Arguments Against a Test Ban Fizzle

The Soviet Union has once again extended its unilateral ban on nuclear-weapons testing, this time until New Year’s Day, in hopes that the United States will join the moratorium. For more than a year the Reagan Administration has rejected the invitation, primarily on grounds that such a ban is not verifiable and that tests are required to guarantee that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will work when called on. Suddenly this summer, however, the Administration’s rationales are falling apart.

Today in the desert of Kazahkstan, 1,800 miles southeast of Moscow where the Soviets test their nuclear devices, American scientists are watching seismic equipment recently assembled there to measure ground disturbances, including possible nuclear tests. This unprecedented venture resulted from a private negotiation between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the American environmentalist group, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The monitoring stations, set up and staffed by Americans, including geophysicists from UC San Diego, are in a triangle around the Soviet test range at Semipalatinsk at a distance of about 75 miles. Each station is a seismograph system--including two self-triggering digital recorders, two “geophones,” a master clock and oscillographs, among other gadgets. A “central analysis facility” nearby will synthesize the data with a powerful computer. If the plan goes forward, the American team will put more seismic geophones in holes 325 feet underground, enabling far greater fidelity in monitoring.

Such high-tech hardware can clearly distinguish the waves of an earthquake from those of explosions; it can also spot a “de-coupled” nuclear test--one muffled by detonating a warhead in a large, hollow cavern instead of in solid rock.

Already, new data have been gathered on the area’s geological characteristics that will aid off-site measurements of future tests should the Soviets finally give up on their self-restraint.

More important, the principle of on-site verification has been established. Even before the National Resource Defense Council’s dramatic deal with the Soviets, high-level scientists had insisted that a ban on explosions as low as 1 kiloton--far below the 5 to 10 kilotons required to develop new strategic warheads--could be monitored with seismic stations inside and outside the Soviet Union, on terms that the Soviets agreed to in the 1970s. Therefore, it is specious for the White House to dismiss the very possibility of a test ban on the ground of lack of access to adequate data.

The other U.S. objection to a test ban insists that the testing of old warheads is necessary. A warhead, like any machine, can deteriorate over the years, thus jeopardizing its performance. Earlier this summer, before the House called for a U.S. test ban to respond to the Soviet moratorium, a House subcommittee was confronted with a report alleging that inspections of six nuclear warheads (four of them built in the 1950s) had turned up troubling deterioration. The Administration proffered the report, written by a defense consultant, as proof of the need for continual testing to ensure that the U.S. deterrent was in working order.

Subcommittee chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) asked a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ray Kidder, to evaluate the report. Kidder’s assessment, which was delivered to Markey early this month, refutes the Administration’s conclusion that the six cases prove that nuclear-weapons testing is necessary.

Interestingly, Kidder does not claim that warheads don’t degrade. “Just left to age in the dark somewhere for a long time, they will deteriorate,” he said in an interview. The non-nuclear components, made of rubber, corrosive chemicals and the like, can have problems. “The stockpile does degrade to the point where it won’t work anymore, though they’re not going sour overnight. It takes 10 to 20 years.”

Deterioration does not necessarily mean that the weapons won’t work. If the weapons laboratories (of which Livermore is one) set extremely high standards for performance--for example, that a warhead must be 99.9% certain to explode within 10% of its expected yield--then anything below that could be interpreted as “not reliable.” But a slightly subpar rating does not affect the ostensible purpose of the weapon--to deter nuclear war.

Still, if deterioration is worrisome, alternative remedies exist to maintain the stockpile. “A suitable program of maintenance, inspection and non-nuclear tests should be adequate,” Kidder says. This analysis conforms with that of colleagues such as Hugh DeWitt of Livermore and long-time defense consultants Richard Garwin and Hans Bethe, who have been instrumental in the designing and testing of nuclear weapons.

Kidder adds that the weapons laboratories “should be conducting operations in such a way that weapons can be remanufactured in the future. That can be done without testing.” Old designs and specifications, he says, are sometimes discarded in the expectation that they will be replaced by new ones.

For some time experts have challenged the Administration’s two oft-repeated reasons for declining the Soviet test-ban initiative. Now new evidence from the Livermore Lab and the Soviets’ test site underscore the White House obstinacy. It will be difficult to maintain the illusion that the United States is interested in arms control and disarmament when such opportunities are so cavalierly snubbed.

The White House and the Kremlin have traded charges for five years that the other is “not serious” about arms control. But actions speak louder than words, and the Soviet moratorium speaks loudly indeed.