Nuclear arms labs would get more work under Bush budget
By Dan Stober
Mercury News
The Bush administration wants to pump more money into nuclear weapons, gradually restoring facilities to produce nuclear warheads that had been shut down at the end of the Cold War.
At the same time, the administration intends to pursue a controversial program of research on the development of battlefield nuclear weapons to destroy underground bunkers.
The Energy Department budget for 2004, released Monday, proposes a 9 percent increase in nuclear weapons related funding, bringing spending to $6.4 billion.
The Energy Department budget means more money for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which would get $1.17 billion for weapons-related work. Together with funding from other agencies, this would push the Bay Area lab's total annual operations budget past $1.5 billion.
``As the Nuclear Posture review issued by President Bush acknowledges, a nuclear capability is going to be a key element of our national defense in the foreseeable future,'' said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Agency, the Energy Department organization that runs the weapons program.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and ranking NNSA officials told reporters Monday that they aimed to rebuild the U.S. bomb manufacturing capability. The administration will push ahead with plans to manufacture a small number of plutonium pits -- the radioactive spheres at the heart of nuclear weapons -- at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. At the same time, site selection is moving forward to construct a full-scale factory to make bomb cores.
NNSA is also moving ahead with studies at Livermore and elsewhere aimed at strengthening existing bombs and missile warheads to withstand a high-speed penetration of earth, concrete and rock. The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator is proposed to bury itself in the ground, where its explosion might destroy buried enemy command bunkers or storage sites for weapons of mass destruction.
Studies have suggested that such weapons could be used to attack deeply buried bunkers storing chemical or biological weapons in countries such as Iraq or North Korea.
The seriousness of this effort was underscored last week when the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency last week announced it was seeking proposals for a computer-based system to predict how effective nuclear weapons would be in destroying specific underground targets, and what the effects of the resulting radioactive fallout might be.
The Pentagon is seeking companies to supply a computer system that would model geography, construction techniques and nuclear effects to determine, among other things, the most effective angle for a nuclear warhead to slam into the ground if it is to destroy the target.
Experts from Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratory would help interpret the computers' predictions.
The system must produce a ``3-D visual presentation of the results,'' according to the Pentagon's request for proposals. The $1.26 billion program is scheduled for completion is 2006.
Arms-control advocates oppose the Bush initiatives. ``You put all these pieces together and the administration is moving in the direction of creating a new type of nuclear weapons that would probably require nuclear testing,'' said Daryl Kimball, the director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.
The arms-control community fears that a resumption of testing by the United States would encourage non-nuclear nations to join the nuclear club.
The United States stopped live tests of nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert in 1992. ``This is a slow-motion slide backward to the Dr. Strangelove days,'' Kimball said.
The Bush budget proposal includes funding to reduce the time it would take to prepare for the resumption of testing, from three years to 18 months.
But a ranking NNSA official, who spoke to reporters on the condition that he not be identified, said testing would not be resumed unless an existing weapon develops safety or reliability problem that can't be fixed any other way.
``Those situations do not exist today and I have no reason to believe they will exist in the foreseeable future,'' the official said.
Other highlights of the proposed weapons budget:
• Increased anti-terrorism funding, including cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency to secure radioactive substances that could be used to make so-called dirty bombs.
• A renewed effort to work with the Russian government to protect its stored nuclear materials and weapons from theft, and to buy bomb-grade Russian uranium to keep it safe. The uranium will be ``blended down'' to make it usable as fuel for nuclear reactors.
• A continued emphasis on super-computer simulation of weapons and large-scale machinery, such as Lawrence Livermore's stadium-sized laser, the National Ignition Facility. The so-called Stockpile Stewardship Program is intended to maintain the nation's nuclear arsenal without resorting to renewed testing.
• Refurbishment of existing weapons, such as the B-61 hydrogen bomb and the W-76, W-80 and W-87 missile warheads.
