Op-ed: Nuclear resurgence in the US

M V Ramana

US nuclear weapons laboratories and the Pentagon have been pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. Thus the hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s active pursuit of useable nuclear weapons while accusing Iraq of developing weapons of mass destruction is monumental

On January 10, 2003, 32 senior nuclear weapons managers from US nuclear weapons laboratories, the uniformed military, the National Nuclear Stewardship Administration (NNSA), and the Office of the Secretary of Defense met in the Pentagon to discuss the future of the US nuclear weapons programme. Earlier this week, the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), a small non-governmental organisation that works for the abolition of nuclear weapons, obtained the minutes from this meeting and released it publicly (see http://www.lasg.org/). The minutes show, according to Greg Mello of the LASG, “the bold sweep of nuclear weapons planning in the Bush Administration.”

The purpose of the January meeting was to plan a secret conference later this year. The agenda for the upcoming conference includes an assessment of the stockpile stewardship programme and the effectiveness of the current and future US nuclear stockpile, what weapons may go into a future U.S. nuclear arsenal, how they might be tested, how these weapons might be mated to new delivery systems, and how these are to be related to the other parts of the US arsenal including ballistic missile defence systems. Among the new weapons to be discussed are low-yield weapons, earth-penetrating weapons, enhanced radiation weapons, and agent defeat weapons.

What characterises all of these weapons is that they fit with the emphasis in the 2002 US Nuclear posture review (see The Friday Times, April 5-11, 2002) for more useable nuclear weapons whose use is more credible. This is because over the last decades nuclear advocates have been postulating specific targets, such as deep underground bunkers, as requiring the use of nuclear weapons. Given the current rhetoric about rogue states and terrorism, questions about whether such targets really exist and what threat is really posed by them are never asked. Nuclear advocates also hope that their typically smaller yields would reduce the outrage provoked by their use. The hypocrisy of the Bush administration’s active pursuit of such useable nuclear weapons while accusing Iraq, with its crumbling infrastructure, of developing weapons of mass destruction is monumental.

One new element revealed by the minutes of the January 10 meeting is an emphasis on building small quantities of new nuclear weapons. The upcoming conference is to explore possibilities for changing the process for authorising such production. Small production lines would allow for greater stealth; pre-delegation of authority to build would also leave no room for political debate and possible cancellation. It also fits with modern management techniques of not accumulating substantial inventories; instead weapons are to be manufactured just in time and in the quantities that are needed. The January 10 meeting talks explicitly about a “testing strategy for weapons more likely to be used in small strikes” and raises the possibility that “a requirement for higher confidence in small strikes” might “drive larger test asset inventories”.

The January 10 meeting is by no means the only evidence of a push for a new round of nuclear weapons research and testing. Included in the Bush administration budget, for example, is $21 million for design of new or modified nuclear weapons in 2004. The budget for weapons work itself is roughly $6 billion, up from about $3.2 billion in 1995. Even though it maintains a moratorium on nuclear tests, the Bush administration also called for increasing the readiness of the Nevada test site to resume testing.

House Republicans have also supported an expanded nuclear weapons programme. In a review released last week, they laid out a requirement for “a fully capable nuclear weapons complex” and a “confident, capable workforce needed to operate this complex”. The review recommends that the time period needed for the US to conduct a nuclear test be reduced to “possibly as low as 12 months” from the current three years and pursuing research on low-yield weapons (under five kilotons yield or about a third of the yield of the weapon dropped on Hiroshima).

The Bush administration and the Republicans in the Congress are clearly singing a tune orchestrated by nuclear weapons laboratories and the branches of the Pentagon responsible for nuclear strategy. Since the end of the Cold War, these institutions have been searching for a rationale for their existence. Through the invocation of a purported threat from so-called rogue states — Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Libya — the Pentagon managed to keep up its high budgets. Even then, to seek to use nuclear weapons against them was a bit laughable. With the Bush administration’s new doctrine of preemptive attack, this aim has gained in respect and has resulted in budget increases. Speaking to the San Francisco Chronicle last October, Michael Anastasio, director of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, put it succinctly: “I actually had a fear for the future viability of the lab... It just feels very different now. It’s a positive tone as opposed to a going out of business tone.”

Nuclear weapons laboratories have also managed to convert a vaguely defined rogue state threat into a series of technical requirements — the ability to destroy underground command centres, stores of biological or chemical agents, and so on. This effectively shifts the terms of the debate from one of the necessity or prudence of using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapon states to one of whether nuclear weapons could perform the self-selected tasks. Indeed, the fact that they may not be able to fulfil the set requirements could itself allow the weapons laboratories to seek larger amounts of funding for research.

The lessons for South Asia of this nuclear resurgence in the US are clear enough. The institutions that make nuclear weapons and operate them have a vested interest in these massively destructive weapons staying around forever and ever. Nuclear weapons are powerful, and like other sources of power, it also corrupts. What is corrupted is the process for social and popular control over institutions that are supposed to be answerable to the citizens of the country. This has to be challenged at each and every stage, and the earlier the better.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream

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