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U.S. Nuclear Weapons Programs Could Require Testing, Official Says By David Ruppe Speaking to Global Security Newswire before his retirement last month, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters Fred Celec said testing might be needed if scientists find that they must design new nuclear warheads because existing ones cannot perform those missions. For targeting deeply buried and hardened facilities, the administration has requested $15 million for fiscal 2004 for the Energy Department’s Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator program. The plan is to study the feasibility of modifying two current weapons, the B-61 and the B-83, to enable them to detonate reliably after withstanding the enormous stress of penetrating the ground. Celec said the program involves “an attempt to use an existing nuclear weapon, … repackaging it in a different bomb casing, so that we would have sufficient confidence in its performance that we would not have to do a nuclear test.” “At the end of the day, we could conceivably arrive to the point where we say, ‘This just won’t work,’” he said, “in which case, we would have to go back to the drawing boards to design a new weapon. And, in that case, we in all probability would need or require a nuclear test.” The administration has also requested $6 million for fiscal 2004 for other nuclear weapons work that would include exploring options for destroying chemical and biological agents with a nuclear weapon. The principal challenge of that task is to create a weapon that will neutralize the targeted agents without dispersing them in the blast, Celec said. “If an existing weapon was [found to be] effective … [then] no, you’re not going to need a nuclear test,” Celec said. “On the other hand, if you say, ‘I’ve got to go design a new nuclear weapon … you probably will have to have a nuclear test,’” he said. Some nuclear weapons experts question Celec’s assertion that nuclear testing would probably be needed in either case, however, saying decades of Cold War research, development and testing have outlined the limitations on developing radically new nuclear weapons capabilities that might enable the United States to overcome the challenges facing either program. While U.S. scientists could design new weapons, they are unlikely to devise ones offering radically improved capabilities that might require testing, according to former Sandia National Laboratories Vice President Robert Peurifoy. “We’re at the end of the road in terms of better weapons. I’m prepared to debate that issue with anyone you name,” said. University of California at Berkeley professor Raymond Jeanloz says experts within the U.S. nuclear community appear convinced their work will not likely lead to testing. “When I have personally talked in the last several weeks with the directors of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, they have very sincerely and in a clear-cut manner expressed their view that they don’t believe anything they’re pursuing is pushing the country toward resuming testing,” he said. Arms Control Concerns The administration’s nuclear weapons programs are currently a hotly debated topic by national security experts in Washington, and particularly in Congress. Critics of the administration’s plans have argued that developing the weapons, and potentially testing them, could undermine or destroy the 188-party 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that bans nuclear weapons from all but five countries. “A decision to resume testing to build low-yield nuclear weapons could deal the regime a fatal blow while providing the United States with a capability of questionable military value,” wrote Jeanloz, Peurifoy, and two other arms control advocates in a March Arms Control Today article. Bush administration officials have said such weapons are needed to counter enemy threats the United States faces from growing numbers of deeply buried facilities and stores of chemical and biological weapons. The Energy Department’s Advanced Concepts Initiative, which incorporates the two efforts, is intended to ensure “that future American presidents have deterrence options to deal with these threats,” said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in March 20 congressional testimony. Congress is expected to decide this month whether to approve the requested appropriations as part of the energy and water appropriations bill. Legislators are also expected to approve a partial repeal of 10-year-old law restricting research, development, testing and production of smaller-yield weapons, contained in the defense authorization bill for 2004 (see GSN, July 17). Earth Penetrator Testing Need Questioned Peurifoy contends that a new weapon requiring resumed nuclear testing should not be needed if the B-61 and B-83 prove unsuitable. He says the United States during the Cold War had designed and tested far sturdier warheads that could be used. “You can start with the W-33, and then you can look up the W-79, the W-82. We did a whole bunch of different tests that produced low-yields that were very rugged but never entered the stockpile,” he said. The three warheads types he cited were designed as nuclear artillery shells. The United States tested one such design in a 1962 test named Aardvark that produced a yield of 40 kilotons. That design was found to withstand as much as 10,000 times the force of gravity, he said. “That would be my candidate if I wanted to build a penetrator, because it’s stronger than hell and produces any yield of interest in terms of low yield,” he said. Celec said he was not aware of a warhead that could withstand 10,000 Gs, and said it would not be possible to build weapons today exactly as they were designed decades ago and so there would be a need to fully test it anyway. “I would argue that because of the changes in procedures and environmental regulations and the sunset technologies, all those sorts of things, what you would end up with is a new weapon. It might look very much like one you had pretty high confidence in, in the past, but I don’t think you’d have sufficient confidence that you wouldn’t say, ‘I think I have to test this,’” he said. Stanford University physicist Sydney Drell challenged part of that view, saying the old designs could be built using old and new technologies and that all of those components outside of the physics package could be tested without resorting to a nuclear weapons explosion. “I believe that all the parts of the weapon outside the physics package not only can be, but must be tested,” he said. “It’s the physics package one’s talking about, that’s the only thing we don’t test,” he said. Peurifoy said there should be no technological obstacles to building a weapon based on the design exploded in the Aardvark test, which was of the simplest type and did not require outdated technologies such as vacuum tubes. “I did not know that uranium has disappeared from the face of the earth. I did not know that gunpowder disappeared from the face of the earth. I did not know that we have no more competent engineers in the United States. Therefore I challenge his argument,” he said. Earth Penetrator Utility Questioned Peurifoy and others also questioned the likelihood that some new earth penetrator with radically different capabilities that would allow it to be both highly effective and minimally destructive in terms of collateral damage could be developed. “Technically, my argument is that this is a very difficult task that cannot be successfully achieved without producing large radioactive damage,” he said. With respect to the Aardvark design, he said, “You could detune it if you wished to produce anything less than 40 kilotons if you wanted. The problem is you could not kill much underground. And you certainly cannot kill things [underground] without producing large amounts of radioactive fallout in the area.” A very large weapon producing massive fallout would be needed to reach deep targets, while a low-yield weapon would not likely destroy a deep bunker but would still produce significant fallout, says David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists. He calculates that for at least one type of soil, a one-kiloton weapon exploding 35 feet underground would disperse 60,000 tons of radioactive debris and destroy bunkers buried as deep as 80 feet. To reach a bunker at 240 feet, a 100-kiloton weapon would be needed, but that would spew 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris. The smaller weapon might destroy chemical and biological agents within a radius of 15 to 30 feet. The larger one might destroy those within 20 to 40 feet. Beyond those distances, the agents would likely be dispersed if they were within the blast range, he said. Celec agreed that using any earth-penetrating weapon would certainly produce radioactive fallout, but he said the lesser fallout from a low-yield weapon would be preferable to other alternatives, such as a large-yield nuclear weapon, a warhead exploded above ground or a conventional weapon that cannot reach deep targets. He also said the United States has identified scenarios in which using a nuclear weapon to collapse an underground facility holding chemical or biological agents would save many more lives than it would take. “We’ve looked at some very specific targets around the world and the casualties from an earth penetrator destroying a particular target is in the hundreds and if you lofted the agent just using a conventional attack it would be close to a million,” he said. Agent Defeat Doubts Critics did say it is conceivable that testing would be needed if a new weapon were designed for neutralizing chemical and biological agents. They said, however, it is unlikely that nuclear weapons scientists today could design a new warhead radically more effective in an agent-defeating role than anything designed in the past. “What are you going to optimize that people haven’t already optimized before?” said Wright. He cited two recent, separate studies by physicists Michael May of Stanford University and Robert Nelson of the Council on Foreign Relations that concluded that a nuclear attack on buried chemical or biological agents would be more likely to disperse the agents than destroy them, unless the agents’ location was precisely known and struck (see GSN, Aug. 11). At issue are the relative amounts of blast, heat and radiation that nuclear weapons are likely to produce, as well as the physical properties of earth, Wright said. “You can maybe tweak some of these effects, but the point of these two papers is you are not very close to making these things useful,” Wright said. “It comes down to the fact that soil is a very good absorber of radiation and heat and a very good transmitter of blast. It works against you to make the problem intrinsically hard. When people say they are going to work around this, you know, there’s fundamental physics here. The idea that they would somehow figure out something that’s such a breakthrough that would get around those fundamental physics seems questionable,” he said. Peurifoy is so certain that the challenges of developing either weapon cannot be overcome that he suspects senior Bush administration officials just want to restart nuclear testing. “This is simply a smokescreen to find a way to resume yield testing,” he said. Scientists Not Convinced Celec said he was familiar with one of the May and Nelson studies and did not dispute the main conclusion, but said scientists at the national laboratories have not concluded the problem is unsolvable. “The only thing I would say is the very best minds at the nuclear laboratories who do this for a living every day are not as certain as the people who only do this part time,” he said. “[It] would be only after we do the calculations and we do some above ground experiments … permitted experiments, if you will, with high explosives and simulants and things of that nature, that we will be able to draw the conclusion that one, that these are either effective or not, or two, that they could be made effective if we tailored the weapon in some way,” he said.
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