Kenneth Adney

September 23, 2002 will mark ten years since the last nuclear test was conducted by the United States. Ten years ago, the Clinton Administration declared an indefinite nuclear test moratorium and set its goal to ban all nuclear tests forever through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). President Clinton signed the CTBT in 1996, even though the treaty didn’t even have a practical definition of what constitutes a nuclear test. India and Pakistan tested nuclear devices in 1998. In 1999, the Senate rejected the CTBT. While the Bush Administration does not support the treaty, many Clinton-era nuclear weapon policies nonetheless remain in effect, including the test ban.

For decades, nuclear tests provided data for nuclear weapon scientists and demonstrated to all, friend and foe, the credibility of American nuclear weapons and the scientific vitality of the nation's nuclear weapon complex. A nuclear test’s seismic wave reverberating through the earth was an unmistakable message testifying to the readiness of America's nuclear deterrent.

Now, a "program" and a "process" have replaced nuclear testing. The "program" spends billions each year on new computers and software development for simulating nuclear weapon performance and for non-nuclear experiments. After decades of insisting that nuclear tests were essential to assure stockpile safety and reliability, the directors of our nuclear weapon science laboratories did an about-face and went along with the no-nuclear-test approach. This change, however, did not reflect any major scientific breakthroughs rendering nuclear testing obsolete. Instead, the labs were given an offer they couldn’t refuse. If they went along with the no-nuclear-test approach, they would be showered with billions for the nuclear test "substitutes." If they refused, they faced major cutbacks.

An elaborate bureaucratic process of nuclear weapon certification has also been established. Each year, nuclear weapon scientists evaluate the weapons in the stockpile using the non-nuclear tools and methods now permitted to them. If a scientist concludes that a nuclear test is absolutely necessary to resolve some inescapable problem critical to the stockpile, that recommendation must go through a bureaucratic gauntlet all the way up to the President himself. There are a number of reasons why this certification process is seriously flawed: No nuclear tests are conducted to detect problems--only computer simulations and static and non-nuclear examinations of the weapons are made. This is good for detecting some problems, but without periodic nuclear testing, there is a risk that significant technical issues will not be uncovered.

The psychology of the process is also wrong. A scientist’s recommendation that resumption of nuclear testing is necessary would likely be based on some arcane technical reason but would begin a process that ultimately would have monumental implications: personal, domestic, and international. It would be an admission that all those expensive computers, expensive non-nuclear testing machines, and all that expensive brainpower were not adequate to the task and fell short of their promise. No one would have told anti-nuclear President Clinton and who today would hand President Bush another problem? Without competence to critique the technical results, concurrence or opposition up the bureaucratic, military and political chain-of-command would be problematic and split along ideological lines.

Besides all this, it is simply bad policy to conduct nuclear tests only after we convince ourselves they are "broken." With an advertised policy to test only when there is a serious problem, test resumption discloses to everyone, everywhere, that the United States is facing a nuclear weapon crisis! A policy of nuclear weapon certification incorporating "routine" rather than "emergency" nuclear testing would remove this problem. Routine nuclear testing would also be consistent with sensible preventative maintenance requirements of nearly all military equipment and even consumer goods. Without daily use, periodic testing is even more important for nuclear weapons than for refrigerators, cars, and tanks.

It surely is good news that the United States no longer needs tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to threaten the Soviet Union. But with less than one-tenth of the Cold War stockpile remaining, we should be certain that the Cold War relics we keep (with their "8-track tape" technology) function when called upon. Better yet, we should configure new weapons so they are militarily useful with optimum capabilities in terms of yield, precise, rapid delivery, and so on. Unfortunately, modernization of the stockpile to optimize its future military effectiveness is hobbled by the absence of nuclear tests.

In what possible way would the United States be forced to use nuclear weapons in the future? Frankly, it is hard to predict with any certainty under what future scenarios we might need to use nuclear weapons. However, it would be foolish to assert that there are no conceivable conditions under which weapons might have to be used. After all, who anticipated the attack on the World Trade Center, or that American troops would be permanently based in Uzbekistan, of all places? One thing, however, is certain: If the United States ever uses nuclear weapons, it will not do so casually. Failure under such circumstances would not be acceptable.

Left with politically correct but inadequate non-nuclear substitutes for the past ten years, American scientists have been working hard trying to squeeze as much blood as possible out of this non-nuclear turnip. But it is not enough that only our scientists sitting in their laboratory cubicles reviewing their computer simulations feel confident in the potency of our weapons. It is even more important that our enemies believe this. Our credibility is undermined, however, by our continuing unwillingness to test.

Only a fool would believe allowing American nuclear weapons to become unreliable or slip into military obsolescence will make the world a safer place but fools seem to abound in this field. Nuclear weapons cannot be wished away or written out of reality. The United States must continue to possess nuclear weapons and be prepared to use them. This requires that we take care and test them. Calm, cold thinking about our place in a world of even colder antagonists demands we accept and deal with nuclear weapons as the ultimate potential threat and as our ultimate asset of war.

Even with some measure of distaste, the United States continues to spend several billion dollars each year to maintain the nuclear weapon complex and its aging stockpile. Much of this work should continue. However, a significant fraction is spent on activities to compensate for the fact that we are not conducting nuclear tests. Instead of these, a program of one or two well-instrumented nuclear tests conducted routinely each year would supply a huge amount of directly relevant data to American scientists. It would also re-assert the credibility of our nuclear capabilities to the world.

The annual cost of conducting these nuclear tests could easily be made up through cuts in activities made superfluous by the resumption of routine nuclear testing. In fact, it should be possible to save money! After all, we continue to spend money to keep the Nevada Test Site semi-active in case of an emergency. A decision to return to nuclear testing in the near future should dovetail well with current administration plans to restore nuclear test capabilities that have ossified over the past decade. Ten years without nuclear testing is more than enough!

Loud and vocal opposition to the resumption of testing is to be expected, from domestic quarters that have never accepted the need for a credible American nuclear deterrent, as well as from other states already concerned about the increasing gap between the United States and the rest of the world. Negative reaction could be mitigated by announcing our plans several years in advance, especially if it was made clear that the resumption of testing was not being done to rescue the United States from some nuclear weapon emergency into which it has stumbled. Instead, routine nuclear testing is simply a sound, responsible policy for any nation serious about possessing (and even using) this profoundly dangerous and awesome capability.

Kenneth Adney worked for over 25 years in the Department of Energy as a scientist specializing in nuclear weapon program-and-policy issues. He was involved in well over 100 nuclear tests. After cessation of American nuclear testing, he helped obtain acceptance of ongoing non-nuclear experiments and continues to work in support of the American nuclear weapons program. The views expressed in this article are solely his own.