Thursday, June 19, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cover story: Testing, testing

Bush's nuclear dreams could play out in Nevada

By Heidi Walters

We begin this report with a very important message: The United States is not, repeat, is not planning to resume full-scale nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site.

That's the assurance from Washington: "At this time, there are no plans for nuclear testing," says Tessa Hafen, press secretary for Sen. Harry Reid, a bit huffily. We've had a brief, frustrating telephone discussion about how Reid, Nevada's own, supports President Bush's call to shorten the test-readiness preparation time at the test site from the current two- to three-year period to a proposed 18 months, but "at this point in time does not support resumption of testing."

Doesn't one lead to the possibility of the other, or at least imply and encourage it?

"Shortening the readiness time is world's away from resuming testing--can't you see that?" Hafen says.

It's simply what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and others have been saying--that there's no current plan to resume testing--since early last year when the Department of Energy reported that, actually, there may be a growing need for full-scale testing of the nation's aging nuclear weapons stash.

Huh. What about that report? And what about those three policy-shifting papers unleashed by the Bush administration in 2002--the Nuclear Posture Review, the National Security Strategy (in which the administration vows to be pre-emptive in these difficult and unpredictable times) and the National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction?

The Nuclear Posture Review, which according to the summary "shifts planning for America's strategic forces from the threat-based approach of the Cold War to a capabilities-based approach," talks about the need to "retire old weapons systems and create new capabilities." It discusses using a "mix" of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons plus a missile defense system. It talks about goals to "assure, dissuade, deter and defeat"--that is, to show rogue nations and would-be new superpowers how bad-ass we are. It talks about new nuclear weapons that can burn out deeply buried terrorist bunkers and biological and chemical weapons. And it talks about the need "to enhance test readiness" for when the time comes to try out the dandy new hardware or at least make sure the old stuff's truly up to snuff.

The Nuclear Posture Review summary states: "While the United States is making every effort to maintain the stockpile without additional nuclear testing, this may not be possible for the indefinite future."

Right now, Congress is debating whether to lift a ban on research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons, or "mini-nukes" (less than 5 kilotons; the bomb that incinerated Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons). There's also debate over the Bush administration's $15 million-per-year budget request for a three-year program to develop a high-yield "bunker buster" (officially called a "robust nuclear earth penetrator") that would use an existing nuclear warhead attached to an improved delivery system. The administration also has requested $25 million to speed up Nevada Test Site readiness. Finally, there's the administration's plan to build a modern plutonium pit (the primary ingredient for beginning a nuclear chain reaction) manufacturing plant. The test site is No. 3 on a list of five possible sites for the plant.

So there's a lot of noise. And it does make you wonder. Are things ramping up at the test site? Will we once again crater the lovely Nevada desert with earth-collapsing underground nuclear weapons tests?

Should we?

* * *

Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip.

It's a Thursday morning on the Nevada Test Site, and inside the Mercury base camp's tomb-like cafeteria the only sound, aside from the pale hum of refrigeration, is coming from the cashier. He's clipping his fingernails. Now and then a scientist-type wanders through in a desultory fashion, buys a soda, and then maybe sits quietly at a table. Time slows to a stall. One wonders why anyone bothered to update the menu on the board outside the Steakhouse & Pub. Or maybe no one did.

Outside, across the sun-white street, a loud scraping sound emanates from the closed movie theater, a large Quonset hut. Kirsten Kellogg, public affairs officer for National Nuclear Security Administration (she is soon to be transferred to Bechtel, which runs the test site for the NNSA), says workers are cleaning out asbestos. An old sign on the building says, "Think safety first."

Town's pretty dead--nothing like the bustling activity between 1950, year of the test site's inception, to 1992 when a worldwide moratorium on nuclear testing began. The test site work force has dropped from nearly 11,000 in 1992, says NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan, to around 2,000 today. Even so, there's still a fair bit of activity out in the 1,375-square-mile expanse of the test site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas.

As Kellogg drives me and a photographer around to see the sights, we pass a surprising number of vehicles, including a couple of water trucks that look like giant land-locked waterskippers as they spray down road dust. They fill up at a salt cedar-crowded, spring-fed pond--there are several such ponds scattered about the site. Kellogg tells us there are 400 miles of paved roads out here, and 400 miles of unpaved. We pass a tour bus full of VIPs--military guys, atomic scientists. We stop at a viewpoint looking out at 123-square-mile Frenchman Flat--14 atmospheric tests between 1951 and 1962, and five underground tests from 1965 to 1968. Here and at other sites on the test site, a total of 928 tests took place, 100 atmospheric and 828 underground. Since 1986, a number of corporations, such as Amoco Oil Co., and others have used the flat to study hazardous materials spills and cleanup.

We then head for a low-level radioactive waste management site, also run by Bechtel, passing sites from the old days: a rotted-fence pig pen area where the military tested the effects of the bombs on farm animals; a long row of brick rooms Kellogg calls "motels" that are now used for storage and, on occasion, Nellis Air Force Base conventional weapons practice (as the large holes blasted into the walls reveal); now-famous materials-test objects such as the concrete dome shelters, the blast-twisted steel-beamed railroad bridge (which, amazingly, some security-cleared vandal has tagged: "B.B. Bobby sucks!"), the parking garage, the bank vault. Black diagnostic cables snake across the ground in every direction.

Somewhere in all this space is also a non-military University of Nevada facility where scientists do global warming studies. We pass, at a distance, the nuclear explosive device assembly facility, one of the most secured buildings. Kellogg mentions counterterrorism training, the fastest-growing activity out here since 9/11.

At the waste site, Merl Schwartzwalter tells us 23 generators ship pre-packaged low-level nuclear waste here to be buried in 23 unlined pits and trenches, which eventually get covered in eight feet of dirt.

We drive back out across the desert, where wildflowers are in full dainty bloom. We pass News Nob, where journalists watched the atmospheric tests, enter a spindly forest of joshua trees, and end up at a strange, billowing "air" building. This is the above-ground part of where the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory conduct their separate subcritical experiments on the nuclear stockpile to test the warheads' viability. In a subcritical test, explosives are packed around a small amount of plutonium and detonated, but no chain reaction occurs.

Quirky signs--from the absurd "Speed Limit 24" to the serious "Housekeeping prevents accidents"--greet us. All the cars here have been backed in so their noses face the exit, as if their "readiness" plan is to get the hell out of here fast if anything goes wrong.

Chuck Costa, test director for Los Alamos, says the subcriticals began five years after the last underground full-scale test, "Divider," on Sept. 23, 1992. While explaining the test process, Costa notes that he's been naming the Los Alamos-run tests after his Italian relatives back East: Vito, Mario, Rocco and, coming up, Armando, set for March.

One of the reasons the Bush administration gives for wanting to resume full-scale testing is a December 2001 DOE report that suggests the subcritical tests aren't providing enough information about the aging stockpile. However, on Feb. 5 a number of lawmakers, including Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, sent a letter to President Bush asking him not to resume full-scale testing. Their letter quoted a July 2002 study by the National Academy of Science, which said that "age-related defects...affecting stockpile reliability may occur," but "nuclear testing is not needed to discover these problems and is not likely to be needed to address them."

Costa hints that there are some new subcritical projects in the works. A few days later, on the telephone, NNSA's Morgan confirms there's a new machine coming on line soon. The 30-meter-long Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research (JASPER) gas gun will shoot a projectile 5 miles per second at nuclear materials. And the huge Atlas pulse-powered machine, to be housed in a 100-by-100-foot building, will bombard non-nuclear "surrogates" with super-high voltage from a circle of large capacitors.

"All of these provide critical data points for the national labs so they can verify the stockpile," Morgan says. However, he adds, "we are not doing any development of new nuclear weapons."

He says the Department of Defense also has been using the test site to work on the "bunker-buster conventional weapons system."

About test readiness, Morgan says that's what the people at the test site do from day to day. The subcriticals, training exercises, other programs plus a stockpile of holes are part of that. As for speeding up the time frame to just 18 months, Morgan says, "We were able to do that when we were testing, so we can meet that obligation if that's what the administration wanted us to do."

We head for Icecap Ground Zero, site of one of the last "racks" (a huge tower in which a nuclear device is mounted and lowered into a hole in the ground for testing) built just before the testing moratorium occurred. It was never used. Huge cables stretch out from the site. Rows of metal mobile buildings sit with doors ajar; inside one, papers and log books dating from 1992 litter the dusty floor and desks and walls, an empty TV-dinner box rests on top of the old-fashioned fridge, an abandoned jacket lies on a table. It feels like 1992 was just yesterday. You get the feeling the workers just up and walked out the moment their purpose was dismissed.

On another building, two signs next to each other make absurd sense: "Ground Zero," "No smoking." Yet another warns, "No classified discussions in this building."

Then it's back in the car.

Driving around the Nevada Test Site makes you sleepy. Something about the long drive through a seemingly endless undulation of hot desert. It's even hard to muster the energy to contemplate past horrors when we pass near the site of the "Japanese Village." It was constructed, complete with dummies that looked Japanese, to study what happened to those poor people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, whose skin peeled from their bones like rags, whose eyes popped out, who, closer to ground zero, were reduced to "small black bundles...stuck to the streets and bridges and sidewalks," as Richard Rhodes wrote in his 1986 book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; or who, closer still, were vaporized into shadow-silhouettes of themselves on whatever solid surface they blocked from the nuclear flash. Yes, and when we stand outside the Apple II houses, built to study the effects of a nuclear blast on different building constructions, the best we can do is note their strange stark beauty in the vast landscape and take pleasure in the fact that a band of Say's phoebes have taken to roosting inside the wood one's shifted walls. The birds become agitated the longer we nose around, and they fly in and out of the windows, pausing to call out from a sill, or the roof.

The sleepiness the drive induces is not unlike the somnambulism that seems to have overtaken the American public with regard to nuclear testing.

* * *

Worldwide, a cadre of thinkers, policy makers, organizations and scientists thinks resumption of nuclear testing would be dangerously unwise.

A group of scientists from the Manhattan Project (which developed the atomic bomb during World War II) who call themselves the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists have what they call a Doomsday Clock, whose minute hand they move closer or farther from "midnight" (doomsday) as world events occur. Last year, the Bulletin moved the clock's hand from nine minutes to seven minutes to midnight, "the same setting at which the clock debuted 55 years ago," the Bulletin's website says. They note a number of developments, including the United States' withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year, its Nuclear Posture Review and its "preference for unilateral action rather than cooperative international diplomacy."

Jim Bridgman, program director for the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, says the Bush administration's push for new, "more usable" nuclear weapons "is very scary because it's blurring the line between conventional and nuclear weapons." And despite what the Pentagon says, Bridgman says scientists predict there would be significant collateral damage (civilian deaths and injuries) from the "low-yield" bombs and higher-yield bunker busters.

John Hadder, with Nevada's anti-nuclear outfit Citizen Alert, worries that the new, "more practical" mini-nukes the administration's talking about would "legitimize" nuclear weapons in the public's mind. He also fears that while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's seeming dictum "to carry a big stick and use it" might scare non-nuclear-capable countries into compliance, it could provoke a nuclear-capable country like North Korea into action, "causing escalation into nuclear war."

Hadder says he thinks Americans, meanwhile, have forgotten about the dangers of nuclear escalation. He, for one, is working on a nuclear issues curriculum he hopes to introduce to Nevada schools.

State Sen. Dina Titus, who detailed the Nevada Test Site program and the problems downwinders faced from radiation in her book Bombs in the Backyard, opposes a resumption of nuclear testing. She says if we resume nuclear testing, then "what we do is we make the rest of the world unstable, we make our allies uncomfortable and we force our potential enemies to escalate their nuclear weapons programs. And we start the arms race all over again."

Titus says she sees shades of the Cold War era's "red scare" tactics today--fearmongering in the media, propaganda about other countries' weapons of mass destruction. "What's happening now is they're using Sept. 11 to get people afraid," she says. "My feeling is, North Korea is not going to bomb us. They may bomb someone [closer to them], but not us. And you can do all the nuclear testing you want, and that's not going to stop a terrorist."

But people are once again afraid to criticize the government's foreign policy, for fear of appearing unpatriotic, Titus says. "I certainly do not support unilateral disarmament," she adds. "I'm not that na•ve. But I'm not too sure about that missile defense system. It just seems to promote proliferation.

"But see, I think it goes beyond the arms race. We're not well-liked in the world." We rejected the Kyoto accord, we want to reserve the right to use land mines, and we refused to urge an indictment of Serbian war criminals. "It's like we're the cowboy over here," Titus says. "I don't want to be seen as wanting a weak military. I don't. But I think we need to look at our foreign policy as a balance between diplomacy and military actions. We need a balance."

Titus thinks testing will likely resume. And as far as local outcry, well, she says Nevada's Washington delegation has "always supported the test site."

"Now here's an irony," Titus says. "You would think that gaming would be a very strong lobby against [nuclear testing]. But gaming's in kind of a corner, because if it says too much, and then testing happens, they'll have scared people away."

Titus says the administration needs to take care of old business--such as the downwinders and former test site workers still seeking compensation for radiation-related illnesses.

But Troy Wade, former test site director who spent "40 years in the business," thinks there's altogether too much whining about the nuclear testing talk in Washington. Wade's chairman of the nonprofit trade group Nevada Alliance for Defense, Energy and Business, which promotes test site projects (they're courting the plutonium pit plant). He also is chairman of the board of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation (Titus is also a member--she jokingly refers to Wade as "the ultimate Cold Warrior"). The foundation is building a test site museum.

"We're never, ever going to do the large-scale testing of the past," Wade says. And while he says we don't need to do any smaller-scale testing right now, someday we might--"which is a perfectly logical and prudent thing to do."

"A lot of people don't realize that the defense of the United States is based on the nuclear deterrent," Wade says. "So, we still have lots of nuclear weapons in inventory, and many are very old and have exceeded their design lifetime. What the president has said is, `I want a better insurance policy than I inherited.' [Nuclear weapons] kept us out of World War III for decades. Look, nuclear weapons are a tool of war, and war is not a pretty thing."