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United States III: New Development Could Reinvigorate Scientists, Experts Say The Bush administration’s plans to restart designing and producing nuclear weapons could help U.S. laboratories regain an intellectual edge lost by a lack of nuclear weapon research in the last 10 years, USA Today reported yesterday (see GSN, March 15). “Nobody wants to work here,” said Tom Thomson, a senior weapons designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “There’s no sense of mission.” Starting next month, nuclear weapons scientists will begin designing a nuclear weapon that could destroy bunkers buried deep underground, according to USA Today. The administration’s proposed fiscal 2003 budget raises U.S. Energy Department funding for nuclear stockpile work to $1.2 billion, up 18 percent. The Bush administration has also proposed $243 million to rebuild the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex in fiscal 2003. The Bush administration wants nuclear weapon scientists involved in the new projects to “think more broadly” about current threats and “the present stockpile and whether it’s properly configured,” said Everet Beckner, deputy director of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton tried to halt intellectual decline among U.S. weapon scientists through programs that evaluated the safety and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without having to resort to testing, according to USA Today. Those programs included the world’s largest laser at Lawrence Livermore, expensive non-nuclear explosive facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and supercomputing initiatives to create better 3-D models of nuclear explosions (see GSN, March 11). Such programs, however, only slowed down the departure of weapons scientists from laboratories, administration officials said. “To keep people thinking at the front edge of their intellectual interests, it’s important that they not be constrained to think only in terms of what’s out there, already built,” Beckner said. The Bush administration’s plans to develop new nuclear weapons carries far more risks than are justified by the benefit of providing new work for scientists, according to some critics. “Getting nuclear weapons untangled from old Cold War doctrines and putting them on the shelf for use is a huge departure from the past,” said Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official. Developing new weapons also could increase the need for testing, according to USA Today. Building a new weapon and then not testing it is like designing a new car without turning the ignition to determine if it works, Thompson said. Recently leaked excerpts from the Nuclear Posture Review also hint that any new weapons might have to be tested (see GSN, March 14). “While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future,” the document said (Jonathan Weisman, USA Today, March 18).
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