Test Anxiety

In the first few months of the Bush administration international treaties have been falling faster than old-growth trees in the national forests. Now comes word that the Bush administration wants to end the moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and junk the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

In June Bush instructed the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to examine "what it would take to do various kinds of tests on various time scales." The NNSA, a shadowy wing of the Department of Energy, is the agency that manages nuclear weapons research, development, and the testing complex. This examination is part of an ongoing "Nuclear Posture Review" that is becoming increasingly unnerving to many peace activists.

Bush fumed against the test ban treaty repeatedly during his campaign, alleging that it undermined US national security. Although the current moratorium on nuclear testing was put into place as a pre-election ploy by Bush's father in 1992, Bush suggested during the campaign that a new round of testing might be needed.

Since the election, Bush, perhaps not wanting a photo op of him with a mushroom cloud to go along with the one of him turning the tap on arsenic-laden water, has remained stubbornly mute on his personal position on resuming nuclear tests. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney have been less coy. Both have argued that the US needs to resume nuclear testing, alleging that such periodic detonations are necessary to ensure the reliability of the Pentagon's cache of nuclear weapons.

This is an old canard. The only parts of the nuclear stockpile that are likely to deteriorate are the non-nuclear components, which can be, and, in fact, are, regularly tested and evaluated by the weapons teams without encroaching on the terms of the test ban treaty. "All non-nuclear parts to a weapon can be extensively lab tested and replaced as needed--if needed at all," says Jay Coghlan, director of NukeWatch. "The nuclear parts, specifically plutonium, and surrounding high explosives have been found to actually achieve greater stability with age."

The purported rationale for the US nuclear stockpile, which now totals some 12,000 nukes and 10,000 plutonium pits (or triggers), is deterrence.

Coghlan suggests that the real interest of the testing faction isn't to assure reliability, but to shift the US nuclear strategy from deterrence to more tactical uses. "US nuclear weapons are certainly reliable in the sense that they are sure to go off," says Coghlan. "The concern that the military has with reliability is that weapons are not only guaranteed to go off, but explode close to design yield. This is important not for mere deterrence, but for nuclear warfighting, counterforce, and possible first strike capabilities. These weapons are over-designed in terms of yield to begin with for mere deterrence."

One of the great myths of the Clinton era was that Clinton supported total abolition of nuclear testing. In fact, Clinton authorized a series of so-called sub-critical nuclear tests, and a number of other nuclear programs, that quietly flouted the test ban treaty--the very treaty he simultaneously heckled the Senate for failing to approve.

The Bush administration, of course, has no intention of asking the Senate to approve the test ban treaty, where it has languished for more than two years, since it was rejected 51-48 in a partisan vote. But its top arms control negotiator, John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, has also determined that the administration can't unilaterally withdraw the treaty from consideration. The Senate has two options: it can approve the treaty by a two-thirds vote or it can send it back to the president for renegotiation through a simple resolution, which only requires a majority vote.

Currently, 161 nations have signed onto the treaty and 77 nations have ratified it, including all the US's partners in NATO. For the treaty to go into force, it must be approved by 13 other nations. The holdouts include China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and the US. Other leaders at the G-8 summit chided the Bushies on their repudiation of the test ban treaty. But their status as a renegade doesn't seem to have deterred them in the least.

Indeed, in May, the Bush team bullied its NATO allies into a major retreat in its communique on the test ban treaty. In December the ministers had agreed that: "we remain committed to an early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and, in the meanwhile, urge all states to refrain from any acts which would defeat its object and purpose."

The May communique was a sadly diluted document only urging "all states to maintain existing moratoria on nuclear testing."

The exacerbating tensions between the US and the other nuclear nations may lead to an awkward situation this week when the US is scheduled to host the Conference on Accelerating Entry into Force of the Test Ban Treaty, slated for New York City on September 25-27.

Bush has loaded the top levels of his administration with full-blooded nuclear hawks, including Defense Department flacks Douglas Feith, Richard Armitage, and Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom have railed against the limitations of the test ban treaty. The most fanatical of the brood may well be Jack Crouch II, Bush's pick to become Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. In the mid-1990s, Crouch wrote a series of articles attacking the test ban treaty and the testing moratorium. He also wrote that he believed that the US should deploy nuclear weapons in South Korea and consider using them against North Korea if they did not accede to US demands to drop their nuclear and biological warfare programs.

Shortly after taking office, the Bush crowd heard from an advisory committee that had just completed a study on the "reliability, safety, and security" of the US nuclear arsenal. The panel was headed by John Foster, the former director of Lawrence Livermore Labs and former Director of Defense Research and Engineering at the Pentagon. Foster now serves as an adviser to TRW, one of the nation's top defense contractors.

The Foster group urged the administration to begin taking steps to resume testing as quickly as possible and to begin training a new crop of weapons designers who could develop "robust, alternative warheads that will provide a hedge if problems occur in the future." Even though most other nuclear scientists disagree, Foster, a protege of the mad bomber himself, Edward Teller, dismissed computer modeling as a substitute for real nuclear explosions. "There are a number of underground tests that we can't reproduce," Foster told a gathering of weapons designers at the National Defense University in June. "We have these enigmas."

For Foster the answer to every enigma seems to be a nuclear explosion. He is a doomster in almost every respect. He argues that the US nuclear arsenal is aging and growing ever more unreliable. The average age of the US nuclear weapons stockpile is 18 years, which Foster claims is six years older than their intended design life. "They will be many times their design life before they are replaced," Foster said. "We have opened some of the warheads and found some defects that are worrisome." (Though certainly not so worrisome as a prospect of them ever being used.)

Using the Foster report as an excuse, in June the Bush administration instructed the Department of Energy to study how to shorten the time it takes to prepare nuclear tests at the Nevada test site, the 1,350 square mile bombing range 65 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Currently, the DOE says it will take 36 months to resume testing. But hard-liners in the Bush administration, such as Gen. John A. Gordon, Director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, want this reduced to less than 4 months.

Darwin Morgan the chief spokesman for the Nevada Test Site, said that his staff is ready to conduct a range of explosions, from a big blast meant for intimidation to the testing of components and the evaluation of new warheads. "The question is what information do you want back from the test," Morgan said. "If it were to rattle a sword, we could do that fairly quickly."

As the Pentagon moves ever closer towards resumption of testing, Secretary of State Colin Powell continues to chide India and Pakistan about dire consequences if either nation conducts new nuclear tests. "The Nuclear Security Agency's site readiness effort will unfortunately send exactly the wrong message to the would-be testers and test ban treaty hold-out states, including India, Pakistan, and China," says Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Institute. "It leaves the door open to a global chain reaction of nuclear testing, instability, and confrontation in the future."