While stopping short of overturning his father's moratorium on nuclear testing, U.S. President George W. Bush has catapulted the testing issue back into the political foreground with the Pentagon's new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). Following the NPR's release, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was at pains to point out that Bush "has not ruled out testing in the future."

Although Fleischer and other administration officials are quick to say there are no plans to actually resume underground nuclear testing, the NPR calls for an acceleration in "testing readiness'' so the Department of Energy would be able to resume such tests within a one-year window.

The question is, why? Why spotlight such a controversial issue at this time, when the Bush administration is seeking to win friends and influence people abroad, most importantly those in Russia, with its vow to downsize the U.S. nuclear arsenal?

The administration's repudiation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, signed by 154 nations, already has caused consternation among many U.S. friends and allies who say the treaty helps prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

To be sure, the question of U.S. nuclear testing is something of a vampire in domestic politics, rising from the seeming dead on a regular basis. Every year the Energy Department and the Pentagon must certify the nuclear stockpile as "safe and reliable," and that there is no need to resume the nuclear testing voluntarily abandoned by the United States in 1992. Every year since 1992, the two departments have so certified, and voiced confidence that the Energy Department's "Stockpile Stewardship" program is capable of continuing to ensure this is so.

And nearly every year, a tenacious group of nuclear-laboratory officials, lawmakers and right-wing pundits seek to undermine confidence in the largely computer-based Stockpile Stewardship program's ability to conduct that certification.

In years past, the first President George Bush, and President Bill Clinton, were content to stifle the debate by declaring that they intended to uphold the moratorium. The current Bush administration instead has chosen to highlight not the moratorium itself, but the fact that the moratorium may be lifted.

Administration officials, and the laboratory proponents of testing, publicly argue there is reason for concern about the safety, security and reliability of the aging U.S. warhead arsenal. They also question the ability of the current maintenance and refurbishing regime to find warhead problems.

On the latter issue, they received some ammunition in the form of an Energy Department inspector general report, publicly released Jan. 2, showing that the National Nuclear Security Agency was behind in its weapon surveillance work. The agency oversees the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

While troublesome, the delays in the non-nuclear test regime do not, as some have sought to claim, automatically mean there are problems with U.S. warheads, or that renewed underground nuclear testing is now needed. In fact, even before the 1992 moratorium, underground nuclear testing was not the primary method of certifying stockpile safety and reliability.

According to Sidney Drell, a theoretical physicist and long-time adviser to the Department of Energy, the weapon labs and Congress on Stockpile Stewardship, only about 10 percent of the 150 to 200 U.S. underground nuclear explosive tests of modern weapons from 1972 to 1992 were those on deployed warheads. Instead, the bulk of the tests were used in designing and proving new nuclear weapons.

So, the question must be asked: Is concern about the current nuclear arsenal the real driver for the testing debate? There is evidence of another motivation — the desire to develop a new class of U.S. nuclear weapons.

A study released in January 2001 by the National Institute for Public Policy, "The Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control," a group that reads like a Who's Who of today's administration and Bush's informal nuclear policy advisers, argued for development of "simple, low-yield, precision-guided nuclear weapons for possible use against select hardened targets such as underground biological weapons facilities."

Proponents of a so-called mini-nuke successfully spurred Congress to demand that the Defense and Energy departments issue a report on "Defeat of Hard and Deeply Buried Targets" in order to raise the issue.

The study touts nuclear weapons as having "a unique ability to destroy both agent containers and CBW [chemical/biological weapon] agents."

The study further notes that several Energy Department labs have been participating in the Air Force's research on so-called "Agent Defeat Weapons" designed to take out CBW facilities, and that the Defense and Energy departments "continue to consider and assess nuclear concepts that could address the validated mission needs."

The administration's flirtation with a new nuke was partially confirmed by J.D. Crouch, Pentagon assistant secretary, in releasing the NPR's unclassified version. While stating the NPR makes no recommendations about a new nuclear weapon, Crouch told reporters Jan. 8 that "We are trying to look at a number of initiatives. One would be to modify an existing weapon, to give it greater capability against … hard and deeply buried targets."

If the desire for a bunker-busting mini-nuke is the reason for today's assault on the nuclear testing moratorium, the administration should say so. There likely would be even more serious international security repercussions from a U.S. decision to build new nuclear weapons than from a decision to renew testing.

One troubling scenario would be the abandonment of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by a number of non-nuclear nations. And given the NPR's new emphasis on non-nuclear strike capabilities made possible by today's ever-improving precision-guidance weapons, would pursuing new nuclear options make sense even from a unilateral force-structure perspective?

The questions surrounding new nuclear weapons, and nuclear testing, require a full and public airing. The Bush administration should not be allowed a disingenuous and semi-stealthy slide into policy changes of such major national security import.
 

By Theresa Hitchens CDI Vice President thitchens@cdi.org

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