a weapons designer for 20 years who is now assistant associate director for national security at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

  “Thomas Thomson, a weapons designer at Livermore, said that under the current program, I think you just accept the fact that you’re going to have a decline” in the reliability of the stockpile. “You try to make it as gradual as possible,’ he added.”

• No comparable experience by which to be guided. “Even with all the [advanced diagnostic tools the SSP is supposed to provide], critics say, crucial questions about the performance of aging bombs must still be answered directly by data from old tests. Because bombs this old were never tested, they say, computer simulations cannot definitively determine the seriousness of new types of changes caused by continued aging….

  “Serious questions about the operation of the stockpile program are being heard at all three of the major American weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Livermore and Sandia.

• Brain drain. “As a result [in part of security investigations at the labs and their repercussions] according to officials at the weapons labs and at the Energy Department, which runs them, there has been a flight of scientific talent and a decline of top-flight applicants, problems exacerbated by a rise in lucrative job offers from the private sector. Weapons experts say the frustration over tighter security procedures comes at a particularly unfortunate time, as the scientists who designed and tested the weapons in the stockpile try to pass their knowledge and experience to new caretakers before retiring or dying. We have a five- year window to make this transfer,’ Dr. [Michael] Bernardin, [a senior weapons designer at Los Alamos], said.”
• Remanufacturing not an option. “One way to get around all these criticisms of the program and still avoid testing, some scientists outside the laboratories say, would be simply to remanufacture’ new, nearly exact replicas of existing weapons in the stockpile and replace them on a regular basis as they age. Neither very much science nor underground testing would be necessary.

  “But Dr. Jas Mercer-Smith, a former weapons designer who is deputy associate director for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, said that was easier said than done, since many manufacturing techniques of the past were no longer available, and the copies could in reality be significantly different from the originals. Without the sophisticated scientific analysis of the stockpile stewardship program, he said, nuclear experts could not be sure what effects the changes might have.

• The need for modernization of the stockpile. Dr. Bernardin of Los Alamos said possible new military needs, anything from building nuclear-tipped missile interceptors to replacing an existing weapon completely if it became too old to function, could someday require entirely remade designs as well.

  Supporters of re-manufacture insist that no new designs are needed because the nation’s nuclear deterrent is sufficient. If they are needed, however, the uncertainties and complexities involved in any new designs would inevitably require underground tests, and not just computer simulations, several weapons designers said. Those complexities, Dr. Wood of Los Alamos said, mean that even existing designs are now coming into question. “If this was somebody’s hair clip, I wouldn’t mind as much,” she said. “But it’s not.”

Changing Facts on the Ground

In one of the most brazen of its many affronts to the U.S. Constitution, the Clinton-Gore Administration has spent millions of dollars and untold man-years on the implementation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the year following its rejection by the Senate. Thanks to the work of the U.S. interagency, official representatives to various international forums and special interests, this country has provided critical technical expertise and other forms of support essential to the operations of the multilateral organization being set up to backstop the CTBT.

A President Bush will inevitably be confronted, as a result, with the argument that this entity has been established with U.S. assistance and requires its continued leadership in order to function. The temptation will be great to go along by avoiding a public repudiation of the Treaty and the domestic and international criticism sure to follow.

It would be a serious mistake to accede to this pressure, though. The more the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is institutionalized and the U.S. is implicated in its work, the more illegitimate will appear actions by this country needed to safeguard and modernize its deterrent forces but that contravene the letter and/or the spirit of the CTBT. This back-door Clinton-Gore ratification of the CTBT must not be allowed to go unchallenged.

The Bottom Line

As long as U.S. national security depends upon even a single nuclear weapon, the Nation, and its potential adversaries, are going to have confidence that it will work if it is needed to do so — and, no less importantly, that it will not work under all other circumstances. There is no getting around it: Periodic, safe underground testing is required to have and maintain that confidence.

Candidate Bush pledged to conduct a comprehensive review of America’s nuclear posture. In addition to weighing carefully the wisdom of further deep reductions in the U.S. arsenal and the idea of de- alerting such weapons as remain, President Bush must redirect the Nation’s policy towards nuclear testing.

Specifically, he should make clear — as President Reagan and Mr. Bush’s father did in the past, that nuclear testing is a necessary part of maintaining a credible American nuclear deterrent, not an evil to be curtailed. The United States will not test any more often than is absolutely necessary, but it will conduct such tests when they are deemed necessary.

Mr. Bush should, accordingly, renounce the CTBT and secure its formal removal from the Senate’s calendar of pending business — the only way to establish that this fatally flawed accord will not be allowed to undermine U.S. security in the future.

¹It would have been a public service had the Times seen fit to blow the whistle before the election on the inherent inconsistency between a permanent, “zero-yield” ban on nuclear testing and the requirement to maintain a safe and effective American deterrent for the foreseeable future. Still, given the Times editorial board’s vociferous support for the CTBT, however, and its castigation of Republican Senators many of whose criticisms have now been vindicated by this article, it is little short of a miracle that the paper ran it at all.