The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The question went around the room. Powell cautioned great care; America’s nuclear weapons, he said, were its “crown jewels.” Christopher and Aspin thought the U.S. should run the fifteen tests that the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment had authorized, since that was the deal Congress had struck. Gibbons agreed with Graham that the U.S. should continue its moratorium. Then O’Leary almost casually finessed the debate and took control, Graham wrote:

  Hazel, however,19 to the annoyance of Tony [Lake], stopped the show. She said she was a new kid on the block and that she had not really had time to study the issue and consult her experts. She wanted to put off any discussion of this issue for two weeks so that she would have time to study and understand it. This created something of a furor, but she stuck to her guns. When asked about the position of DOE at lower levels that opposed the moratorium, she noted that she was the secretary. Grumpily, Tony announced that there would be no decision, no outcome to send to the president, and that the principals would meet again on this issue in two weeks’ time.

  The next time Graham saw O’Leary, in her DOE office a few days before the second principals’ meeting, they were joined by Victor Reis, the Pentagon’s shrewd and influential director of defense research and engineering, a mechanical engineer with degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic, Yale, and Princeton and decades of government experience. “It was an inspirational20 meeting,” Graham writes. “Hazel said that she was with us and that stopping testing was the right way to go.” O’Leary qualified her endorsement, however, telling Graham, “It would require a lot of laboratory support to maintain the weapons without testing.” Reis, Graham comments, “made no dissent and seemed happy.” The second principals’ meeting, in late May, was divided on the moratorium extension, Graham wrote:

  Hazel brought with her,21 among others, two senior lab experts to give a briefing on the status of the nuclear weapon stockpile. They explained how, for at least ten years, even if we were to do nothing, there was no problem with the safety and reliability of the stockpile. After that period of time they could not be so certain, but they were confident that any problems could be addressed successfully through means other than testing. After a lengthy discussion on this Tony went around the room on the moratorium issue.

  O’Leary had evidently struck a deal with Reis. There was still resistance from some of the principals to banning testing, but on O’Leary’s recommendation, on 3 July 1993 Clinton resolved the dispute by announcing that the United States would continue to observe the nuclear-testing moratorium until September 1994, provided that no other state tested. Clinton said that the moratorium would then be renewed year by year under the same terms until successful negotiation of a comprehensive test-ban treaty, a process that would begin in January 1994.

  WHAT VICTOR REIS’S DEAL with O’Leary might be began to reveal itself that summer, when Reis left Defense at the beginning of August to join the DOE under O’Leary as assistant secretary for defense programs. Reis told Hecker that his fundamental assignment from O’Leary was to cut the nuclear-weapons budget. The new assistant secretary had a more positive goal in mind: to figure out what the nuclear-weapons complex needed to maintain the U.S. arsenal without testing and then to make it available.

  “Vic knew nothing about nuclear weapons,” Hecker told me, “so he started to learn. He had this wonderful technique of bringing in lots of people from different sides of the business. Bringing them together in workshops, brainstorming ideas, working things through. He’d have a few of his department people, the lab directors, even people from the Office of Management and Budget, because in the end, if you don’t have those guys supplying the money, you don’t have anything. He had congressional staff and people from the regulatory agencies. These people all said nuclear weapons were still important, still the cornerstone of our defense strategy for the security of the country. But, they said, we don’t want to make any new ones. We just want to make sure that those we have are safe, secure, and reliable. And then that meshes in with the direction of our negotiations with the Russians for arms reductions.

  “So that summer of 1993 we started strategizing the future,” Hecker continued. “Vic was unquestionably the driving force. We’d called the weapons program R, D & T in the past, for “research, development, and testing.” We lost the testing, so we called what we were doing R & D. But that wasn’t what people wanted. They didn’t want more R & D on nuclear weapons; the whole idea now was that the world had changed. So we tried to find a way to describe what it was that we were now supposed to do, and we came up with the idea of stockpile stewardship.”

  Reis defined the concept succinctly at a congressional hearing in 1999 from a perspective six years along. “Stockpile Stewardship,” he said then, “consists of two22 interlocking parts: restoring and modernizing the production capability of the [nuclear weapons] complex, and being able to perpetually certify the reliability, safety and security of the nuclear weapons in the stockpile.” Given the state of the production complex in 1993, Reis testified, “This was, and is, an extraordinary challenge.… Rocky Flats, the only facility capable of producing plutonium pits, was permanently closed. Oak Ridge Y-12, the nation’s uranium factory, was soon to shut down for safety concerns, and there was no source of tritium and no money in the budget to develop a new source. And to top it off, the weapons laboratories were being strongly encouraged by the DOE to turn their attention to non-defense missions and they were doing so. Frankly, it was not a pretty picture, and few gave the program much chance for success.”

  The nuclear-weapons complex could either reinvent itself or fall apart, and under Reis’s leadership and with full budgetary support from Congress the effort to slim down and modernize succeeded. By 1999, Reis could testify in operational terms to what stockpile stewardship had meant:

  For three years running23 we have been able to certify to the President and the Congress that the stockpile is safe and reliable. We have been able to modify and deploy a version of the B61 [hydrogen] bomb to replace the very old and very large B53. We have started deliveries of a refurbished W-87 [nuclear warhead] to the Air Force; Y-12 [the primary uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which had been shut down for safety violations] is up and running. We have re-established neutron generator manufacturing at Sandia, tritium gas bottles at Kansas City, and are on schedule to produce tritium with the TVA and Savannah River and plutonium pits at Los Alamos. Savannah River is operating the new tritium refill facility, and since 1990 we have safely dismantled over 10,000 weapons at the Pantex Plant [in Amarillo, Texas].

  There had always been a price to pay within the U.S. defense bureaucracy for arms-control treaties and particularly for arms reductions. The price for the bureaucracy’s support had been money for new weapons systems, or, failing that, money for modernization of the weapons systems that remained. In that regard it was not much different from the defense bureaucracy of the old Soviet Union. “A very large part24 of the [Soviet] military budget,” wrote William Odom, the U.S. general who directed the National Security Agency during Ronald Reagan’s second term, “went to the [Soviet Military Industrial Commission] for constant modernization of weaponry.” What Reis, Hecker, and others in the U.S. nuclear-weapons complex organized in the second half of the 1990s was a physically leaner complex appropriate to a smaller nuclear arsenal. So many weapons were being dismantled in response to U.S.-Russian arms negotiations that the remaining weapons could be maintained from dismantled parts.

  A more serious problem, however, was manpower. Without the experience of designing new weapons and testing them, new recruits to the national laboratories would acquire little of the personal knowledge that was vital to their work. Science and engineering both require not only book learning but also craft skills, and craft skills grow from hands-on experience. Under the new, leaner regime that Reis was building for the Clinton administration, where would that personal knowledge come from?

  “We did some planning exercises as we went into
1994,” Hecker told me, “trying to lay out the requirements within the DOE defense complex depending on what the force structure would look like and on whether or not the START II treaty went into effect. Those are significant differences in terms of how much tritium you need, for example, what sort of construction capacity you need, how many people you need. So Vic not only did workshops; he also did very specific studies. And from that emerged his variation on the Clinton election mantra ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Vic said, ‘It’s the labs, stupid.’ He meant, you really have to start with the labs and then you build the complex around that.” Hecker explained:

  Better than anyone else, he was able to articulate the link between stewardship and no testing. He said, look, maybe the country doesn’t need us to develop new weapons, but it needs us for stewardship. We’re being asked to take cradle-to-grave responsibility for an incredibly complex mechanism. And as these weapons age, they change, and now we have to maintain them without testing.

  Every organization needs a major goal. What he helped us to see was that the goal was no longer the next great bomb, but doing something that had never been done before. Vic kept reminding us that nuclear weapons were still officially in the supreme national interest. If so, he said, then our leaders had to have confidence that they would work. How do we have confidence if we can’t test? We do it by building a program that ensures that confidence in the absence of testing.

  Ironically, Reis and the U.S. laboratories were reaching this conclusion even as others in the defense bureaucracy had concluded that continued testing was the answer. Hecker told me:

  It seemed to us that the proponents of testing were pushing toward a world where we would get a few tests a year to ensure ourselves that the bombs we still had in the stockpile would work. I felt very, very strongly that taking one out every now and then and testing it was the wrong way to go, a vulnerability the United States couldn’t afford. As Vic had said, the more important plan was to keep the intellectual capacity of our laboratories. Make the laboratory such that it still attracted the smartest people in the country to think about these issues and about what other defense issues there might be. I was afraid that if you did a test now and then and you finally had a problem, the laboratory would have become the Jiffy Lube of the nuclear-weapons business—an oil change and a lube job at best. And the people doing it would know just that much and no more. They wouldn’t have the ability to really sort things out if the going got tough. Vic said, Sig, do you believe the Israelis have bombs? I said, Well, yes, of course. He said, Do you think they ever tested their bombs? I mentioned the 1979 test, but if they did that one, it was probably not a very big one.

  He said, Do you think their bombs work? I said, Yes, sure. He said, Why do you say that? And I said, Because they’ve got smart people.

  I thought about that conversation many times.

  Reis also believed that each laboratory needed a major scientific facility to attract the best people. “He called it the Nordstrom Mall concept,” Hecker recalled. “He said, You can have a lot of boutiques, but if you don’t have a major department store anchoring it, you don’t have a mall. It’s a simple point, but it was very effective. He said, The way we’ll do this is, Livermore will get the lasers and Los Alamos will do the neutrons. Meaning, Los Alamos would build the next big accelerator and Livermore would build the next big laser.”

  Hecker defends the multibillion-dollar investments the U.S. made in its weapons laboratories in the years after 1993. The lab directors sign an annual letter certifying that the U.S. nuclear-weapons stockpile is safe and reliable and that testing is not required. Hecker signed two of those letters to the president before he left the Los Alamos directorship in 1998. “There’s nothing else that I’ve ever done,” he told me, “that caused me to think more and pause more and worry more than the responsibility I felt when I did that. It’s easy to be a critic on the outside and say you don’t need this or that, you don’t need this budget. In the end, though, the president can only go with the judgment of the lab director. He has no other way of judging. But unless the lab director has faith in his system and his institution, he can’t certify the nuclear weapons. If you still consider the weapons to be important to the future of the country, you have to take that seriously.”

  AT THEIR FIFTH SUMMIT MEETING, in September 1994, Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin agreed to continue the testing moratorium and to support both indefinite extension of the NPT and a worldwide ban on fissile-material production—a fissile-material-cutoff treaty.* In December, Tom Graham flew to Israel to discuss the concerns of NPT member states about Israel’s refusal to become a signatory. “Israeli officials regarded the NPT as important,”25 Graham writes. “Several officials said that when Israel could be assured that Iran and Iraq were not threats to acquire nuclear weapons, they would consider the NPT, but not before.”

  As Graham continued making the rounds of national capitals, the United States continued promoting the NPT. In a speech celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the treaty’s entry into force, 5 March 1995, Clinton announced that he was ordering two hundred tons of plutonium and HEU permanently withdrawn from the U.S. stockpile. “None of that material26 will be used to build a nuclear weapon ever again,” Graham wrote. “The president decided that this bold disarmament gesture was an appropriate way to emphasize the commitment of the United States both to Article VI and to the NPT in general.” Article VI, the treaty requirement that the nuclear powers work seriously toward eliminating their nuclear arsenals, continued to be a source of contention with the nonnuclear signatories.

  Graham reported a revealing mix of motives among the treaty parties for and against indefinite extension. Egypt’s foreign minister told Graham that Egypt “could not live forever27 with a huge, unconstrained nuclear arsenal on its border,” meaning Israel’s. Egypt wanted concrete steps on Israel’s part toward its accession to the NPT. A Jordanian diplomat told Graham he thought Egypt “was misguided, that Israel would eventually join the NPT not as a result of confrontation but only after a long evolutionary period in which Israel’s security could be assured.” Mexico had been horrified by the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which would have irradiated it along with Cuba and the United States had nuclear weapons been used, as they very nearly were. “Mexico was determined28 that it never be caught up again in such a crisis,” Graham wrote. “This had been the motivation for the Treaty of Tlatelolco, the Latin American nuclear-weapon-free zone treaty,” signed in 1967. Argentina, which had signed the NPT only a few months before the NPT extension conference after a decade when it raced Brazil partway to a bomb, confessed through its representative that it “had kept open the nuclear option,29 thinking it would add to their security, but it only served to cut them off from the countries with which they wished to be associated.” After its military dictatorship fell it was free to end its nuclear program. “Countries began to join30 the NPT more rapidly as the conference approached,” Graham reported. Peru, Chile, Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines, Ivory Coast, Togo, Argentina, El Salvador, Belize, all signed on. “And thus the 160 NPT parties in 1993 became 177 parties at the conference … raising a simple majority from 81 to 89.”

  THE NPT REVIEW and Extension Conference began on Monday, 17 April 1995, at the United Nations building in New York. It would continue in session for almost a month, until 12 May. A popular Sri Lankan diplomat named Jayantha Dhanapala was elected president. Extending the NPT indefinitely only required a majority vote, but because a sharply divided outcome would undercut the treaty’s authority, Dhanapala—and Graham—worked for extension by consensus. And as if to drive home the stakes involved in limiting the worst of all weapons of mass destruction, on the third day of the conference a truck bomb loaded with four thousand eight hundred pounds of nitrate fertilizer and fuel oil exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, shattering the building and killing 168 people, including nineteen children playing at a day-care center on the second floor.
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  The Non-Aligned Movement states (NAM),* none of them nuclear powers, were deeply skeptical of indefinite extension. The nuclear-weapons states, the NAM delegates argued, had never taken seriously their Article VI obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. “Several important NAM ambassadors31 made this point to me privately,” Graham wrote, “emphasizing that the NPT created two classes of member states, and they were only willing to remain second-class states under the NPT temporarily as negotiated disarmament proceeded. They were not willing to be second-class states on a permanent basis.” Vice President Al Gore addressed this mistrust in the opening U.S. national statement. “The treaty did not create32 a permanent class of nuclear-weapons states,” Gore asserted. “What the treaty did create was a requirement that those who already possessed nuclear weapons did not help others to acquire them, coupled with a binding legal obligation in Article VI to pursue good-faith negotiations on nuclear arms control and disarmament. By extending the NPT indefinitely, non-nuclear states will ensure that this obligation remains permanently binding and create the conditions for its ultimate achievement.”

  Making an obligation permanently binding that had so far been largely ignored was a damp squib so far as the Australian ambassador Richard Butler was concerned. A rawboned, vigorous man of clear intellect and strong opinions, fifty-three years old in 1995, Butler believed as deeply as Graham in the importance of the NPT; it was, he would write, one of “the principal elements33 of the post–World War II international architecture” along with the U.N. Charter, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, “and possibly the Nuremberg Trial principle of individual responsibility for crimes against humanity.” The norm established in the NPT, Butler argued, “is that no state or person should possess nuclear weapons.”