The New-Nuke Chorus Tunes Up

The new-nuke chorus tunes up

With the public and much of the news media looking the other way, a small but influential group has been quietly paving the way for a nuclear revival. They want to build a variety of new and improved warheads, including a new generation of highly accurate, ground-penetrating, bunker-busting beauties that, they say, will be able to take out Kim Jong Il's or Saddam Hussein's subterranean hideaways while leaving the rest of Pyongyang or Baghdad unscathed.

The players in this drama include scientists at Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, Energy Department officials, right-wing analysts, former government officials, and a congressionally appointed oversight panel and their friends and allies in Congress. The group wants to make sure that the nuclear enterprise remains alive and kicking for at least another half century.

Achieving this goal—which has not been articulated to the public at large nor submitted to them for their consideration and approval—would require more than just refurbishing existing weapons and developing new ones. A decade-long effort costing as much as $8 billion would be needed just to bring decaying production sites, some dating back to the Manhattan Project, up to current standards. Billions more would be needed, of course, to actually produce and maintain a new generation of nuclear weapons.

The first salvo

One of the first to speak out was Stephen Younger, associate director for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos. In a July 2000 white paper, “Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-First Century,” Younger called for a “fundamental rethinking of the role of nuclear weapons,” and offered his vision of nuclear weapons beginning around 2020, a time scale during which “it is possible to make reasonable projections of technology and some assumptions about the probable threat situation.” 1

Younger says the United States will continue to require nuclear weapons because other countries will still have them or be seeking them, and because conventional weapons, even advanced ones, may not be able to hold at risk important targets like hardened missile silos and deeply buried command bunkers. Ultra-precise delivery systems might permit a substantial reduction in nuclear yields, he says. And simpler designs, possibly “gun-type” uranium weapons (like the one dropped on Hiroshima and later adapted for use in artillery shells), would allow for a significantly smaller weapons complex and reduce the need to handle large amounts of plutonium.

He hastens to add that it will also be necessary “to retain expertise in more sophisticated nuclear designs as a hedge against changing conditions in the future.” Conveniently, if Younger's conclusions are accepted, it would mean steady work (and funding) for the weapons laboratories for the indefinite future.

Although he postulates several scenarios, Younger believes that retaining a sizable nuclear arsenal is the most effective way to deter threats and, should deterrence fail, achieve U.S. military objectives: “It is almost impossible to conceive of technological and political developments that would enable the United States to meet its defense needs in 2020 without nuclear weapons.” (This is particularly true if that's your starting premise as well as your conclusion.)

Younger also considers the possibility that one day long-range ballistic missiles could be used to deliver conventional warheads, but adds dryly that the use of such weapons “against Russia, China, or other nuclear states, would require care, since the appearance of such a weapon on long-range sensors might be indistinguishable from a nuclear attack by the United States.”

Younger thinks that burrowing, low-yield bombs (and other small new nuclear weapons) would deter “some set of potential adversaries,” while relying solely on high-yield weapons like the MX or Trident II missile “could lead to ‘self-deterrence,’” because political leaders might prove unwilling to incinerate thousands or even millions of people to defend U.S. interests. (Nuclear visionaries, like Younger, lauded policies favoring multiple-warhead, high-yield weapons during the Cold War, but have suddenly found them ineffective and/or counterproductive.)

Surgical strikes?

As if in response to Younger's concerns, two Republican senators, Wayne Allard of Colorado and John Warner of Virginia, tucked a provision into last year's Defense Authorization Bill requiring the Defense and Energy Departments to work together to determine “what kind of” weapon should be developed to attack and destroy hardened and/or deeply buried targets. The provision, which was first worded to make it clear that the correct answer was “a nuclear weapon,” was rewritten after Senate Democrats raised objections. The provision was aimed specifically at overturning a 1994 law barring “research and development which could lead to the production … of new low-yield nuclear weapons, including a precision low-yield warhead.” Low yield was defined as “less than five kilotons.” 2

The Defense Department is scheduled to report its findings to Congress in July. Meanwhile, it is also reviewing current U.S. nuclear weapons requirements. Both studies are expected to help define U.S. nuclear policy and requirements during the Bush administration—although the reversion to Democratic control in the Senate may limit, or slow, the implementation of the administration's agenda.

Construction of a line-of-sight pipe for a 1972 underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test site.

The renewed interest in “mini-nukes” is based on two premises. First, some believe that only nuclear weapons can destroy hardened underground targets (they also believe that such targets are numerous and growing). Deterrence is said to be weakened if those targets cannot be credibly held at risk. Second, as Younger points out, low-yield weapons would give policy-makers the option of launching a nuclear strike tailored to take out a discrete target while, in their minds, avoiding massive civilian casualties. But is a surgical nuclear strike possible—or merely wishful thinking?

Sen. Wayne Allard added a provision to the 2001 Defense Authorization Bill intended to overturn a law banning R&D on new, low-yield nuclear weapons

Princeton theoretical physicist Robert W. Nelson recently took a look at that question for the Federation of American Scientists. His conclusion: that “no earth-burrowing missile can penetrate deep enough into the earth to contain an explosion with a nuclear yield even as small as 1 percent of the 15-kiloton Hiroshima weapon. The explosion simply blows out a massive crater of radioactive dirt, which rains down on the local region with an especially intense and deadly fallout.” 3

Nelson used data from the Plowshares program of the 1960s (which sought to demonstrate that nuclear explosives could be used for civilian projects such as digging harbors and canals and stimulating the production of natural gas), as well as data from the 828 underground nuclear tests conducted in Nevada. They show that full containment of a 5-kiloton explosion is only possible if the weapon is detonated at a depth of 650 feet or more. A 1-kiloton weapon must be buried at least 450 feet— and even a 0.1-kiloton weapon must not explode less than 230 feet below the surface to be fully contained. (In addition, these figures are based on optimum conditions—tests in which weapons were placed in specially drilled and sealed shafts in a well-understood geologic environment.)

In tests of the B61-11 gravity bomb, a modified weapon deployed in 1997 and intended to destroy some hardened targets, the bomb burrowed about 20 feet into dry soil after being dropped from an altitude of 40,000 feet. Given the unyielding physical constraints under which such weapons operate, Nelson concluded that a hypothetical 10-foot missile could be expected to penetrate steel and concrete to a depth of some 100 feet at most—too shallow to contain even a very small nuclear explosion.

But facts like these have done little to dampen the enthusiasm with which nuclear proponents have embraced the one significant new mission proposed for nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century. For them, a neat and tidy nuclear strike—a concept eerily reminiscent of the “clean bomb” deception perpetrated by Edward Teller, Ernest O. Lawrence, and others in the 1950s and 1960s—is just around the corner. 4

Tell me what I want to hear

Congressional advocates of nuclear testing and new weapons production have not been particularly subtle. Consider the “Panel to Assess the Reliability, Safety, and Security of the United States Nuclear Stockpile,” created in 1998 by Republican Sen. Jon Kyi of Arizona, a longtime foe of the comprehensive test ban. Known as the “Foster panel” after chairman John Foster, a former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the group was established to “assess whether [the Energy Department's stockpile stewardship program] would prove adequate should the suspension of testing be extended indefinitely under the proposed Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” 5

In its second and most recent report, released in February, the panel recommends, among other things, spending $4 billion to $6 billion over the next decade to “restore needed production capabilities … to meet both current and future workloads”; to construct a small-scale plutonium pit production facility at Los Alamos; to continue design work on new warheads; and to shorten the time needed to prepare for tests at the Nevada Test Site from 24 to 36 months to just three to four months. The Energy Department is reported to be working now on increased preparedness for testing.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has endorsed the panel's recommendations. In a speech on the release of his department's fiscal 2002 budget, Abraham remarked, “We are also improving the department's efforts to reestablish our nation's capability for producing plutonium pits…. We must have the capability to replace this critical weapons component if and when they are needed.” Energy is spending $147 million on pit production at Los Alamos this year and is requesting $218 million for fiscal 2002. 6

Although a renovated facility at Los Alamos will be capable of producing up to 20 pits a year by 2007 (with the first certifiable war reserve weapon to be produced in 2003), last year Energy received $2 million to design a “modern” pit plant capable of producing up to 450 new plutonium cores a year—roughly half the production level of the late Cold War period. This year's request is for another $4 million. 7 As described in Los Alam-os's Institutional Plan fy 2001-fy 2006, ultimately “this campaign will develop an automated, expandable, robust manufacturing capability to produce, without underground testing, stockpiled and new-design pits.”

Aging disgracefully

Other Energy officials have been sounding the alarm. During his mid-March testimony before a Senate subcommittee, Gen. John Gordon, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the semi-independent entity within the department that is now responsible for managing the weapons complex, cited a litany of woes:

The “Foster panel,” appointed by Sen. Jon Kyl, recommends continuing design work on new nuclear weapons.

Only 26 percent of the weapons complex's buildings are in excellent or good condition, down from 56 percent in 1995 (66 percent of these facilities are 25 years old or older; 25 percent date to the 1940s). One laboratory building at Los Alamos wraps pipes carrying radioactive waste in plastic bags to prevent spills and contamination. At the 57-year-old lithium-salt facility at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, concrete chunks routinely fall from the ceiling, endangering workers. And the roofs over the assembly/disassembly bays at Pantex are cracked, allowing rainwater to seep into rooms where nuclear weapons are inspected, repaired, and dismantled, delaying work there. 8

The root cause of all these problems is that over the last 10 years Energy has failed to invest in maintenance, preferring instead to spend money implementing the expensive stockpile stewardship program, which includes such “essential” programs as the $61 million Atlas Pulsed Power Experimental Facility, the $280 million Dual Axis Radiographic Hy-drotest Facility, and the $4.2 billion (and counting) National Ignition Facility.

Two additional factors were at work. First, even though Energy's budget was based on a stockpile of 3,500 deployed strategic warheads, a 1997 Presidential Directive set the level at 6,000 weapons without increasing the department's operating budget. Second, Energy officials changed their minds about shifting the cost of managing now-closed production facilities to the environmental management program, as originally intended, forcing unanticipated costs to come out of each plant's operating budget.

As originally proposed in 1996, stockpile stewardship was supposed to cost an average of $4 billion a year over 10 years (revised to $4.5 billion in September 1997) to maintain the nuclear arsenal without resuming underground testing. But this year, Energy will spend a massive $5.3 billion on stockpile stewardship—$1.3 billion more than the average amount Energy and its predecessor agencies spent each year during the Cold War on a full-blown program that included building hundreds or thousands of new weapons each year and conducting frequent tests. 9

Gordon says the department needs $725 million for maintenance right now, and at least $300 million to $500 million more per year for at least the next 10 years. (A September 2000 audit by the department's Inspector General put the figure at $5 billion to $8 billion over 10 years.) 10 Gordon's argument is remarkably similar to those made by senior Energy officials in 1988 and 1989, when they warned that the deteriorating condition of the weapons complex was an immediate threat to the arsenal. Taxpayers should demand to know why so little maintenance work was accomplished with the money that was appropriated since then. In the meantime, Congress is preparing to allocate even more money to Energy, which now promises that it will fix all its problems for good, really.

The end of arms control?

Also weighing in for new weapons is the National Institute for Public Policy (nipp), a small, private, rightleaning policy organization based in Fairfax, Virginia. NlPP's January report, “Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control,” received special attention in the mainstream media because three of the study's participants were hired by the Bush administration. 11 Like Younger, the nipp gang says they would prefer not to base force-planning assumptions on an unknown future—although the inability to predict the future leads them to hedge their bets at every turn. Unlike Younger, they have a radical solution to the problem.

Nipp's solution is to dispense with arms control altogether and with any outside constraints on U.S. actions or forces. While conceding that significant reductions in the U.S. arsenal could be both possible and beneficial, the report argues that only the United States should determine whether, when, and how to make reductions, and that it must reserve the right to reverse or modify its decisions whenever necessary.

The study's authors argue that in future conflicts, to “ensure that enemy facilities or forces are knocked out and cannot be reconstituted, attacks with nuclear weapons may be necessary. Indeed, in the future the United States may need to field simple, low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons for possible use against select hardened targets such as underground chemical weapons facilities.”

The authors' single-minded focus on safeguarding U.S. nuclear forces and preserving U.S. freedom of action takes them in some interesting directions. For example, they do not champion missile defenses because those defenses would be a means of protecting U.S. citizens, but because they would “increase the survivabili-ty of icbms [intercontinental ballistic missiles] in silos, aircraft at airfields, and submarines in port.” If U.S. weapons were thus defended, they say, it might eventually allow the United States to deploy fewer of them.

The authors also like the idea of a boost-phase missile defense system, seeing it as a potentially “more efficient means of eliminating an enemy's mobile missiles.” Alternatively, they suggest attacking enemy missiles with U.S. nuclear missiles, an approach that would require a fairly large arsenal. They do not mention another, relatively inexpensive and remarkably effective means of destroying offensive missiles—verifiable, bilateral arms reduction agreements.

The authors also disparage arms control agreements for locking in arms reductions. But that, of course, is their purpose—to help create and perpetuate stability and predictability in a world of otherwise uncontrolled competition.

The authors further maintain that the arms control process helps to perpetuate mutual assured destruction (mad) and an adversarial relationship with Russia. While there may be some truth to that argument, it is difficult to see how the removal of all constraints would improve the situation. Moreover, mad is not a policy but an objective reality. How would abandoning the arms control process change that reality for the better?

“Capability two”

On March 7, Paul Robinson, director of Sandia National Laboratories, presented his white paper, “Pursuing a New Nuclear Weapons Policy for the 21st Century,” at the Nuclear Security Decisionmakers' Forum in Albuquerque. 12 Unlike the folks at nipp, Robinson stresses that “nuclear weapons must never be considered as war-fighting tools.” Instead, he says, “Conventional armaments and forces will remain the backbone of U.S. defense forces, but the inherent threat to escalate to nuclear use can help to prevent conflicts from ever starting, can prevent their escalation, as well as bring these conflicts to a swift and certain end.”

Unlike Younger, who suggested that “lowering the threshold for using nuclear weapons … could raise the level of care with which countries interact,” Robinson is emphatic that conventional weapons be steadily improved “in order to raise the threshold for which we would ever consider nuclear use.” On the other hand, in keeping with the paradox of nuclear deterrence, the United States must be able to threaten a nuclear attack to “make it abundantly clear that our actions would have terrible consequences.”

Robinson believes that “nuclear weapons must have an abiding place in the international scene for the foreseeable future” and that for deterrence to be effective it must “be tailored in a different way for each potential aggressor nation.” He recommends maintaining a portion of the current nuclear arsenal as a deterrent to Russian aggression for at least the next 10 years, which he dubs “central deterrence,” or “capability one.” (Interestingly, he argues that the United States “should avoid any action … that could lead China to respond” by increasing its nuclear forces substantially or accelerating its force modernization programs.)

For the rest of the world's threats, Robinson recommends the creation of a second arsenal—a “capability two” or “to whom it may concern” force for use against “any nation or (tar-getable) sub-national entity which, if not otherwise deterred, might be tempted to employ nuclear weapons (or other weapons of mass destruction) against the United States, our forces, or our allies.”

Like Younger, Robinson tries to retain the fig leaf of moral respectability for nuclear weapons by stressing that the United States should tell the world it “will never directly or systematically target civilians.” That thought may comfort scientists like Robinson as well as those responsible for selecting the targets and launching nuclear weapons to rationalize their actions. But, as Bret Lortie reports in “The Do-It-Yourself Siop” (page 22), even a small attack, supposedly on purely military or leadership targets in Russia, would—incidentally—kill many millions of innocent people.

Robinson supports the development of accurate, low-yield (low-kiloton range) weapons for “deterrence in the non-Russian world.” To acquire such weapons quickly and without the need for testing, Robinson suggests that “dummy secondaries” could replace the active thermonuclear components in existing weapons, leaving the weapons' primary or fission components as the sole explosive yield. He also recommends installing Global Positioning System (gps) receivers in new or modified weapons to increase accuracy and thus reduce civilian casualties. Anticipating the day when such weapons might be used, he would thoughtfully add devices on new weapons “that could harmlessly destroy a U.S. warhead without giving a nuclear yield” should it fail to function properly, preventing unintended deaths as well as the accidental transfer of sensitive weapons technology (whether and how this would destroy or render unusable the plutonium or uranium core of the weapon is not explained).

Will they succeed?

Largely silent thus far in the discussion is the military. Since the massive nuclear buildup of the 1950s and 1960s—when virtually anything that could be made into a nuclear weapon was—military leaders have become less and less interested in nuclear weapons. When the elder Bush unilaterally removed thousands of nuclear weapons from Europe and U.S. naval vessels in 1991, no one in the military complained, at least not publicly. They understand that these are weapons of last resort, with little or no military utility.

Apart from some people at U.S. Strategic Command and the navy's strategic submarine community, few in the military have expressed interest in developing nuclear weapons for new missions. And why should they, when they know they command the most lethal conventional fighting force in the world? As a retired air force officer now working under contract for U.S. Space Command told analyst William Arkin recently, “Nukes are not considered a usable viable weapon by anyone any more.” A recent Air Force Academy research paper even suggested scrapping the entire icbm force (now totaling 550 missiles), calling them “aging giants, the relics of the Cold War.” 13

As the full cost of the Bush administration's military modernization plans becomes known—including the costs of deploying missile defenses— it will be interesting to see whether these seminal plans for new nuclear weapons survive. Bush himself has said that the United States “can, and will, change the size, composition, and character of our nuclear forces in a way that reflects the reality that the Cold War is over.” 14 Some have interpreted his references to “composition” and “character” as veiled calls for new weapons, though they might also refer to changes to the strategic triad of icbms, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (slbms), and bombers as well as the alert status of deployed forces.

Is this the last gasp of those who cannot envision a world without nuclear weapons—or is it the start of a new nuclear era, one based on the dangerous, destabilizing, and costly premise that nuclear weapons should be more usable?