THE MOST IMPORTANT JUSTIFICATION FOR FIRING HAZEL O’LEARY: HER ROLE IN DENUCLEARIZING THE UNITED STATES

(Washington, D.C.): In the wake of an article in
yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, widespread and
welcome calls have been heard for the resignation of
Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary. The reason? Secretary
O’Leary’s department has spent tens of thousands of
taxpayer dollars on a contract intended to improve her
public relations image and assist in communicating the
departmental party line. This contract involved
compiling, among other things, lists of journalists who
have provided favorable and unfavorable coverage. As Mrs.
O’Leary’s press secretary, Barbara Semedo, put it to the Journal:
“[The lower ratings] meant we weren’t getting our
message across, that we needed to work on this person
a little.” (Emphasis added.)

It is, of course, a travesty that Mrs. O’Leary’s
evident preoccupation with good press would be indulged
(with or without her direct approval) at taxpayer
expense. But even more troubling than the appearance that
certain journalists were to be “worked on” if
they failed to provide favorable copy is the further
confirmation provided by this contract that the
content and timing of decisions by the Secretary of
Energy may be influenced by a desire to manipulate press
and public opinion. Two previous examples of this
practice were Mrs. O’Leary’s highly publicized actions in
December 1993 involving the wholesale declassification of
documents pertaining to U.S. nuclear weapons program and
her assertion that tens of thousands of Americans may
have been secretly subjected to dangerous levels of
radiation.⁽¹⁾

Unfortunately, these decisions reflect more than an
obsession with cultivating positive PR from a generally
anti-nuclear press corps. They are of a piece with many
other steps taken at Mrs. O’Leary’s direction or with her
endorsement that appear to have a far more insidious
purpose: the unilateral denuclearization of the United
States. Taken together, such actions constitute
compelling grounds for securing her immediate termination
as Secretary of Energy.

A Bill of Particulars

Among the recent, troubling denuclearization actions
taken by the O’Leary Energy Department are the following:

• The denuclearizers’ campaign for the permanent
  cessation of U.S. nuclear testing. As those
  opposed to the United States remaining a nuclear
  power 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 this 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 with political cover
for its no-testing campaign, their laboratories
stood to receive a piece of the billions of
dollars O’Leary and Company propose to put into
an R&D slush fund for what she
euphemistically calls “stockpile
stewardship.” 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
the lab down.

• The denuclearizers’ efforts to dismantle the
  production side of the nuclear 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. Perhaps Mrs. O’Leary hopes that
  — by deferring taking such steps for at least
  three years — she can go beyond simply
  compelling further cannibalization and deep
  unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear
  stockpile. She may come close to realizing the
  denuclearizers’ surreal dream: a world
  “unthreatened” by American
  nuclear power.

Fortunately, there is hope that the
Congress will reject at least the tritium
dimension of the denuclearization agenda. A
House task force commissioned by Speaker Newt
Gingrich and led by Rep. Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
has offered a valuable “second
opinion.” It concluded that the United
States can no longer delay work on a new tritium
production reactor that is capable of producing
both tritium for national security purposes and
electricity for the civilian economy. It is very
much to be hoped that this finding will be
translated into legislative action in the near
future.

Most recently, the Clinton denuclearizers
have parlayed regional anger over a series of
French nuclear tests into a formal American
embrace of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone —
an initiative that has been opposed by previous
U.S. administrations. Such opposition stemmed
from the fact that the Treaty is totally
unverifiable, sure to be violated by potentially
hostile powers and inconsistent with the Nation’s
security interests in that part of the world, as
well as other areas which American forces reach
by transiting the Pacific.

While the Clinton team has declared it will
not observe some of the Treaty’s prohibitions, it
seems clear that this denuclearizing
Administration will not long resist demands for
full, rather than selective, U.S. compliance with
the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty — or
appeals to join similar utopian delusions in
Latin America, the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

The net result of these various initiatives — and
others, such as the purposeful demoralization by Mrs.
O’Leary and her anti-nuclear cohort of the Nation’s
technical experts needed to create and maintain a
credible nuclear arsenal combined with incentives for
them to leave government service — are more serious than
any one taken individually. As things stand now, the
Clinton Administration’s legacy to its successor will be
a world rife with rogue nations equipped with dangerous
nuclear capabilities and a less-than-viable American
deterrent.

If such a frightening circumstance is to be
avoided, the Congress had better chart a new course. An
appropriate first step would be to secure a thorough
housecleaning at the Department of Energy, starting with
Hazel O’Leary’s resignation.

(1) Interestingly, when a
presidential commission charged with examining this
evidence issued its report last month, the findings were
decidedly anti-climatic. After an exhaustive review of
tens of thousands of cases, it turns out only about
thirty instances were discovered in which participants in
experiments were exposed to radiation in a manner that
is, by today’s standards, deemed ethically problematic.
While those few episodes may warrant opprobrium, they
hardly justify the witchhunt, hysteria and recriminations
apparently deliberately precipitated by Secretary O’Leary
in furtherance of her denuclearization agenda.