Speaking of pen ises,
this makes me think our leaders are walking ones.
Bush wants nuclear testing "it would be a 'political test' rather than a science test."U.S. ponders resumption of nuke-weapons test
BY DAN STOBER and JONATHAN S. LANDAY
San Jose Mercury News
www.villagevoice.com
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is laying the groundwork for the resumption of nuclear testing and the development of new nuclear weapons, according to a memo obtained by Knight Ridder.
The memorandum circulated recently to members of the Nuclear Weapons Council, a high-level government body that sets policy for nuclear weapons, urges the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories to assess the technical risks associated with maintaining the U.S. arsenal without nuclear testing, which President Bush's father halted in 1992. In addition, the memo suggests that the United States take another look at conducting small nuclear tests, a policy rejected by the Clinton administration.
"We will need to refurbish several aging weapons systems," writes council chairman E.C. Aldridge Jr., the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. "We must also be prepared to respond to new nuclear weapons requirements in the future" - a reference to a push to develop "earth-penetrating" weapons that might destroy buried stocks of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons in countries such as Iraq.
"It's recognizing that the stockpile that we designed 25 or 30 years ago for the Cold War really might not be the stockpile for the war on terrorism," a senior Pentagon official said Friday. "The rest of the world realized after Desert Storm that if you could be seen, you could be killed."
The memo is backed up by little-noticed language in the defense authorization bill that Congress approved this week. The bill suggests that the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories - Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia - should be ready to resume testing with as little as six months notice.
Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the memorandum demonstrates the Bush administration's intention to end the testing moratorium.
"The administration is chipping away at the barriers to a resumption of testing," said Kimball. "They are doing their best to establish a rationale to resume testing, either for reliability problems or for new weapons. The reality is that there is no scientific nor military basis for a resumption of testing, and to do so would be an enormous strategic blunder that would invite a wave of proliferation that could swamp the entire non-proliferation regime."
New testing could prompt the Russians, the Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis to do likewise, or harden North Korea's refusal to abandon its nuclear program, he warned.
But a Pentagon official said there is no movement afoot to resume testing.
"It was just time to go back and collect our thoughts" after 10 years of maintaining the nuclear stockpile without tests conducted beneath the Nevada desert, said Frederick Celec, the deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear matters. "Let's take stock and see where we are. What are the risks involved in not testing?"
Democrats in Congress say that the interest in resumed testing comes not from the uniformed generals or the physicists in the weapons labs, but primarily from conservative civilian leaders, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and advisers such as former defense official Richard Perle and John Foster, a nuclear weapons designer.
Since 1992, weapons scientists in California and New Mexico have used a multibillion-dollar system of supercomputers and large-scaled technology to understand the underlying physics of bombs and missile warheads. The Aldridge memo suggests that this Science Based Stockpile Stewardship program may not be enough. It requests studies "to assess the potential benefits that could be obtained from a return to nuclear testing with regard to weapons safety, security and reliability."
The memo suggests another look at the potential benefits of a "low yield" testing program, which might produce a nuclear explosion equivalent to only a few hundred pounds of conventional explosives. Such tests might involve small amounts of plutonium - not in bomb form - at the Nevada Test Site, according to a well place defense official. So-called sub-critical tests are now designed to produce no nuclear yield at all.
Portions of the defense authorization bill passed Wednesday require nuclear weapons scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere to report if nuclear explosions beneath the Nevada desert might be "helpful" in resolving reliability questions about existing nuclear weapons, even if the tests are technically "unnecessary."
"I don't know of any reason why we can't" maintain the stockpile without testing, Bruce Goodwin, the head of the nuclear weapons program in Livermore, told the San Jose Mercury News. Testing might be required "if somebody came along and said we needed a completely new, ultra-lightweight weapon," he said. "But I don't see anything like that on the horizon."
Although some nuclear weapons scientists unsuccessfully sought permission to conduct low-yield nuclear tests after the testing moratorium began in 1992, Goodwin said he sees no need for it now. "I don't think I would ask for that today. We know a lot more, we're a lot more capable," he said.
Congress this week authorized the three nuclear weapons labs to create preliminary designs for a weapon known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, designed for underground targets. The project involves strengthening existing hydrogen bombs, rather than creating new designs. Livermore weapons designers say they don't expect the project to require nuclear tests.
But critics fear that development of such weapons could increase pressure to resume nuclear testing. The defense bill includes language, inserted by Democrats opposed to the earth penetrator such as Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., that specifically prohibits the scientists from beginning work until a list of written questions is answered, involving the bomb's purpose and targets, and an assessment of whether such targets could be destroyed using non-nuclear weapons.
The authorization bill also tasks the labs to study the costs and benefits of reducing the time required to prepare for a nuclear test to six months, 12 months, 18 months or 24 months. The current "readiness" time is two to three years. In March, an influential Pentagon advisory panel chaired by former defense official and Lawrence Livermore director John Foster recommended a lead time of "no more than three months to a year."
A veteran nuclear weapons physicist said a test designed, built and tested in only six months would be a "political test" rather than a science test. "Historically, in order to do a test in six months you pretty much had to have the device picked out already and have preliminary plans on what to do. How can you predict a problem in advance?" |
