The Sedan crater at the Nevada Test Site
is nearly a
quarter-mile wide and 320 feet deep. One purpose of the 1962 Sedan
test was
investigating whether nuclear weapons could be used to excavate
canals and
harbors. The crater is a national historic site.
THE ENTRANCE to the Nevada Test Site still has
cyclone-fence pens to
hold
protesters who used to assemble at the gate and get arrested.
Military police,
tired of the caging, once bused a group of arrestees 60 miles out
into the desert,
dropped them by the side of the road, and drove off.
Now, with the Cold War over, as many as 10,000
tourists a year
take tours
of the bleak site. What they see are the structural remnants of
what became known
as the strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD: twisted
bridge girders,
smashed igloo bunkers and shattered windows, the glass still lying
in the dust and
glinting in the Nevada sun. Scientists built hangars and set out
airplanes, cars,
locomotives, fuel tanks and freight cars. What would it take to
destroy, totally
destroy, the Soviet Union? What would doomsday really be like?
The physicists studied their wreckage and
produced classified
estimates. In
1984, the World Health Organization estimated an all-out nuclear
war would kill 3
billion people.
Here at the Nevada Test Site a 1955 atomic
cannon fired its only
live shot.
Here troops crouched in trenches as close as 2,500 yards to see
how well they
would react and maneuver after an explosion. Here pigs were penned
and exposed to
the horrific heat because their skin resembles that of humans.
Here the
Environmental Protection Agency maintained a 36-acre farm to
measure the impact of
later underground tests on vegetables and cows. (Radiation turned
out to be
negligible.)
Nature is slowly reclaiming the blast sites. A
tuft of grass has
sprouted
at ground zero of the Met explosion of 1955. Mesquite and sage
grow in the old
blast zones. We watched a coyote jog along a spring lake near the
site of the
37-kiloton Priscilla test. Birds nest in the twisted I-beams of a
trestle once
wrenched by an explosion half a mile away.
In 1955 scientists built a mock village around a
29-kiloton test
called
Apple. The houses were built of brick and wood, painted, furnished
and occupied by
mannequins obtained from J.C. Penney.
Film showing the ignition and disintegration of
most of those
houses has
become a standard memory of the atomic age: the siding bursting
into smoke and
flame, the house leaning away from the force of the blast and
finally blowing away
in a whirl of debris. This from an explosion of popgun force,
compared to the
standards of today's weaponry.
Ground zero of Apple is still too radioactive,
40 years later,
to allow
visitors to prowl about. Two of the houses are still standing,
however, one just
over a mile away and another a mile and a half from the bomb site,
preserved like
mummified husks by the desert air. On the nearest house the paint
was blasted off,
and shutters town away, the windows shattered and the interior
chewed up. The
basic frame survived, however. The brick chimney is twisted but
still
standing.
Photos show the mannequins thrown and slumped
like rag dolls and
table
settings knocked askew, the nose of "father" clipped off
by a piece of
flying debris.
It is disturbing to visit these relics of the
Cold War, just as
it is
disturbing to visit a prison or landfill or other reminders of
society's less
savory necessities, or insanities.
There is also a drabness to them. The nuclear
complexes were
mostly sited
in lonely or desolate places to maintain security. While the
weapons are
technologically impressive, the atomic reservations are bleak
compounds of
windowless concrete reactors and factories and hasty
government-spec architecture:
places frozen in the 1950s and 1960s.
OF THE 16 major nuclear
complexes that cropped up around the United States,
the loveliest by location is probably Los
Alamos, a piney plateau in northern New
Mexico selected by Robert Oppenheimer because he had spent time
there at summer
camp as a youth.
Lavish residences and mobile homes alike claim
some of the prime
perches on
the rims of canyons that cut the plateau. Other scientists live in
pleasant
suburban neighborhoods. But there is no substantial downtown or
civic core. Los
Alamos revolves around its fenced lab.
The laboratory shares with Lawrence Livermore in
California and
Sandia labs
in Albuquerque the responsibility for designing and devising tests
of nuclear
warheads, and there is an uneasy sterility about the place.
White-male stereotypes
have been beaten to death and yet Los Alamos is unmistakably, even
to this white
male, an overwhelmingly "guy" kind of place: a
techno-freak haven for
boys who like things that go boom, even underground.
The enthusiasm for this raw power can be
slightly infectious,
even during a
brief visit: I found myself musing that once, just once, it would
be awfully
interesting to stand in the Nevada desert and see one of these
things go off.
All those interviewed at Los Alamos believe
their work has saved
the world
from a disastrous war, rather than threatened one.
"I've always considered nuclear weapons to
be
defensive," said
computer expert Mike Sohn. "The reason there have been no
major conflicts in
the world the last 50 years (comparable to the world wars) has
been the presence
of the bomb."
"We feel we are defending the nation,"
added Ken
McKenna, who
works to counter proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological
weapons.
"We don't know why Saddam (Hussein) didn't use biological
weapons, but the
conjecture is he didn't because the (American) response would have
been
overwhelming and devastating to his country."
Our nuclear posture is changing. The U.S.
nuclear arsenal peaked
at about
30,000 warheads, and the Soviet arsenal, once estimated to be as
few as 20,000
warheads, has been revealed since the end of the Cold War to have
reached 45,000.
Both stockpiles are slowly being cut to meet a START II
arms-reduction limit of
3,500.
That is still more than enough warheads to
destroy either
country. Former
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara once suggested a hundred bombs
might be a
sufficient deterrent.
Warheads are being disassembled at the Pantex
plant in Amarillo,
Texas. It
takes several days to a few weeks to safely take a warhead apart
in the earthen
bunkers there called Gravel Gerties.
Since 1988, according to the Department of
Energy, the number of
U.S.
strategic warheads on deployment has been cut 47 percent and the
number of
nonstrategic, or battlefield, nukes by 90 percent.
U.S. ground forces are no longer nuclear-armed.
Neither are Navy
surface
ships. Submarine and land-based missiles have been de-targeted, or
aimed at the
ocean instead of Russia (though both sides could re-target their
warheads in a
matter of minutes or hours.) Strategic bombers have been taken off
alert, nuclear
submarines have gone from "alert" to "modified
alert," and
several weapons systems proposed in the 1980s have been canceled.
The Trident
submarine fleet, once planned to have 20 boats, will have
only
14. The Air Force is cutting 28 B-52s and keeping 66. There has
been a 70 percent
cut in military personnel with access to nuclear weapons.
By 2010, planners hope to achieve an annual
nuclear-weapons
budget (which
does not include the ships and planes and missiles that deliver
warheads) of $2.5
billion, a third of what it was in 1989. Research funding at the
federal
government's nuclear-weapons labs has been cut 42 percent since
1989, and money
for nuclear testing has been cut 50 percent.
THIS TREND poses the
obvious question of why America needs a Los Alamos at
all anymore. Why not let nuclear wizardry wither? Through decades
of work,
scientists whittled the 10,000-pound Fat Man to
cruise-missile-sized 259-pound
packages with more punch, more accuracy and more reliability.
Isn't that good
enough? Can't we quit fiddling with nukes?
South Africa built seven nuclear bombs and then
decided they
were more
trouble than they were worth and dismantled them. Argentina and
Brazil backed away
from bomb-building efforts. India appears to be letting its
nuclear capability
deteriorate. The breakaway republics in the former Soviet Union
appear willing to
leave their nukes to the Russians, rather than have the headache
of maintaining
them. Why can't the major
powers do the same?
Scientists reply that nuclear weapons will
remain a necessary
component of
U.S. defense into the foreseeable future, particularly for a
nation that doesn't
want the expense of sustaining a huge conventional military to
deter attack.
"I think the genie is out of the bottle
forever," said
Bob
Kelley, who works on emergency response to terrorist bomb threats.
The scientists' logic is that nukes are
necessary as a threat,
that the
threat is effective because the bombs are so terrible, that they
are terrible
because they work, and that with nuclear testing shut down, we
must devise new
means to ensure they work.
In other words, reliable bombs mean fewer wars:
the "peace
through
strength" philosophy voiced through the Cold War.
There are practical problems in sustaining a
credible stockpile.
Warheads
have an effective shelf life of perhaps 10 years, after which
their reliability
becomes too uncertain. In the past this did not pose much of a
problem because new
weapons so rapidly succeeded old. But if technology is frozen, the
stockpile must
be periodically inspected and rejuvenated.
An essential component of hydrogen bombs,
tritium, a radioactive
isotope of
hydrogen, has a half-life of only 12.5 years, meaning in that time
that half of it
decays. It must be replenished in warheads. The United States is
disassembling
bombs quickly enough to retrieve enough surplus tritium until 2011
or so, but we
will run out unless a new reactor source is started, probably in
South
Carolina.
Plutonium, another basic bomb ingredient, has a
half-life of
24,000 years
and won't run out anytime soon, making the world's surplus of
plutonium a security
headache. But it emits alpha radiation that can affect the conventional explosives
that trigger an atomic weapon and create pockets of helium gas in
itself.
What this means in terms of weapon performance
is unclear. The
old method
was to cart an aging weapon to Nevada and try to set it off,
measuring its energy
output. "We used to say Nevada equals truth," said
computer-expert
Sohn.
The testing was necessary. Despite the success
of the first
atomic bombs,
subsequent, more sophisticated ones did not always work as
planned. Tom Seed, a
physicist at the Nevada Test Site, noted that in one recent series
of 12
underground explosions, six weapons "underperformed" and
had to be
reworked.
With testing ruled out, physicists now want to
simulate
explosions on
computers that don't exist yet. A modern Pentium computer that can
be bought at a
discount store is two to eight times more powerful than the ones
used in the 1960s
and 1970s to design most of the current U.S. stockpile. But to
simulate the
complexities of a three-dimensional nuclear explosion requires
computers a billion
times faster than the Pentium, explained Sohn. Such machines are
not expected to
be delivered for another seven years.
Also planned is improved bomb analysis by X-ray
and setting off
microscopic
nuclear explosions in a proposed $1.8 billion National Ignition
Facility proposed
for Lawrence Livermore labs in California.
Jackie Cabasso, a nuclear critic with the Western
States Legal
Foundation, said such elaborate measures are designed not to
maintain present
warheads but
perfect new ones without underground testing. She charges that the
program is more
a welfare program for underemployed bomb designers than a
safeguard of our
stockpile.
"Experienced designers are an endangered
species,"
admitted Sohn.
The Los Alamos cadre is in its 40s and 50s. Younger physicists
stay away not just
because of moral qualms but because weapons laboratories no longer
offer the job
security and cutting-edge computers and instrumentation that once
lured
designers.
The trend worries Defense Department officials.
"You cannot
mothball
intellectual capital," Secretary William Perry said last
year. "That's
the basis for (continuing) the research-and-development program.
It would take
decades to reconstitute critical elements of the (defense)
industrial base if we
had to do it from scratch."
Difficulty in restarting weapons design is
exactly what peace
advocates
would like to see. A withering of bomb expertise might not put the
genie back into
the bottle but could force the United States to look to other
means to ensure its
security.
The question then becomes what makes the world
the safest.
Complete nuclear
disarmament by the major powers, risking blackmail by rogue
dictators or
terrorists? Dependence on aging nuclear stockpiles so unreliable
that perhaps
their military use would be too much of a political gamble to be
exercised? Or
maintaining, and regularly updating, a nuclear stockpile
frightening enough to
discourage war but catastrophic if it were used?
With the "new world order" far from
clear, this is a
political
question presidents will probably be wrestling with for years.
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