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DOE Official Seeks to Clarify Bush Nuclear Program By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — The U.S. Energy Department has no programs or plans for studying or developing new low-yield nuclear weapons capabilities, a senior official told Global Security Newswire this month, echoing complaints by other Bush administration officials that the department is being criticized inaccurately (see GSN, March 22). Officials in numerous forums have insisted this year that a misconception has spread that the controversial work is occurring, possibly resulting from poorly phrased comments by administration officials, poor analysis by nongovernmental experts, and inaccurate reporting by the news media. John Harvey, director of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Policy Planning, at the Energy Department, reiterated in the interview that there are no formal programs under way exploring low-yield nuclear weapons concepts or plans for programs. “We have no studies under way, … with regard to modified weapons [or] with regard to a new low-yield mini-nukes,” he said. The issue however is not cut and dry. Harvey said that scientists at the national nuclear laboratories could be thinking about low-yield concepts, that two nuclear initiatives — one proposed by the Air Force and a self-directed effort at the Los Alamos National Laboratory — could lead to low-yield work, and that the government could at any time initiate basic low-yield nuclear weapons research. “We don’t rule it out. It could happen in the future. I’ll let you know when it does,” he said. What Is Under WayThe prospect of new low-yield work has been controversial both here and abroad, because critics say it suggests that the United States is developing less-destructive nuclear weapons capabilities that the United States could be more likely to use. Such developments, critics say, would undermine efforts to discourage global nuclear weapons proliferation. Harvey said there are four nuclear weapons studies under way or under consideration: * A current study of options for a new or modified high-yield weapon called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (see GSN, March 10); * An NNSA-Air Force study just beginning on modifying a cruise missile nuclear weapon to improve its safety, security and control; * An Air Force request for the National Nuclear Security Administration to study using nuclear weapons to destroy chemical and biological agents in storage (see GSN, Aug. 11, 2003); and * An initiative under way at Los Alamos to explore replacing some existing warheads with longer-lasting ones that would be less likely to require nuclear testing. The latter two projects, Harvey said, could someday lead to low-yield nuclear weapons work. “Now the agent-defeat [weapon study] could conceivably be either for low or high-yield. We don’t know yet. We haven’t looked at it yet. We don’t know what the requirement is,” he said. The Air Force has requested NNSA support for the study, he said, but the agency has “not agreed yet because we need to further clarify what their intent is.” “We will have to establish what the yield should be, and what the characteristics should be, if it’s feasible to employ a nuclear weapon to destroy stocks of chemical or biological agents,” he said. The replacement warhead study underway, Harvey said, has not been formally requested by the Energy Department, but could someday lead to new low- or high-yield weapons to replace existing arms. However, it is now not focused on low-yield questions but on “reliability and replacement work.” Harvey said other unrequested low-yield “thinking” or studies could be under way at all at the national laboratories, but that he was personally unaware of such work. “We ask our laboratories to think creatively about nuclear weapons and concepts and all this in part to make sure that we’re at the forefront and to understand what the possibilities are because we don’t want to be fooled by other nations’ activities. … We don’t ask them to request permission for everything that they think about,” he said. Harvey said the laboratories keep the agency apprised of their work, and NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes said the department was conducting no low-yield work at all. “I can clarify for you right now, as a spokesman for the administrator, that the answer to that is ‘no,’ right now,” he said, noting that NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks speaks weekly with the lab directors on a conference call. “If they [the laboratories] are, then they’re doing it kind of secretly. … We just want the record to be clear,” he said. Misunderstanding AssertedHarvey said there is a widely shared impression that the Energy Department does have low-yield nuclear weapon development plans or programs. “There’s a lot of confusion. When you see the New York Times and the Washington Post say we’re spending $9 million next year to do development of low-yield nuclear weapons, I’m sorry, that conveys an impression, which is simply incorrect. And they don’t print retractions on this, no matter how much we ask them,” he said. The Washington Post, for instance, last month reported Senate authorization “for further research on two new nuclear weapons: a low-yield ‘mini-nuke’ and a high-yield ‘bunker buster’ to destroy deep underground facilities.” Global Security Newswire in April reported low-yield work was “begun this fiscal year” (see GSN, April 29). The presumption has been that such work has or would occur with money requested by the administration for “Advanced Concepts” nuclear weapons research and development through the department. The administration requested $9 million this year for this fiscal 2005 (see GSN, June 28). One roadblock to future work on low-yield nuclear weapons was cleared last year at the administration’s request, when Congress partially repealed a 10-year-old research and development ban that had been sponsored by Representatives John Spratt (D-S.C.) and Elizabeth Furse (D-Ore.) (see GSN, Nov. 7, 2003). “I think [some in the arms control] community and some in Congress have made the mistake of assuming that the repeal of the Spratt-Furse ban meant that they were definitely going to be doing something with low-yield weapons. And I don’t think that they ever really said that,” said analyst Kathy Crandall of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball said the blame lies with the administration. “The extent [to which] there has been some confusion about what low-yield concepts they are doing is because they have not been specific in their budget requests and public statements,” he said. Told of Harvey’s program descriptions in the interview, he called them “the most specific they have gotten about what their objectives are that I have heard.” Apparent InterestBush administration interest in lower-yield weapons capabilities has been expressed in various ways. Excerpts of the administration’s 2002 Nuclear Posture Review argued for the utility of developing lower yield earth-penetrating weapons, which if deeply penetrated “would achieve the same damage while producing less fallout (by a factor of 10 to 20) than would the much larger yield surface burst.” A 1999 planning document prepared by the deputy undersecretary of defense for science and technology noted plans to prepare a tunnel test bed for 2001 to “demonstrate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons capabilities in defeating deep structures using precise, low-yield attacks by HE [high explosive] simulation.” A report by the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board in March argued that nuclear weapons with low yields could be useful for striking deeply buried and hardened bunkers and destroying chemical and biological agent stores while also minimizing collateral damage (see GSN, April 29). The Bush administration’s successful effort to repeal the 1993 Spratt-Furse ban on research and development that could lead to the production of a low-yield nuclear weapon also has been seen to signal interest in exploring such capabilities. NNSA Administrator Brooks last December sent a letter to the laboratories urging they “take advantage” of the ban’s repeal, which provoked bipartisan congressional criticism and a public concession from Brooks that the letter was “poorly written” (see GSN, March 22). Brooks then and has since insisted publicly that the United States is conducting no research and development for low-yield nuclear weapons, and has no immediate plans to do so. Brooks said the repeal was sought because the restrictions had a “chilling effect” on exploring new nuclear concepts (see GSN, May 12). The public record shows that U.S. officials would like to study low-yield concepts, said Hans Kristensen, an analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He suspects that denials of plans and programs are crafted to be technically accurate but misleading about those intentions to avoid criticism at least until after this year’s political season. “They’re just playing games with the public. It’s like launching a missile and [saying] it’s not a missile attack until it hits the ground. It’s lawyer talk,” he said. “We know [the military has] done that kind of stuff before, like in 1993 when they held off on presenting a request to build the [high-yield] B-61-11 [warhead] until Congress changed to build a better political climate,” he said. NNSA spokesman Wilkes said U.S. officials are not playing a “cutesy game of wink wink, we’ll I’ve got something on my desk but … I’ll look at that, you know, next year.” The Arms Control Association’s Kimball said critics are losing sight of the big picture by focusing on the prospect of low-yield nuclear weapons activities. The concern should be about development of any new nuclear weapons or capabilities. “I don’t care whether it is low-yield or high-yield. … The issue is whether the United States needs to, wants to, or is wise to develop new nuclear weapons capabilities for whatever purpose,” he said.
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