New Arms Race Launched In Cyberspace
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of its doomsday clock three minutes closer to midnight. The Clinton Administration’s stated goal of reducing nuclear weapons is being subverted by the Department of Energy’s new efforts to design and manufacture these weapons. Allowing the department to continue on this course could land the United States back in another costly arms race.
At the present time, it is U.S. national policy to pursue a Comprehensive Test Ban on all nuclear weapons and to continue negotiations on reducing the size of our stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons to approximately 3,500 warheads.
This should mean that the United States is going out of the nuclear warhead design and manufacturing business.
However, under the guise of its $1.2 Billion “Science Based Stockpile Stewardship” program, the Department of Energy plans to keep building warheads based on computer simulations.
Meanwhile, the Department of Energy’s budget for nuclear weapons is slated to rise from $3.6 billion in 1996 to over $4 billion by the year 2000 - hardly an indication that the United States will be disarming. The DOE is proceeding in three steps:
First, the department wants to build a $4.5 billion National Ignition Facility to, among other things, test aspects of the initial explosion phase of a nuclear warhead without having to actually detonate nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. Not only would this disarm citizen protests over testing - which, as France has discovered, are not a matter to be taken lightly - but it would also allow U.S. weapons designers to work in secret, thus enabling them to develop new generations of nuclear bombs without public knowledge.
Second, the Department of Energy has proposed a “Strategic Computing Initiative,” at a cost of about $150 million a year, to build a “Terraflop” computer ten thousand times faster than the fastest known computer. This new computer would do three-dimensional models of nuclear explosions and would facilitate warhead design in cyberspace. Any number of new nuclear weapons could be designed and computer tested for viability - all without any overt evidence that these weapons were being developed.
Third, the department’s Sandia Laboratory in New Mexico is hard at work studying the latest dynamic manufacturing models - models that allow the user to quickly and efficiently marshal diverse resources to build new products. Under this system, nuclear warhead production can take place on an almost instantaneous basis.
Add to this program both a new way to cast small numbers of plutonium warhead pits developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the ready existence of tons of bomb-grade plutonium from dismantled warheads, and you end up with designer warheads.
This Department of Energy “mini-production complex” for future warhead manufacturing will be able to design, computer-test, and manufacture nuclear weapons in an environment free from public scrutiny by only using the three highly classified weapon laboratories at Los Alamos, N.M., Livermore, Calif., and Sandia, N.M.
If the Department of Energy and its weapon laboratories succeed in their attempts to implement this program, both the test ban treaty and the limits on the number of nuclear warheads we can keep under Start I and Start II agreements will cease to have any meaning. The U.S. will be able to say it has no nuclear weapons in its arsenal, and yet it will be able to generate new warheads on demand.
The reaction of other nations to this capability will be instantaneous and predictable - another nuclear arms race. The policy implications will be profound.
No agency of the federal government should be able to develop and produce new nuclear weapons without a national debate on how these weapons would be controlled and used, and without close oversight and independent monitoring. Further, the nation as whole must decide if it wishes to accept the risk of finding ourselves again in the costly and dangerous nuclear arms race we thought we had just escaped.
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