-==U.S. DISARMS AS CHINA GEARS UP 
Aging Nuke Missile Arsenal Worries Ex-Officials ==-

Date: 4/12/99		
 Author: Paul Sperry 

At the same time China builds more lethal nuclear missiles - using U.S.
technology - America's nuclear arsenal collects dust. It's been 10 years since
the nation built a new missile, and seven since it tested old ones. 
 
In fact, the Pentagon can't be sure existing missiles even work. And it won't
be sure until around 2010, when weapons testing is scheduled to resume. 
Even then it's iffy. 

Scientists at the nation's nuclear labs won't be able to blow up bombs in the
Nevada desert to spot bugs and perfect designs as they've done for 50 years.
President Clinton banned that for ''virtual testing,'' which uses computers to
simulate detonations. 

But virtual testing is itself virtual. At this point, it's just a theory.
Scientists will need another 10 years - and billions of dollars in new
equipment -to come up with the massive number of computations to mimic a real
nuclear blast. 

All this worries some national security experts. 

They fear the administration hasn't taken post-Cold War nuclear threats
seriously enough. As America's nuclear edge grows duller by the day, they
point out, China's gets sharper. 

Thanks to recent spying at U.S. labs, China may now have the ability to tip
its nuclear missiles with several warheads. And it may have the know-how to
perfect a neutron bomb, which can kill troops and knock out electronics
without destroying buildings. 

More, China may have snatched the secrets to making a so-called
electromagnetic gun, which shoots a pulse that can short computers and power
grids. 

These are the reported leaks. More may come to light later this month when a
select House panel releases declassified parts of a report on Chinese
espionage. The bulk of the report is said to focus on lab leaks - parts the
White House is trying to block. 

Not only is China stealing U.S. nuclear secrets, it's aiding the weapons
programs of nuclear wannabes like Pakistan and Iran. 

In essence, a nuclear arms race has started in South Asia and the U.S. is
sitting on the sidelines - unable to test weapons and, therefore, hamstrung in
its efforts to design new ones. 

Meantime, the nation's nuclear stockpile ages. More than half of U.S. bombs
were first produced in the 1960s and 1970s. 

''Every weapon in our inventory has been designed for a 20-year shelf life,''
said former Reagan Defense official Frank Gaffney. ''Most of them are
approaching that, if not now past it. So there's a real question about how
this stuff is working today.'' 

But administration officials say there's no cause for alarm. 
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson points out that, despite Clinton's
underground test ban, the agency is maintaining the Nevada Test Site at a
level that would allow ''timely resumption'' of underground nuclear testing if
ordered by Clinton. 

In a December memo to Clinton, Richardson certified that the ''nuclear
stockpile has no safety or reliability concerns that require underground
testing at this time.'' 

There are a few problems with those assurances, observers say. 

For one, funding for the Nevada Test Site is being cut, in part to support
construction of new computer-based testing facilities under Clinton's
so-called Stockpile Stewardship plan. 

In fiscal 2000, Energy is asking for an 8% hike in spending for Stockpile
Stewardship and a 1% cut in funding for Nevada weapons activities. 
So maintaining the site for future nuclear tests may not be so easy. 

The definition of ''timely resumption'' of testing also bothers some experts.
It actually means ''within two to three years'' of the president's order,
according to the back pages of Energy's 2000 budget request. 
A lot can happen
in two or three years, critics note. 
But anti-nuclear activists argue that underground tests may not be that
effective anyway. 

''Of the total of some 830 recorded 'findings' of defects in stockpiled
weapons since 1958, less than 1% were discovered in nuclear tests,'' reports
the Natural Resources Defense Council. 

Gaffney says it's not that simple. In testing, scientists aren't just looking
for duds. They're also looking at science. 

''In conducting nuclear tests in support of our nuclear deterrent over the
years, we just kept getting surprised by things that were supposed to perform
in a certain way and didn't,'' Gaffney said. 

By not testing, ''you also preclude the introduction of new weapons into the
inventory,'' Gaffney added. It's just too risky to mix untried designs into
the arsenal, he explains. 

When the Soviet Union collapsed at the start of the decade, the U.S. stopped
making nuclear warheads (even though Russia kept churning them out at a rate
of nearly 1,000 a year). In 1993, Clinton called a moratorium on warhead
testing. 

Thus ended an era in which the nation upgraded its nuclear arsenal by
continually replacing aging weapons systems with new ones. 

Then in 1995, Clinton unveiled his Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to stop all
levels of nuclear testing worldwide. In 1996, the United Nations endorsed it
and Clinton signed it. It's up to the Senate to ratify it. 

Knowing a permanent test ban was a death sentence for the stockpile, nuclear
weapons labs kicked against it - until Clinton promised the billions of
dollars needed to move to a science-based testing program. So Stockpile
Stewardship was born. 

All the labs got something. 

Los Alamos got a steel-penetrating X-ray to take pictures of tiny, in-lab
explosions ans plutonium). Livermore got the world's largest laser to study
the physics of weapons (in the absence of nuclear testing). And Sandia will
share advanced supercomputers (to help simulate nuclear explosions). 

But the projects are still under construction. And they won't all come
together for at least another decade. 

At that point, the administration says, thorough weapons testing will resume.
In effect, labs will be able to punch a button and certify that a nuclear
weapon is safe and reliable. 

''That's the theory,'' said Troy Wade, a former Reagan Energy official in
charge of nuclear weapons. ''Many of us are very nervous.'' 

Some lab scientists are still resisting the computer-based testing program. 
''There are still people at the labs who will tell you they don't trust
computers,'' confirmed a Los Alamos spokesman. 

Even if the computer science is sound, switching testing methods midstream
makes it tough to reliably analyze the results, Gaffney notes. Comparing the
actual results of the hundreds of tests done in the desert against computer-
simulated results is like comparing apples to oranges. 

''Nobody will be able to calibrate how good these new technologies are because
there will be no tests against which to compare their results,'' he said. 
Therein lies the danger, Gaffney says. By banning real tests, you render
existing bombs useless and increase the risk of building new bombs. 

But then, that's the ultimate goal of Clinton's denuclearization plan, he
says. 

''By that, it was always implied that everybody would be denuclearized, not
just the United States,'' Gaffney said. ''Regrettably, it's been the general
tradition of the left - especially when it's in power - to disarm
unilaterally.'' 

As most U.S. missiles reach their expiration date, China keeps building new
ones. 

Our newest nuke - the W80 cruise missile - was first produced in 1990. No
newer models are in the works. Meantime, China is busy making its next
generation of long-range land-based nuclear missiles - the Dong Feng (East
Wind) 31 and 41 - and long-range submarine-based missiles -the Julang (Giant
Wave) 2. 

These missiles can strike the U.S. Other than Russia, China is the only
potential foe that can do that. And it's fully prepared to pull the trigger:
At least 13 of its 17-plus long-range, land-based missiles are aimed at U.S.
cities. 

Of course, that's just a handful next to the thousands of American missiles
that can target China. 

Aging or not, the country's total nuclear arsenal boasts nearly 10,000
weapons. That's ''enough to produce nuclear winter and the end of most life on
Earth by a factor of 10,'' said Helen Caldicott, author of ''Nuclear
Madness.'' 

But China is hard-pressed to make its weapons more accurate and deadly. And
it's stealing U.S. lab technology to do it. 

At the same time, the Clinton administration has put America's nuke program in
the deep freeze. Officials hope China and Russia will follow our good example
and lower their guards too. In 1996, former Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary
said, ''We have made the U.S. safer by moving toward a Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty.'' 

Others laugh at the notion. They argue that the administration's denuke
policies are fraught with minefields for national security. 

Computer-based testing. If you're alarmed now by the reports of top-secret
weapons data escaping from Los Alamos and Livermore, just wait until all that
info is stored in computers designed to test weapons' performance, experts
warn. 

At that point, ''you have effectively taken out of the hands of a relatively
small, easily policed, generally highly patriotic and security-minded group of
people the most sensitive information of all about nuclear weapons designs and
phenomena, and put it into databases that are widely shared,'' Gaffney said.
''That is simply a formula for disaster.'' 

Exchange programs. They're another disaster waiting to happen, experts say. 
In 1994, the administration started a high-priority program of lab-to-lab
cooperation between U.S. scientists and their counterparts in Russia and
China. Just at Los Alamos, the visits now number over 100, a spokesman says. 
The technology exchange is usually one-way - from us to them. Our experts show
them, among other things, lab security techniques and ways to abandon
underground testing. 

''An awful lot of very sensitive technology has gone from the U.S. labs to
Russia and China in the interest of trying to help them monitor their
facilities and safeguard them,'' Gaffney said. 

Declassification. Early on, Clinton adopted a very liberal policy toward
declassifying papers, effectively reversing President Reagan's restrictive
policy set in 1982. It was part of an overall post-Cold War ''openness''
policy at Energy. 

''This policy actually had the effect of turning shelves of restricted data
into unclassified documents,'' Gaffney said. ''(Energy staffers) were obliged
to do it at such an extraordinary speed that they weren't even able to review
the boxes, let alone the files - to say nothing of the individual papers.'' 
O'Leary got some good press for opening files on the government's war-era
human radiation experiments. But that was just a small part of the
declassification effort. 

''This got down to data that bear on nuclear weapons design, where nuclear
materials are held and where nuclear weapons are stockpiled,'' Gaffney said. 
For instance, in February 1996, Energy declassified the locations and forms of
the federal plutonium reserve. Anyone with access to the Internet can find the
data. 

For Chinese spies trying to collect such information, it ''did make it easier
for them,'' Wade said. ''There's no question about it.'' 

Rose Gottemoeller, who heads Energy's national security office, says 3 million
pages of classified documents are up for declassification in this year alone. 
At that rate, papers documenting the first 25 years or so of the U.S. atomic
weapons program will soon be public. 

So what? ''A lot of wannabe nuclear states like Pakistan, India and Iran are
at least 25 years behind our program and would like nothing more than to get a
hold of that information.'' Gaffney said. 

''We're talking about designs and testing and false starts and proofs of
concepts and work-arounds to fix problems,'' he added. ''You turn over that
and you're toast.'' 



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