Admiral Gene LaRocque (USN, Ret.),
Pres., Center for Defense Information
HOST:
Admiral John Shanahan (USN, Ret.)
Director, Center for Defense Information
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH:
David T. Johnson
DIRECTOR of TELEVISION:
Mark Sugg
SENIOR PRODUCER & NARRATOR:
Ira Shorr
PRODUCERS:
Glenn Baker
Daniel Sagalyn
Stephen Sapienza
PRINCIPAL ANALYST & SCRIPTWRITER:
Martin Calhoun
SEGMENT PRODUCER:
Stephen Sapienza
VIDEO GRAPHICS:
Adam Luther
ORIGINATION:
Washington, D.C.
PROGRAM NO.:
826
INITIAL BROADCAST:
12 March 1995
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information).
(C) Copyright 1995, Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
Videotapes also available.
JACKIE CABASSO
Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation
TOM ZAMORA COLLINA
Executive Director, Institute for Science and International Security
CHARLES CURTIS
Under-Secretary, US Department of Energy
FRANK GAFFNEY
President, Center for Security Policy
Now with the Cold War over and with plans to reduce the size of the US nuclear arsenal, what is the future of America's nuclear weapons complex? And, what does the future hold for nuclear weapons?
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
ADM JOHN SHANAHAN: I find as I move about the country that there is little concern about our nuclear weapons. Granted, the United States and Russia no longer target each other, and that is a small step in the right direction. But there are other significant issues that need to be considered: The reliability and safety of nuclear weapons. The cleanup of what nuclear weapons production facilities. And, of course, the environment. There could be trouble out there in "River City." Our program today looks at the management of our strategic nuclear arsenal.
[From video of "Trinity" test]
NARRATOR: "Scientists of many nations -- American, British, Canadian and those driven from their homes by Nazi persecution -- have perfected the atomic bomb, the most astounding development of scientific history. First try out of this new cosmic force was held on the New Mexico desert, only 20 days before it devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in its first combat test. It is night...
"Army cameras six miles away record the historic explosion. This is the end result of years spent on research..."
NARRATOR: For more than four decades after scientists exploded the first atom bomb in the New Mexico desert, special factories turned out nuclear weapons like America's automotive companies turn out cars. First under the direction of the Atomic Energy Commission, and then later under the Department of Energy, or DOE, America's nuclear weapons assembly lines ran continuously, producing, over time, nearly 70,000 warheads.
By the late 1980s, however, these nuclear assembly lines had ground to a halt. A massive nuclear buildup ordered by the Reagan administration in the early eighties had pushed the DOE weapons complex beyond its physical limits. Revelations about serious environmental and safety problems resulted in much of the complex being shut down:
...the Hanford Reservation in Washington state.
...the Idaho Chemical Processing Plant in Idaho.
...the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.
...the Fernald and Mound plants in Ohio.
...the Savannah River site in South Carolina.
...and the Pinellas Plant in Florida.
Today, all of these former weapons production sites are closed, in most cases permanently. Their sole or primary mission now is to clean up their radioactive and toxic chemical pollution.
Cleaning up the contamination throughout the nuclear weapons complex is an enormous task, one which the Department of Energy estimates may ultimately cost anywhere from $350 billion over the next 75 years. DOE currently spends more than $6 billion annually on environmental activities.
Meanwhile, the end of the Cold War and progress in nuclear arms control have also have an impact on the weapons complex. Proposed reductions in the number of US weapons under the recently concluded Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties will shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal by more than 60 percent. Meanwhile, in September 1992, the United States conducted its 1,054th, and what could be its final, nuclear weapons test.
A national moratorium precluding such tests in the United States was recently extended by President Clinton for an additional year. And in Geneva, representatives of the United States and other nations are meeting to negotiate a global Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a ban on the production of special nuclear, or "fissile," materials for weapons purposes.
What has all of this meant for the nuclear weapons complex?
CHARLES CURTIS: The Department of Energy nuclear weapons complex is undergoing a very significant transition in the post-Cold War environment.
NARRATOR: Charles Curtis is Under-Secretary of the US Department of Energy in the Clinton administration.
Mr. CURTIS: We are no longer producing new weapons, nor designing new weapons, and we are no longer producing new nuclear material for weapons. And we are engaged in a very significant dismantlement of our existing arsenal. That has led to a reconfiguration of the department, closures of our production facilities, turning those facilities over to the cleanup responsibilities of our Office of Environmental Management.
NARRATOR: Despite these tremendous changes, the Department of Energy's 1996 budget request to Congress for $17.8 billion still contained $3.6 billion for defense programs, or about $1 billion more than DOE will spend on civilian energy research. This is intended to finance what DOE refers to as "stockpile stewardship and management."
Mr. CURTIS: The president has made it very clear that the maintenance of a US nuclear deterrent is a cornerstone of our national security responsibility. And it is the department's responsibility, in turn, to assure that deterrent that is distributed in our armed forces is safe, and reliable, and assured.
That is an activity that involves what we call stockpile stewardship and management, maintaining a robust support for the safety and reliability of our continuing nuclear deterrent. We continue to have an important role for national security purposes to be played by nuclear weapons and we continue to support what we call the enduring stockpile of those weapons.
NARRATOR: The requirement for stockpile stewardship was put forth in a July 1993 radio address by President Clinton, who stated,
President BILL CLINTON:
"To assure that our nuclear deterrent remains unquestioned under a test ban, we will explore other means of maintaining our confidence in the safety, the reliability and the performance of our own weapons."
NARRATOR: Congress quickly responded with legislation, formally establishing a Stockpile Stewardship Program under the Department of Energy. As a major part of this program, DOE laboratories are working to develop substitutes for full scale nuclear testing.
Mr. CURTIS: One of our great challenges is to develop proxies for underground testing, scientific proxies and facilities that will allow us to, in essence, meet our stewardship responsibility that I referred to before to confidently assure the safety and reliability of the stockpile, but now without underground testing.
NARRATOR: The Department of Energy's 1996 budget request included $55 million for preliminary design of a $1.8 billion national ignition facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. A stadium-sized complex which will house the world's most powerful laser, the National Ignition Facility is one of several new weapons-related research projects currently or soon to be underway at DOE's Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories.
Tom Zamora Collina is executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on the DOE weapons complex. He explains the Department of Energy's rationales for the National Ignition Facility.
TOM ZAMORA COLLINA: Its justifications are many. One is to simulate certain aspects of nuclear weapons explosions, such as the secondary phase, as well as the possibility of having fusion power in the future, because it's a part of the inertial confinement fusion program. And thirdly, just as a basic science research facility, just as an interesting thing to do that scientists will be interested in and keep them at the laboratories.
NARRATOR: Although the National Ignition Facility and other projects associated with stockpile stewardship may prove beneficial in some respects, there may also have a negative impact on arms control goals, such as a comprehensive test ban, or CTB.
Mr. COLLINA: Some of the new concepts may, indeed, subvert a CTB. And the most significant of those is hydro-nuclear experiments, which actually don't take a new facility. They would be done underground at the Nevada Test Site if, in fact, they are done. The problem with these tests is if they are done at a high enough yield, they are considered nuclear tests.
If all five of the nuclear weapons states agree on a high enough yield, you wind up with a low threshold test ban treaty, and this is something that would not go over well in Geneva where the test ban is under negotiation.
NARRATOR: Jackie Cabasso is convinced that the real purpose behind the Department of Energy's concept of stockpile steward-ship has little to do with assuring safe and reliable nuclear weapons. Rather, she believes, it's about maintaining the capability to design and produce new weapons.
Cabasso is executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, an environmental and disarmament advocacy group located near the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California.
JACKIE CABASSO: Taken together, the data that can be generated through these programs, in conjunction with the super-fast super-computers that are going to be built to process the information, give the US full nuclear weapons design capability for the future. And by maintaining these full nuclear weapons research, development, testing and production capabilities at the laboratories, we are ensuring an architecture for a continuing nuclear arms race in the future should political realities change.
INTERVIEWER: Is there still nuclear weapons research and design work taking place?
Mr. CURTIS: There is still nuclear weapons research. There is design work of the character that contemplates testing and challenging our design teams so that they maintain their muscle tone, their fiber. But we are not designing new weapons, but we are doing exercises that maintains that capability for design. The world is an uncertain place. It may change. Our capacity to build down this arsenal may change as world events may change, and we need, therefore, to maintain the capacity to reconstitute our nuclear force if that should be required.
Mr. COLLINA: You have weapons research and designers still in the labs who literally have not much else to do. And so, they're doing paper studies, back-of-the-envelope calculations, work on their computers. Whether this is a good or bad thing really depends on how far they're taking this work. To the extent that it's not being used to produce nuclear weapons designs into production, it's really not that much of a problematic thing.
NARRATOR: For Jackie Cabasso, the most important question is, "What is legitimate stockpile stewardship?"
Ms. CABASSO: Our definition of that is that stockpile stewardship means passive caretaking of the existing arsenal under safe conditions while it awaits disablement and dismantle-ment pursuant to our obligations under Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
And what are the requirements of that kind of passive stockpile stewardship? The requirements are primarily inspectors and guards.
NARRATOR: What are the appropriate future roles for the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories: Lawrence Livermore in California, and Los Alamos, and Sandia in New Mexico?
How might these labs, which have sometimes been described as "national treasures," best be utilized to serve national security and the national interest?
Should they be redirected from weapons work to other areas? Should one or more of the labs be shut down? And should federal funding, about $1 billion per lab each year, be discontinued?
These are some of the questions that were recently studied by a Special Task Force on Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories, also known as the Galvin Task Force.
BOB GALVIN (at 1 February '95 Task Force press conference): "The Task Force was asked to propose alternate futures for the Department of Energy laboratories. Our study revealed the laboratories and the department require a clearer focussed mission. We see the laboratories as having clearer areas of expertise, yet limited to their traditional mission areas."
Mr. CURTIS: What the Task Force very clearly concluded is that these labs are vital, they do important and excellent work, and they are in that respect a considerable scientific talent pool for this nation.
NARRATOR: The Task Force's specific recommendations regarding the laboratories included that none of them should be closed, that the labs should continue to be funded with public money, and that weapons design work should be phased out at Lawrence Livermore and consolidated at Los Alamos. Livermore, meanwhile, would continue to work on other security matters, such as non-proliferation, treaty verification and intelligence support.
Mr. GALVIN (at same press conference): "Independent assessment of safety and reliability issues will be an ongoing requirement. However, peer review, in and of itself, does not justify the existence of two nuclear design laboratories.
"Lawrence Livermore would transfer, as cost-efficiency allows, over the next five years its activities in nuclear materials development and production to the other design laboratory."
NARRATOR: Frank Gaffney believes consolidating nuclear weapons design work in one laboratory would be a mistake. Gaffney is president of the Center for Security Policy, a private policy information and research group. He was formerly a high ranking official in the Reagan administration's Pentagon.
FRANK GAFFNEY: If you are going to pursue, as the Clinton administration has chosen to, a policy in which you don't do nuclear testing, you probably need to redouble your efforts to maintain this technical base of expertise and, in particular, to maintain two competing institutions, two national laboratories that have a competitive interest, if you will, in finding fault with the other's designs, analyses and work, so that you minimize the chances of surprise.
NARRATOR: One thing that Jackie Cabasso feels was omitted from the Galvin Task Force's investigation is input from the local communities that surround the labs, communities with their own ideas about how these labs might best be utilized.
Ms. CABASSO: There are public interest citizen groups who have really tried to take a look at the role of the labs in their communities and what is best for their communities. And they have come up with a variety of suggestions for really changing the mission of the laboratories to environmentally sound, socially beneficial purposes that would also benefit the local communities, in terms of economic development and so on.
Mr. COLLINA: The laboratories have a great potential to do other things other than nuclear weapons research. They have to justify that to Congress. They have to get the money to do it. They can get involved in a lot of the areas that they're already involved in: environmental cleanup research, other basic science activities. And I think they have a great potential if they can convince the Congress that they're the people to do.
NARRATOR: Frank Gaffney, however, believes that the primary focus of the labs should continue to be nuclear weapons.
Mr. GAFFNEY: The nuclear weapons laboratories are extraordinary national assets. I think there's no question that they can and are being used to provide benefit to the nation, given the enormous investment we've made in them over the years. I think, however, that they were created and their first responsibility must remain the preservation of a credible nuclear deterrent capability.
Ms. CABASSO: If the Department of Energy was seriously interested in contributing something to national security, which they claim has always been their central mission, then what they should be doing is science-based non-proliferation. And by that, what I mean is they should be spearheading a global safe energy initiative to develop non-nuclear, renewable, environmentally safe technologies that will be attractive to developing countries as an alternative to nuclear power, which of course is the source of nuclear proliferation.
It's my job, I believe, to refuse to accept the inevitability of nuclear weapons. I think that they're an historical aberration and I think that we can and must get rid of them.
Mr. GAFFNEY: I would not recommend, I don't think anybody can responsibly recommend putting the United States out of the nuclear weapons business.
NARRATOR: Much of the debate over the future of the nation's nuclear weapons complex boils down to one question: What role is there, if any, for nuclear weapons in the post-Cold War world?
The conclusions of a "Nuclear Posture Review," released by the Clinton administration in 1994, offered little indication that the United States is prepared at the present time to move further away from nuclear weapons than it already has.
JOHN DEUTCH, Deputy Secretary of Defense (22 September '94, Nuclear Posture Review press conference):
"Bill Clinton is clear on the fact that nuclear weapons remain part of the post-Cold War world that we have to deal with, that it is important that we retain the nuclear forces forces necessary to deter any possible outcome. The one area where one wants to have continuity of policies and programs is the nuclear programs of this country."
NARRATOR: A further indication that the US is planning on having nuclear weapons far into the future is the Department of Energy's request for $50 million in 1996 to develop a new source of tritium, a radioactive gas used to boost the explosive power of nuclear warheads. Due to the environmental and safety problems within the DOE weapons complex, the United States has produced no new tritium for warheads since 1988.
Because of tritium's rapid decay rate, it periodically must be replenished in warheads.
Mr. GAFFNEY: All of the modern nuclear weapons in our arsenal today require tritium to be effective. Tritium degrades. If you don't replace it, the weapon will not be effective. It is a mathematical calculation that by sometime in the middle, I believe it is, of the next decade, you will start having your nuclear arsenal go away.
NARRATOR: While there is little debate about whether the United States will at some point in the future need new tritium, agreement is lacking on how soon this will be.
Mr. COLLINA: The debate is how fast we need the tritium, when we need to build the new facility, and might it make more sense to make more efforts on arms reduction to reduce the need for the tritium. And it really comes down to how quickly does the US reduce its arsenal. If we reduce our arsenal quicker than it currently foreseen, then we won't need tritium for quite awhile, because you can take tritium from weapons that are being retired and re-use it in the weapons that are still in the stockpile.
NARRATOR: Some are concerned about how the Department of Energy's development of a new tritium facility and other facets of US stockpile stewardship and management will be interpreted by other countries. They believe this determination by the United States to continue its nuclear weapons program may encourage other nations to do the same.
Ms. CABASSO: It's no secret to the other countries of the world that the US now has the capability to continue to modernize nuclear weapons and even to design new ones without nuclear testing.
Mr. COLLINA: I think what the US does with its weapons complex is looked at very closely by other countries, in terms of trying to find indications that the US is deemphasizing its dependency on nuclear weapons.
NARRATOR: Tom Zamora Collina believes that US nuclear weapons policy should be rethought in a more dramatic way. He suggests steps the United States could take to further reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons.
Mr. COLLINA: For example, a "no first use" pledge would be very useful and something that should be considered much more seriously than it has been.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
Mr. COLLINA: Well, I think particularly in efforts to convince other countries that our weapons are not a danger for them. Which is something very important for the extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, for example, where other countries want to see examples that we are deemphasizing our utility of nuclear weapons and, in fact, saying that our weapons are not useful, they are not useful foreign policy tools.
In addition to that, the most important thing is clear declaration that we are willing to go to deep reductions in nuclear weapons as the next step. Once we're beyond the START II Treaty, we'll still be left with some 3000 deployed nuclear weapons. We really need to make a statement to the rest of the world that we're willing to go much deeper than that.
NARRATOR: With its nuclear weapons production facilities closed, due to environmental and safety problems. With the role of nuclear weapons diminished by arms control accords and with many people seriously questioning the utility of nuclear weapons, some see a dramatic opportunity for working towards a nuclear weapons-free world. And some think it will never happen.
Mr. GAFFNEY: It isn't going to happen so long as people somewhere on this planet have the will to translate readily available technology into lethal weaponry. And I believe that under those circumstances, which I project out into the foreseeable future, we are going to continue to need to have a credible nuclear deterrent.
Ms. CABASSO: We can, if there is the political will, begin to rid ourselves of the threat of nuclear annihilation, which has hung over all of us since 1945. And if we don't take very definitive measures as a nation to show some leadership in delegitimizing nuclear weapons now, when the Cold War is over, when we have the opportunity, then we may miss a chance that will never come again.
ADM SHANAHAN: Last fall, I took part in an independent strategic nuclear weapons posture review. Two points were evident:
First, the United States can safely reduce the number of its strategic nuclear weapons well below the 3500 ceiling called for in START II. And two, that a "no first use" declaration, coupled with greater efforts at onsite verification, could go a long way towards delegitimizing nuclear weapons as weapons of war and, thus, enhance the prospects of nuclear non-proliferation.
For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.
[End of broadcast.]
CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR"
(Center for Defense Information). (C) Copyright 1995. Center for Defense Information. All Rights Reserved.
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