Warning to the Nuclear Labs: Don’t Count on ‘Stockpile Stewardship’ to Maintain Either Overhead Or Confidence

(Washington, D.C.): The New York Times yesterday gave its top weekly editorial billing to the
next installment of the anti-nuclear crusade: Dismembering the Stockpile Stewardship Program
(or SSP, which was formerly known as the Stockpile Stewardship Management Program). This
program amount to the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories’ Judas silver — the purchase
price for their agreement to reverse decades-long opposition to the Comprehensive Test
Ban (CTB).⁽¹⁾

To be sure, the Times pays lip service to the need for “some spending” in order “to keep old
[nuclear] weapons ready for use.” It correctly observes that “as long as there are nuclear
weapons, the countries that possess them must be confident that their warheads are useable and
credible to any potential foe.”

Objective: ‘Disinventing’ Nuclear Weapons

The newspaper none-the-less echoes the catechism of the nuclear abolitionists — or, more
precisely, the nuclear “disinventors” — who contend that “the program devised by the Clinton
Administration and Congress is extravagant.” The Times urges that funding for the cornerstone
of the SSP, the $2.2 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, be reduced lest such funding be used “to subsidize unrelated experimentation or allow
any effort to design and build more advanced weapons.” The editorial goes on to applaud a
Congressional Budget Office analysis that recommends not only dispensing with the NIF, but also
“consolidat[ing] work at one of the existing labs” — in other words, closing down Lawrence
Livermore, altogether.

These recommendations should be seen for what they are: a prescription for the further,
complete “denuclearization” of the United States. Without the measures necessary regularly
to assure the reliability and effectiveness of the existing nuclear deterrent — to say nothing of
introducing continuous improvements that will enhance its safety and credibility — the U.S.
arsenal will, in not too many years, become unsustainable and ineffectual as a means of
deterring aggression and other grievous threats.

The Bottom Line

The other message sent by the Times’ lead editorial is to the laboratories and their champions, like
Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM): Don’t count on the denuclearizers to keep their part of this
Faustian bargain. The only hope of satisfying the labs’ parochial interest in maintaining their
vast overhead, let alone in meeting their responsibility to certify the reliability of the nuclear
stockpile, is to tell the trust about the Comprehensive Test Ban: A responsible and effective
Stockpile Stewardship Program requires an on-going program of low-yield underground testing,
at least until such time as the various high-tech facilities and technology envisioned under the
present SSP are fully validated.

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1. See the Center’s Decision Brief entitled The Real Scandal at the O’Leary Energy
Department: The Secretary’s Shakedown of the Nuclear Labs Over CTB (No. 97-D 121, 2
September 1997).