U.S. Lags in Nuclear Infrastructure, Weapons Skills

U.S. Lags in Nuclear Infrastructure, Weapons Skills

NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, March 20, 2001

WASHINGTON (UPI) – For all the talk about how the Russian nuclear weapons complex is falling to pieces, the United States should not be casting stones, two officials told a Senate committee Monday.

It will take between $300 million and $500 million a year for the next 10 years to rebuild the facilities where nuclear weapons are housed and monitored for safety and reliability and $700 million to complete a backlog of maintenance, former Energy and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

It is a $5 billion bill that cannot be avoided, Schlesinger said.

The roof is crumbling on workers' heads at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn., said Steven Guidice, a former Energy Department official who is serving with Schlesinger on a congressionally appointed panel to review the health and safety of the nuclear stockpile.

Workers have been issued hard hats to wear while working in one of the decaying buildings, Guidice said. There are more than 500 workers in the Y-12 complex, which was built in 1943 as part of the Manhatten Project.

The Energy Department stores almost 172 metric tons of enriched uranium.

"Irrespective of the size of the stockpile, we will have to revive the infrastructure," Schlesinger said.

The United States is helping Russia with almost $900 million a year to disassemble nuclear weapons and store the missile material in safe places, under the Cooperative Threat Reduction program created by Congress. Some of that money goes to support scientists with experience in chemical and biological weapons manufacturing and to transform weapons industries into civilian businesses.

The United States has not produced a nuclear warhead for a decade, and it has not conducted a nuclear explosive test for almost eight years. These former manufacturing plants now are in the business of stockpile stewardship – maintaining the safety and reliability of the weapons, the average age of which is now 20 years, according to Schlesinger.

President Bush has said he wants to reduce the number of U.S. nuclear weapons – unilaterally if necessary – to improve security. Russia is presumed to be in favor of the idea, as it has sought to arrange for further reduction to already agreed upon cuts to the arsenal, mostly for cost reasons.

But Schlesinger's panel advocates the United States building a modern facility capable of constructing plutonium cores that begin the reaction in nuclear warheads. That effort will take 10 years – time enough, Schlesinger believes, for the aging stockpile to degrade enough for the United States to have to build replacements, or at least have the option.

"I do not think we need to worry about declining safety of the stockpile, but the question of reliability is a concern," he said. "In the decade that has passed, confidence in the weapons has declined. ... In the face of inevitably declining confidence, do we have a deterrent that will deter others?

"As a simple caution, we must have the ability to produce primaries," he said. "Any deterioration in the nuclear heart of a weapon is of some considerable concern. We ought to have the ability to produce those primaries even if we don't have to use it."

Guidice warned that the generation of scientists with practical experience in building the weapons is retiring.

"If we continue to push that [date] out, we will not be able to transfer those skills to the new generation," he said.

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