Fiddling While the Nation’s Nuclear Weapons Complex ‘Burns’ Down: O’Leary’s Last Denuclearization Shot?

(Washington, D.C.): It is perhaps fitting, if
reprehensible, that Secretary of Energy Hazel O’Leary —
the Clinton Administration official most committed to the
idea of radical denuclearization — is making one more
effort to sabotage the Nation’s nuclear weapons program
on her way out the door. On 25 November, Mrs. O’Leary
announced that she remains unsure of the extent of
radiation that may have leaked into the Alaskan
environment as a result of an American underground
nuclear weapons testing facility in the Aleutian Islands
thirty years ago.

So, who does Secretary O’Leary intend to have
investigate this issue? Greenpeace — a group she
reflexively tries to legitimate by calling it a
“stakeholder” when it is, in fact, one of the
world’s most rabidly
anti-nuclear/anti-industrial/anti-Western environmental
activist organizations. She proposes to allow Greenpeace
access to soil samples from the area so it can make its
own, independent assessment of how much
radiation is in the area.

Set aside for the moment the question of whether Mrs.
O’Leary really believes that Greenpeace will refrain from
using such test results — irrespective of what they show
— to claim that irreversible damage has been done to the
environment, and thereby bolster their extreme political
agenda. The more important point is that Hazel O’Leary’s
latest decision is symptomatic of her four-year
“stewardship” of the Nation’s nuclear secrets
and stockpile: Mrs. O’Leary has consistently used
her tenure as Secretary of Energy to undermine public
confidence in the U.S. nuclear weapons program even as
she has systematically acted — through policy decisions,
budgetary actions and programmatic steps — to jeopardize
that program’s ability over time to maintain the safety,
reliability and credibility of this Nation’s nuclear
deterrent.

‘Erosion by Design’

Concerns about Mrs. O’Leary’s — and the entire
Clinton Administration’s — irresponsible stewardship of
America’s nuclear stockpile have been repeatedly raised
in the past by the Center for Security Policy. href=”96-T120.html#N_1_”>⁽¹⁾ Such concerns
were authoritatively validated by a House National
Security Committee study released on 30 October 1996 by
Committee’s Chairman Floyd Spence (R-SC). The title of
Rep. Spence’s report says it all: “The
Clinton Administration and Stockpile Stewardship: Erosion
by Design.” In releasing the report,
Chairman Spence noted that:

“The past four years have witnessed the
dramatic decline of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and
the uniquely skilled workforce that is responsible for
maintaining our nuclear deterrent. The
Administration’s laissez-faire approach to
stewardship of the nuclear stockpile, within the broader
context of its support for a Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty, is clearly threatening the Nation’s long-term
ability to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear
stockpile….In my mind, it’s no longer a
question of the Administration’s ‘benign neglect’ of our
Nation’s nuclear forces, but instead, a compelling case
can be made that it is a matter of ‘erosion by
design.‘” (Emphasis added.)

That such erosion is “no accident” can be
seen in Secretary O’Leary’s choice of like-minded
individuals drawn from the ranks of the United States top
anti-nuclear organizations to staff the senior ranks of
her department. Predictably,⁽²⁾
they have used their offices to subject the Nation’s
nuclear weapons complex, as Rep. Spence suggests, not
merely to “benign neglect,” but to a
purposeful wrecking operation. Among the actions
taken by O’Leary and Company over the past four years in
their efforts unilaterally to denuclearize the
Untied States have been:

Nuclear Testing

Mrs. O’Leary’s support for the permanent
cessation of U.S. nuclear testing. As the Spence
report notes: “The Administration has given higher
priority to concluding a CTBT than to maintaining the
nuclear testing regime that ensured the safety and
reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile over the past
fifty years. As North Korea, Pakistan, Israel and South
Africa have demonstrated by developing nuclear weapons
without testing, the CTBT will not inhibit nuclear
proliferation and cannot be effectively verified.
Moreover, although the President formally conditioned
U.S. acceptance of a CTBT on a series of safeguards, the
Administration has failed to act when faced with events
that should have triggered those safeguards.”

What is more, as those opposed to the United States’
remaining a nuclear power well appreciate, it is
not possible to retain confidence over time in the
safety, reliability and effectiveness of the Nation’s
deterrent posture without periodic underground nuclear
testing. For this reason, the directors of the
national laboratories — who are charged with certifying
that America’s deterrent forces meet these rigorous
standards — have consistently recommended against a
Comprehensive Test Ban that would preclude all such
testing.

They did, that is, until last year. In the
spring of 1995, Hazel O’Leary appears to have prevailed
upon the DOE laboratories to change their traditional
view of the necessity for nuclear testing. The reason had
nothing to do with the technical merits of the case,
however. Instead, it evidently was a function of
the level of resources the labs could expect to receive
from the Energy Department: If they continued to
support the need for testing, the lab directors could
take their chances on getting the associated resources.

On the other hand, if the directors chose to provide
the Administration political cover for its no-testing
campaign, their laboratories stood to receive a piece of
the billions of dollars O’Leary and Company pledged to
provide what amounts to an R&D slush fund for an
ill-defined activity she calls (ironically)
“stockpile stewardship.” href=”96-T120.html#N_3_”>⁽³⁾

Unfortunately, there is little reason for confidence
that Mrs. O’Leary’s team would live up to its promise to
mitigate the dangers associated with a no-testing
environment — even if it could confidently do so. As the
Spence report put it:

“The Clinton Administration’s Stockpile
Stewardship and Management Program (SSMP) entails
significant technological risks and uncertainties.
Certification that U.S. nuclear weapons are safe and
reliable — in the context of a Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty — depends upon developing highly advanced
scientific diagnostic tools that do not yet exist and
may not work as advertised. Funding shortfalls, legal
challenges and other problems are almost certain to
continue to impede progress in achieving the
program’s ambitious goals, and raise serious doubts
about the ability of the program to serve as an
effective substitute for nuclear testing. The
Administration’s commitment to implementing the SSMP
and, more broadly, to maintaining the U.S. nuclear
stockpile is called into question by DOE’s failure to
adequately fund the SSMP and to conduct important
experiments.”

Dismantling the DOE Weapons Complex

As a result largely of decisions taken by Mrs.
O’Leary, the United States could not now perform volume
production of nuclear weapons. Worse yet, at her
direction, the U.S. will continue to postpone the work
necessary to bring on-line a new, reliable source of
tritium — a radioactive gas essential to the effective
operation of the existing American arsenal.
Surely Secretary O’Leary understands that the upshot of
her decision to defer taking such steps for at least
three years will be not only to compel further
cannibalization and deep unilateral reductions in the
U.S. nuclear stockpile. It may condemn the Nation to a
trajectory that makes the realization of the
denuclearizers’ surreal dream — a world
“unthreatened” by American nuclear
power — virtually unavoidable.

The National Security Committee report describes this
problem in the following, ominous terms:

“Unprecedented reductions and disruptive
reorganizations in the nuclear weapons scientific and
industrial base have compromised the ability to
maintain a safe and reliable nuclear stockpile. The
cessation of nuclear-related production and
manufacturing activities has resulted in the loss of
thousands of jobs and critical capabilities….DOE
still lacks concrete plans for resuming the
production of tritium….Unlike Russia or
China, the United States no longer retains the
capacity for large-scale plutonium ‘pit’ production
and DOE’s plans to reconstitute such a capacity may
be inadequate.”

O’Leary’s Glasnost Campaign

Mrs. O’Leary has pursued policies that effectively
equate the protection of the Nation’s vital secrets with
“repression.” Her insistence on
indiscriminately declassifying vast quantities of
heretofore classified nuclear weapons-related information
has virtually assured that nations and subnational groups
are garnering an undesirably enhanced understanding of
U.S. designs, developmental experiences, capabilities and
vulnerabilities. At one point, deadlines
arbitrarily imposed by the Secretary obliged security
personnel to declassify documents by the box-full rather
than evaluate each one page by page.

Of particular concern is the fact that Mrs.
O’Leary’s glasnost campaign has made public
precise information concerning the quantities and
whereabouts of U.S. plutonium and highly enriched uranium
stocks. At the same time, her Department has
significantly reduced the budget available for securing
and protecting those sites. The Center for Security
Policy has been informed that one reason for these cuts
has been the Clinton Administration’s diversion of scarce
resources from U.S. programs to fund the Cooperative
Threat Reduction initiative (frequently called the
Nunn-Lugar program).⁽⁴⁾
In this manner, she has effectively invited
attacks on these facilities and left them significantly
able to thwart such attacks — with potentially ominous
implications for the local communities and/or for the
effort to staunch the proliferation of radiological,
atomic or thermonuclear weapons.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy applauds the initiative
of Chairman Spence and urges his and other cognizant
congressional committees to make a stem-to-stern
review of Hazel O’Leary’s legacy of denuclearization a
top priority for the new Congress. In
particular, the Senate must ensure that the individual
who replaces Mrs. O’Leary after 20 January 1997 as
Secretary of Energy is someone who, for a change, both
recognizes the importance of and fully supports
that Department’s continuing responsibility for
maintaining a safe, credible and effective nuclear
deterrent. And, last but hardly least, that
individual must enjoy the steadfast support of both
the executive and the legislative branches in taking
the myriad, time-consuming and, regrettably, costly
actions required to fulfill that responsibility.

– 30 –

1. See, for example, Waste,
Fraud and Abuse: D.O.E.’s Mismanagement of Nuclear
Clean-Up Facilitates Denuclearization Agenda
(No. 95-D 29, 25 April
1995) and The Most Important Justification
for Firing Hazel O’Leary: Her Role in Denuclearizing the
United States ( href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_90″>No. 95-D 90, 10 November
1995).

2. See U.S.
‘De-Nuclearization’: Who is Minding the Store?
(No. 93-D 103, 9
December 1993).

3. In the case of Lawrence
Livermore, the inducement was even more dramatic. After
Livermore played ball on testing, Secretary O’Leary
dropped her announced intention to close down the lab.

4. Mrs. O’Leary’s budget cuts have
also significantly diminished her Department’s ability to
monitor the quantities of special nuclear materials in
its facilities. As a result, there is a distinct — and
growing — possibility that such materials could be
diverted or stolen from American as well as
Russian facilities.