-Caveat Lector- http://www.spectator.org/ No Nukes America Can the U.S. afford to become a nuclear-free zone? by Tom Bethell Over a period of several decades, the weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal were assembled at the Pantex plant, a few miles northeast of Amarillo, Texas. The components were fabricated elsewhere -- at Rocky Flats, near Denver; at Hanford reservation, in Washington state; at the Savannah River reactor in South Carolina -- but they were finally all put together at Pantex, 16,000 acres of parched scrub surrounded by steel fences and coils of razor wire. The plant is dotted with infrared motion detectors and armed guards in desert camouflage. Today, the entire U.S. nuclear weapons assembly line is running in reverse. All the nuclear-weapons production facilities are closed down, and the bombs themselves, having been retrieved from silos and Air Force bases, are being brought back to the same Pantex plant at a rate of about 35 or 40 a week. They are transported across U.S. highways in unmarked, heavily guarded tractor -trailers; at Pantex they are disassembled, and their plutonium "pits" stored in bunkers. State officials have expressed concern that Pantex is fast becoming "an unlicensed plutonium dump." The U.S. is said to be dismantling its arsenal at a rate of about 2,000 weapons a year. The planned final size of the arsenal is secret, but some say the total may be no more than 1,000 weapons. Anti-nuke groups stationed outside the Pantex gates monitored the trucks as the completed weapons left the plant, and they continue to monitor them as they return. In the postwar period, the U.S. produced some 70,000 nuclear weapons, of about 75 different types. Annual production rates in the early 1960's reached about 5,000 a year, and a maximum stockpile of over 32,000 warheads was reached in 1967. Information provided by Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev implied that the Soviets' arsenal at its peak exceeded 40,000 warheads. France today has about 480 nukes, China about 450, Britain 200, Israel "probably 100 plus devices," India 60-odd, and Pakistan 15-25, according to a guide published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Tracking Nuclear Proliferation. It seems undeniable that the quantity of Soviet and U.S. nukes at their peak defied logic on both sides. Misleading "perceptions," inter-service rivalry, and the skewed incentives of government agencies contributed to a build-up that was vastly in excess of whatever could have been used. The elimination of superfluous arsenals by definition does not jeopardize security, and there is much to be said for the current "build down." But it also has its disquieting aspects. Above all, it will be difficult to reverse the present course. In an emergency it could be done, but by then it would be too late, in view of the time required to build or re-start the industrial infrastructure. It is safe to say that the existing atomic-weapons production facilities will never be re -opened. The enduring superstition surrounding all things nuclear will see to that: Not in my back yard, or anyone else's. As the Cold War was coming to an end, the environmentalists gained a crucial and little remarked ascendancy over the military in the ordering of government priorities. It helped that George Bush was president when this happened, for he was willing to do almost anything to ward off accusation from environmentalists. Weapons plants were stigmatized as contaminated sites, "hot spots," sources of hazardous waste. All of the major nuclear weapons facilities have since then been included on the Environmental Protection Agency's "Superfund" National Priorities List of the worst contaminated sites in America. "In preparing to fight a nuclear war with the former Soviet Union," according to the Center for Defense Information's Defense Monitor, "America succeeded in 'nuking' itself." It is an irony, surely, that the plants that arguably yielded a 50-year stretch of domestic peace rarely enjoyed by any nation should in the end have been so condemned. The symbolic moment came in June, 1989, when Rocky Flats was raided by FBI agents. The nation's only source of purified plutonium for nuclear weapons, Rocky Flats manufactured the softball-sized plutonium cores at the heart of the weapon. The raid came as a surprise to the Department of Energy, which has responsibility for the production and maintenance of nuclear weapons. Until the mid 1980's the department successfully argued that the practices of weapons -plant contractors were exempt from federal environmental laws. But by 1992 it had in effect become a loyal subsidiary of the Environmental Protection Agency. In that year, Rockwell International, the Rocky Flats contractor, pleaded guilty to charges that it had violated hazardous waste and clean-water laws. The company was fined $18.5 million. Today, according to the General Accounting Office, nuclear weapons facilities all across the country are closed "for environmental, health and safety reasons." The Department of Energy has estimated that cleaning up these sites will cost $300 billion -- more than the annual defense budget. In order to gain insight into future nuclear-weapons policy, it is worth studying the tracts of the anti-nukes, the bulletins of atomic scientists, and the pugwash of "responsible" physicists and physicians. Their goal is unmistakable: America as a nuclear-free zone. The present deconstruction of America's nukes was prescribed in their earlier manifestos. But abolition is the goal. In 1992 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published its "Agenda 2001." Among the contributors was Daniel Ellsberg of Harvard Medical School, earlier the publicist of the Pentagon Papers. It is fair to say that the present (anti) nuclear policies of the U.S., if not of the other nuclear states , are currently in line with his recommendations: No nukes are being built, production facilities are shut tight, the current arsenal is being deconstructed, and the U.S. has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. If ridding the whole world of nukes cannot quite be achieved, eliminating America's may be manageable. At the signing ceremony for the United Nations test-ban treaty this September, Clinton expressed the hope that the "role" of nuclear weapons could be "ultimately eliminated." Signatories include the declared nuclear powers (the U.S., Russia, China, France, Britain). The treaty has not taken effect, one reason being that India has refused to sign. (Gandhi must be turning in his sainted grave.) But the U.S. will respect its own signature and abide by its own gentleman's agreement. The effect will be to deny the benefits of modernization to just those countries that can be most trusted with nuclear weapons. Only those countries whose diplomats believe in the efficacy of such mantras as "trust but verify" will in the end sign on the dotted line. The modernization of weapons without testing them is still permitted, and the U.S. is doing so. Innards are being removed, and old technology is being replaced by modern electronics. But the bombs can no longer be detonated, whether under the ground or above it, and so computer simulations must replace explosions. Will the new mechanisms actually work as intended? Nuclear weapons have a stockpile life of twenty years, and the U.S. arsenal is aging rapidly. Former Defense and Energy Secretary James Schlesinger says that the Clinton administration is hiding the reality that "with an end to testing, confidence in the nuclear stockpile must decline." He adds that if we are determined not to "design, test, manufacture or stockpile nuclear weapons," then perhaps shutting down our production facilities "makes logical sense." Bill Clinton adopted a policy of no more testing against the advice of the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sigfried Hecker. In May 1993, he told Clinton that testing was the best way to maintain a reliable deterrent. Two months later, Clinton nonetheless ordered an end to testing. When China proceeded with an atmospheric test a few weeks later, U.S. policymakers chose to pay no attention. (Why make trouble with the big boys?) Russia is reliably reported to be maintaining its production lines, perhaps assembling as many nuclear weapons a year as we are disassembling. Even the humble Brits continue with a slow but active weapons production cycle to keep their hand in. But the U.S. has produced no weapons since 1990. Tritium, a hydrogen isotope that is an essential ingredient of all American. nukes, has not been produced anywhere in the U.S. since 1988, when the Savannah River reactor was shut down. With a half life of 12.6 years, most of the installed tritium will have vanished into thin air by the year 2015. At that point the U.S. arsenal will have a short half-life indeed. Tritium could be manufactured by electricity-generating nuclear reactors, but here we encounter the popular ignorance that has been both nurtured and exploited by the anti-nukes. Tritium-production would expose power plants to the charge that they are "hydrogen bomb plants." A recent editorial in Science suggested that maybe we could buy some tritium from Canada. Or, er, the Russians. That would "improve our relations" with them, and, in case you hadn't thought of it, "help alleviate their need for hard currency." The main concern of those who are responsible for maintaining the nuclear arsenal today is that the needed human capital, experience, and knowledge will dwindle away along with the tritium. Automobile mechanics who know how to rebuild a 1933 Jaguar S-type sports coupe are difficult to find today. The refusal to allow further testing ensures that nuclear weapons technology will become increasingly outdated. It will require the expertise of those who understand and know how to maintain the nuclear equivalent of cathode ray tubes. The best minds will not be attracted by the prospects of working with museum technology in a dying industry. The blueprints of nuclear weapons are now widely diffused throughout the world, and the knowledge they embody can never be eradicated from human consciousness. Because crude bombs can be assembled without the need for testing -- the Hiroshima bomb was of a type that had not been tested -- an end to testing enhances global security only in the minds of those who think the U.S. is the great threat to it. The main constraint on proliferation is the difficulty of obtaining weapons-grade fissile material: highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Neither occurs in nature -- the main reason why all things nuclear are regarded with dread and horror by homo sapiens-hating enviros -- and both depend for their production upon an advanced industrial capacity that itself has not yet proliferated much beyond the Western world. The uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. has pursued its undeclared policy of unilateral denuclearization at just the time when this material has become more available than ever before, thanks to the breakup of the former Soviet Union. More than 100 cases of smuggling of weapons grade material have been detected, and it seems only a matter of time before a sufficient quantity of it finds its way into the hands of people who pay only lip service to the sleep-inducing diplomatic formulae. Will we feel more secure, let us say ten years from now, when more countries have acquired nuclear weapons, and it sinks in that our own dwindling arsenal is untested and of questionable reliability? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- This article also appears in the December 1996 issue of The American Spectator. Tom Bethell is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent. (Posted 10/15/99) Bard We don't need a 3rd Party; we need a 2nd Party! DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
