Illustration by Kurt Mitchell
Illustration by Kurt Mitchell
Click here to see the full text of The Nuclear Safety Smokescreen, a 49-page report issued by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). The report was written by Hisham Zerriffi, a graduate student at McGill University and a former staff scientist at IEER, and Arjun Makhijani, president of IEER.
The major goal of the comprehensive test ban (CTB) treaty may be to prevent would-be nuclear powers from conducting the nuclear weapons tests that are considered critical to the successful development of a nuclear program. But the CTB has also been praised as a way to freeze new weapons development among the current nuclear powers, putting an end to the qualitative aspects of the arms race.
As the Bulletin went to press in late July, it looked as if the world might finally get a CTB, some 42 years after it was first proposed by India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Delegates from 37 countries were meeting at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in a last-ditch attempt to craft a CTB in time to present it at the fifty-first U.N. General Assembly meeting in September.
The United States has been a supporter of the treaty during these negotiations. But when the CTB was endorsed by the Clinton administration in August 1995, the United States kept its options open, reserving the right to exit the treaty "if the safety or reliability of our nuclear deterrent could no longer be certified." If the secretaries of the Defense and Energy Departments inform the president that they no longer have a "high level of confidence" in the safety or reliability of a nuclear weapon type critical to nuclear deterrence, "the president, in consultation with Congress, would be prepared to withdraw from the CTBT under the standard 'supreme national interest' clause in order to conduct whatever testing might be required," an August 1995 White House fact sheet explains.
Certifying the safety and reliability of the U.S. stockpile will be the job of the Energy Department's newly established Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, which includes experimental facilities to study nuclear components and a large-scale computing project to more accurately model nuclear weapons.
The Energy Department says that this program is critical to maintaining the stockpile, and certainly no reasonable person could argue against a program to maintain its safety. After all, the accidental detonation of a nuclear warhead would have devastating consequences.
But there is more to this Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program than mere certification. It may, in fact, be a multi-billion-dollar effort designed to keep the nuclear-weapons enterprise alive and well far into the future .
It will be the role of directors of the nuclear-weapon laboratories to advise the secretaries of Energy and Defense as to whether a "high level of confidence" in safety or reliability is lacking. The long hostility of the labs to a test ban--a hostility that flowered in the 1950s and remained in full bloom until just a year or two ago--reflects their commitment to extending the life and role of nuclear weapons--and the life and role of the labs.
For example, in recent testimony before Congress, C. Bruce Tarter, director of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory said that a program was under way to extend the life of a particular warhead "so that it may remain part of the enduring stockpile beyond the year 2025 and will meet anticipated future requirements for the system." In the same testimony Tarter said that "the laboratories and plants are developing comprehensive life-extension plans for each weapons system slated for the enduring stockpile."
By giving the vast resources of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program to those with interests in conflict with the goals of a ban on weapons development and the eventual dismantlement of the arsenal, the program may mean that the CTB treaty contains the seeds of its own demise before it is even signed.
In fact, official historical data, obtained from the Energy Department through the Freedom of Information Act and analyzed by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) suggests that the certification of safety and reliability may be scarcely more than a smokescreen behind which the nuclear weapons laboratories are hiding an extensive program to build up their capability to design new nuclear warheads.
According to IEER's findings, the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program is designed to maintain nuclear warheads and weapons designers indefinitely, increase the Energy Department's capability to conduct experiments that could be used in designing new warheads, and perhaps insure the reliability of the nuclear arsenal for possible use in a nuclear first strike.
The far-ranging agenda of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program could have serious repercussions for nuclear nonproliferation, including the viability of the CTB, as well as U.S. commitments under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for "good faith" negotiations toward nuclear disarmament.
A large Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program could also create friction between the United States and Russia or China. Neither country has the funds to greatly expand their nuclear design infrastructure, and their inability to compete with the United States in nuclear experimentation may ultimately lead them to resist progress toward disarmament. It also may provide them with an incentive to resume nuclear tests.
While the Energy Department often uses the terms "safety" and "reliability" interchangeably, they are, in fact, distinct concepts. Moreover, while safety is essentially a technical issue, reliability has political and military overtones.
The Energy Department defined safety in a 1995 document as "minimizing the possibility that a nuclear weapon will be exposed to accidents and preventing the possibility of nuclear yield or plutonium dispersal should there be an accident involving a nuclear weapon." The Energy Department's criteria for nuclear weapons says that warheads must have less than a one-in-a-billion chance of prematurely detonating with a force of more than four pounds of TNT prior to launch under normal conditions, and less than a one-in-a-million probability under abnormal conditions such as a fire or an accident.
The Energy Department has an even more exacting definition of reliability. It is the "ability of an item to perform a required function." Central to that is the concept of "successful performance," which is defined, in part, "as detonation at the desired yield (or higher) at the target," according to Sandia National Lab's 1993 Nuclear Weapon Reliability Evaluation Methodology Guide.
If there is even a small chance that an explosion could be slightly less than the rated yield, it is defined as a reliability problem.
But this strict definition of reliability would appear irrelevant if nuclear weapons are maintained simply to deter others from using nuclear weapons. What country would risk retaliation by the United States on the chance that U.S. nuclear weapons might not, in every case, produce their rated yield?
If another purpose of the nuclear arsenal is, however, to actually wage a nuclear war with the option of a preemptive first strike to disable an opponent's "hardened" nuclear forces, a very high degree of accuracy and performance is necessary. Yet neither the Pentagon nor the Energy Department has explained its reliability requirements in the context of larger decisions regarding the political and military purposes of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program is part of the Energy Department's larger Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, which monitors nuclear weapons, provides manufacturing capabilities, and insures an adequate supply of tritium for nuclear warheads. The management program also handles the dismantlement of retired warheads, the replacement of warheads and warhead components, and the production of newly designed or modified warheads.
Another function of the management program is to detect problems with nuclear warheads that might need correcting. Since 1958, the Energy Department has relied mainly on a part of the management program called the Stockpile Evaluation Program to investigate safety and reliability problems. This program monitors warheads during production and after deployment by disassembling them and inspecting their parts. Warheads that are not "destructively examined" are reassembled and returned to the stockpile.
In 1995 the Energy Department argued that a Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program was a "basic need" to meet national security policies that mandate a "safe and reliable stockpile without further nuclear testing and aggressive pursuit of enhanced experimental capabilities." The Defense Department's Nuclear Posture Review, issued in September 1994, also requires the Energy Department to retain the "capability to design, fabricate, and certify new warheads."
To fulfill these goals, the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program will use the design and test facilities the Energy Department already has at its weapons laboratories (Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico, Lawrence Livermore in California, and the test site in Nevada), all of which were previously part of the weapons design program.
But the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program will also include new facilities. The Energy Department plans to add three new hydrodynamic facilities, which are used to study the reliability of nuclear components, to the five it already operates. Two of these five will also be upgraded. These facilities help weapons designers determine the physical behavior of uranium and plutonium under the extreme temperature and pressure conditions found during detonation of a nuclear warhead. Among the new facilities are the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility (DARHT) under construction at Los Alamos, and the proposed Advanced Hydrotest Facility (AHF). DARHT was initially proposed in the 1980s as a weapons design facility.
The Energy Department also plans to expand its high-energy-density facilities, which are used to examine the processes that take place in an explosion, and to develop computer models, which could be used either to predict problems or to validate changes to warheads. The facilities include the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore, with a total life-cycle cost estimated at $4.5 billion, and the Atlas and LANSCE II facilities at Los Alamos.
The total construction cost for the new experimental facilities has been estimated at about $2 billion. That does not, of course, include their annual operating costs. In addition, the price tag of another new project, the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), has been estimated at approximately $2 billion. Its draft program plan states that "ASCI will create virtual testing and prototyping capabilities based on advanced weapons codes and HPC [High Performance Computing]."
According to the Energy Department, these facilities are necessary to insure the safety and reliability of the stockpile in the face of future problems. But what exactly are these problems?
An analysis of the Energy Department's historical data on the causes and the effects of defects in nuclear warheads found 2,400 individual instances of problems. These could be divided into 800 distinct types of problems, of which about 400 were considered serious enough by the Energy Department to justify corrective action. Of the 400 "actionable" defect types, the IEER analyzed the 245 that were associated with safety, reliability, or operation of the warhead.
The Energy Department published its own analyses of this data in 1996, concluding that one or two "actionable" safety or reliability problems are likely be found each year in the future. It adds that the number of defects may rise as the stockpile ages beyond its design life.
The Energy Department foresees two possible sources of future safety problems. First, aging may cause warhead materials to degrade or change. Second, if a problem component is replaced with either a remanufactured or newly designed model, it could affect the safety of the warhead.
But contrary to the Energy Department's concerns, 58 of the 66 safety problem types found were caused by faults in the design of the warheads, in their production, or in their delivery systems.
Only eight safety problems, or 12 percent, were caused by the aging of the warhead, and none of these involved nuclear components. Furthermore, of the eight, six occurred in warheads that have since been retired; only two were found in warheads scheduled to remain in the "enduring" stockpile. One was a problem with the parachute system and the other affected the gas transfer system, which is used to bring in tritium gases to enhance the explosion. Neither of these problems required a retrofit or major design change.
For problems affecting the nuclear components--the warhead's primary and secondary--the data unambiguously show that aging has not affected safety. The primary contains the warhead's fissile material, usually plutonium 239 and/or highly enriched uranium. The secondary contains thermonuclear and fission components that provide additional explosive power.
Of the 38 different types of safety problems found in primaries, 29 were in warheads produced between 1958 and 1963. Part of the explanation for the increase in problems during this period lies, according to retired Lawrence Livermore physicist Ray Kidder, in the 1958-61 U.S.-Soviet testing moratorium, which led both countries to rush weapons into production before designs had been fully tested. These warheads also lacked the modern safety features that later became standard.
The cause of all safety-related problems with primaries has been in their design. Further, only two design problems have been found in warheads scheduled to remain in the arsenal beyond the year 2000 and both have been resolved. The first problem type was found in the eleventh year after production on a W78 warhead and the second was found in a W88 warhead two years after the start of production. Both were fixed by either a retrofit or a major design change.
While these data show little reason for concern, Energy Department officials argue that they may not be a good indication of future problems as the current arsenal will be forced to last for a longer time than it was originally intended.
However, the physical effects of aging, such as metal corrosion or plastic degradation, affect reliability rather than safety. For example, the sensitivity of high explosives, a serious safety concern, "does not increase significantly with age," says Kidder.
Besides aging, the Energy Department foresees potential safety problems from the replacement of components. In some cases, it is possible to replace a component with a spare. If this does not solve the problem, a new component may be designed, creating possible new safety problems. Even changes made to correct reliability problems could result in new safety problems, according to the Energy Department.
The testing necessary to insure the safety of a new non-nuclear component is already being conducted as part of the Stockpile Evaluation Program. Warheads are dismantled and their non-nuclear components are tested at the Sandia National Laboratories, according to Sandia Director C. Paul Robinson.
But to certify modifications to primaries and secondaries, the Energy Department plans to use new computer models developed under the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program. In the past, changes to computer codes were validated using underground testing. Under the new program, the validation of changes will have to rely on previous test data and computer extrapolations.
Some experts argue that this system will provide questionable safety data on new components. In 1994, Sidney Drell and Bob Peurifoy, weapons experts and supporters of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, said that when it comes to primaries and secondaries, "Most importantly, in the case of a test ban, one should not tamper with the device hardware once it has been certified." They went on to advise that "hardware modifications must be avoided."
Last May, Kidder, the retired Lawrence Livermore physicist, said that changes or improvements to primaries and secondaries should not be made for either safety or reliability reasons, unless they are unavoidable.
A majority of the types of defects found according to the Energy Department's data affect the reliability or performance rather than the safety of warheads. Of the 245 problem types, 186 affected reliability. Most of these were discovered in the early years after a new weapon was introduced, and 81 percent were found in non-nuclear components.
In contrast to safety, reliability data indicate that aging accounted for a significant portion of reliability problems--about 24 percent. And the Energy Department says that aging and the replacement of components could create additional reliability problems in the future.
But the existence of a "reliability defect" does not necessarily mean that the reliability of the warhead will be significantly affected. According to the Energy Department, there were "164 'actionable' defect types with reliability reductions associated with them." However, only nine of those defect types reduced the reliability of a warhead by more than 10 percent. In other words, for warheads with the other 155 defect types, there was still more than a 90 percent probability that the warhead would perform as expected. In fact, most reliability problem types have a very minor effect--almost 70 percent reduce reliability by 1 percent or less.
In the past, the majority of reliability problems did not need any corrective action or could be resolved through production changes. New non-nuclear components could be designed and then tested at Sandia, and many nuclear components could be remanufactured. Only 24 percent of the "actionable" defect types affecting reliability resulted in a retrofit or major design change.
But the question arises as to whether the Energy Department should fix reliability problems when the fixes themselves may result in possible safety concerns. In the past, the Energy Department has often accepted reductions in the reliability of a warhead, without detriment to national security as defined by the nuclear establishment. It is reasonable to assume that the Energy Department could do the same in the future, unless some other motivation was at work.
Although the Energy Department has repeatedly stated in a number of public documents that its laboratories are not developing new warheads, a halt to "development" does not necessarily mean a halt to the design of new nuclear warheads. Traditionally there have been seven stages in a warhead's life cycle. Stages one and two are conceptual design stages; warhead development does not begin until stage three.
Further, the halt to the development of new warheads is not necessarily permanent. In fact, it is described by some Energy Department officials as resulting simply from a lack of new orders from the Pentagon, according to a statement from Siegfried Hecker, director of Los Alamos.
Without actual development under the Energy Department's definition, the facilities can be used to modify existing warheads. In addition, new warheads could be prototyped and placed on "stand-by." With this head-start, the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program would allow the United States to introduce new weapons into the arsenal in the next century far more quickly and easily should it decide to withdraw from the CTB and test the new designs.
The Energy Department's potential to continue development work is already being realized. The existing labs continue to develop capabilities that can be integrated into the design process and can be used to make modifications to existing systems and new warheads.
There are currently at least three warheads undergoing modifications. One of these, the B61, is being modified to replace the aging B53, which has a large yield but few modern safety features. Rather than upgrading the B53's safety capacity, the Energy Department plans to enhance the B61's "earth-penetrating" capacity to compensate for its lower yield and make it more effective against underground installations. Press reports suggest that this modified missile may be used against a possible underground Libyan chemical weapons factory, but the Energy Department denies these reports and notes that this modification has been approved for "development" but not "deployment."
The Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program's proposed new experimental facilities and computer simulation capabilities could be used to further explore concepts in weapons design, test some components of warheads, and allow the laboratories to design new warheads with greater confidence.
NIF, for instance, can replicate most parameters of a nuclear weapons test on a small scale. While its total energy is anywhere from 10,000 to one billion times less than that of a real weapon, NIF would allow weapons designers to explore high-energy densities in a laboratory environment and gain information on new warhead concepts without nuclear weapons testing.
Under the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, the Nevada Test Site also will be kept open and in a state of readiness to undertake full-scale nuclear tests on short notice. It would allow the United States to conduct final testing and modification of new weapons in a very short time, if it were to withdraw from the CTB under the "supreme national interest" clause.
In addition to an interest in securing additional weapons-design capabilities, the Energy Department plans to retain and expand its facilities for weapons-effects testing, which simulate environmental conditions during and immediately after nuclear explosions. The experiments are designed to test whether warhead components can survive the extreme conditions that nuclear detonations create.
Weapons-effects tests are usually conducted using particle accelerators or reactors that generate X-rays, gamma rays, and neutrons at varying intensities. Sandia currently operates all eight weapons-effects facilities. Another X-ray facility is being constructed by the Defense Special Weapons Agency (formerly the Defense Nuclear Agency) at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee and a new X-ray facility called Jupiter has been proposed for Sandia. The Energy Department argues that Jupiter would "provide a class of unique X-ray environments that otherwise would be obtained only in underground nuclear tests."
There are no indications in any of the Energy Department documents studied by the IEER that weapons-effects testing has any relevance to maintaining the safety of the existing arsenal. Instead, weapons-effects tests are conducted solely to insure that weapons will perform reliably during nuclear war.
Weapons-effects facilities also can be used for the building of nuclear weapons prototypes. According to its institutional plan for 1996-2001, Sandia says the Jupiter facility could be used to certify "non-nuclear subsystems without underground testing." This was not stated in the context of replacement components, but rather in a discussion of certifying "future or reconfigured strategic systems."
Various official documents support the conclusion that the Energy Department may be planning to use the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program to continue weapons design and weapon-effect testing in the post-CTB era:
The Energy Department's decision to enhance its weapons design capacity was the price the U.S. government decided to pay to get a CTB. "Ultimately, [Energy] Secretary O'Leary made a decision none of her predecessors had been willing to make: Stop the testing despite the opposition of the weapons labs and the politically powerful supporters in Congress and the Pentagon," explains Frank von Hippel, a professor at Princeton University and former White House adviser on nuclear issues, in a Federation of American Scientists' report. "No decision comes without its price, however, and this same meeting [with O'Leary in 1993] produced the seeds of the very costly Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program intended to maintain the competence--and the funding levels of the labs."
But the deal itself may, in the long run, threaten the CTB it was designed to secure. The Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program creates a strong lobby with a vested interest in weapons development that could exert pressure to withdraw from the CTB. Perhaps an inevitable consequence of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program may be that changes to warhead components will be deemed necessary for the continued performance of the arsenal. These changes could in turn cast doubt on warhead safety, eventually leading to pressures to withdraw from the CTB treaty.
In a similar situation, the so-called "Star Wars" lobby is currently threatening the existing Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty by advocating the deployment of a ballistic missile defense system. Pressures for the United States to withdraw from the ABM Treaty have increased since the 1980s, when Star Wars began receiving large sums of money.
The vulnerability of the ABM Treaty to domestic pressure has, in turn, jeopardized the ratification of START II by the Russian Duma. Russia, which lacks the funds to develop and deploy a ballistic missile defense system, has linked its ratification of START II to U.S. adherence to the ABM Treaty. Many in Russia view the Star Wars program as a strategic threat since the potential technical capability of the system is significantly higher than its stated motive to counter possible threats from countries like North Korea and Iran. They fear that the system would allow the United States both to launch a first strike against Russia and defend itself against any retaliation.
Rather than making this potentially dangerous deal with the weapons labs, the Energy Department had other alternatives for maintaining the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. These alternatives did not require the new, expensive facilities of the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, nor the maintenance of nuclear test sites. Instead, the Energy Department could have focused on remanufacturing faulty components and intensifying maintenance of existing warheads under an expanded Stockpile Evaluation Program.
After all, if one truly wanted to maintain a vintage 1950 automobile today, well beyond its design life, the greatest need would be for excellent mechanics, not a new automobile design team. In the past, the Stockpile Evaluation Program was successful in identifying three-fourths of the problems in nuclear warheads after they had been put into production.
As the remaining nuclear superpower, the United States could also secure a more stable CTB, and thus avoid the type of situation now facing the ABM Treaty and START II. To do so, it must clearly renounce its interest in designing new nuclear warheads. This strong commitment by the United States would greatly reduce the risk for future conflicts and instabilities that could threaten an agreement that has already taken 42 years to hammer out.
Back to IPPNW
Bergen Students' Library
Back to IPPNW
Bergen Students' Homepage