U.S. Nuclear Warheads: Plenty Now, More to Come

On April 29, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted to keep the Department of Energy’s dormant N-reactor at Hanford, Wash., shut down, rather than restart it to produce plutonium for building new nuclear weapons. The committee’s action, necessitated by fears for public safety and prompted by a new consciousness that rose from the ashes of Chernobyl, is the latest event in a series of mishaps to beset America’s most secret industry: the government’s nuclear warhead production complex.

In seven years, the Reagan Administration has bungled virtually every warhead and nuclear materials production project it has undertaken. It has mismanaged goals and timetables and overstated financial and material requirements. All the while, it has been working to restrict more information from congressional and public scrutiny than ever before.

The result is that we now have a program of nuclear overproduction that is in disarray and a bureaucracy arguing that it needs still more resources.

Since 1945, more than 60,000 nuclear warheads of 71 different types have come out of the production complex. The warheads are configured for every conceivable military mission (for each of the services, of course)--bombs, atomic land mines, artillery guns, shoulder-fired bazookas, nuclear torpedoes, air-to-air rockets and missiles of every variety. Today, 25,000 of those warheads are in the U.S. stockpile; the remainder have been retired and their materials recycled.

The Department of Energy currently produces new warheads at the rate of about five daily and “retires” about four. During the Reagan Administration, the department’s budget to maintain the vast nuclear warhead production machinery has skyrocketed from $3.4 billion in 1981 to more than $8 billion for the coming year. The high rate of production (about 4,000 warheads can now be run through the nuclear assembly line in a year) has meant that more than 11,000 of the 25,000 warheads the Pentagon now operates are new models.

On the surface, it might appear that this frenetic pace of weapons production was exactly the shot in the arm promised by the new Administration to “restore” America’s security. In reality, both public safety and U.S. security have suffered from mistakes and bad decisions.

The Administration’s agenda for plutonium and tritium production is a case in point. Plutonium is the prime ingredient in nuclear weapons. Tritium is used to build lightweight but high-yield nuclear warheads, as well as to create special effects from nuclear explosions (such as enhanced radiation). Both are man-made in nuclear reactors. When Reagan took office, the Department of Energy was producing a little more than one ton of plutonium and tritium annually, an amount that could not satisfy the new Administration’s projected needs for raw materials to undertake a nuclear buildup. In order to increase the size of the nuclear stockpile by 15% over a five-year period, the Reagan team undertook 10 initiatives to more than double the Carter Administration level of nuclear materials output. Reactors operating on standby would be restarted, power levels would be increased and new facilities would be built.

What happened instead is almost comical. First of all, the President approved production plans that year after year overstated requirements by more than half. Over the course of the “buildup,” the MX missile program was cut from 2,000 to 500 warheads when its basing mode was changed. Trident II warhead requirements were reduced from 4,800 to 3,000 when the Navy decided it would use older Trident I warheads for the new missile. The program to produce hundreds of enhanced-radiation (neutron bomb) warheads was slashed by Congress.

Projections for new nuclear artillery projectiles, naval nuclear warheads and reloads for Pershing 2 missiles shrank as a result of Pentagon resource fights, congressional budgeting and political trade-offs. Schedules for production of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles were significantly slowed. In all, the Administration overstated its nuclear materials and financial needs by as many as 4,500 warheads.

But all the while Energy Department moguls continued to push their old plutonium- and tritium-producing machines to the limit, ignoring the political realities that had beset the fanciful predictions of their Defense Department colleagues. To find the “needed” plutonium and tritium, DOE set about increasing the number of plutonium/tritium production reactors at its Savannah River Plant in South Carolina from three to four by restarting the L-reactor.

The department’s original plan was to get the L-reactor humming by the end of 1983. But a number of environmental concerns were raised and the department was forced to build a cooling lake to hold the heated water from the reactor, before it was discharged into the Savannah River. The restart schedule thus slipped two years. By that time, another reactor at Savannah River (the C-reactor) had been shutdown (in June, 1985) because it was badly cracked and leaking. Then, in November, 1986, the maximum allowable power at all three operating reactors (P, K and L) was cut for safety reasons, after a National Academy of Sciences panel found that the emergency cooling systems might not function adequately in an accident. In March, the power level was again cut, to the point where the three plants were at half capacity.

In cranking up plutonium and tritium production, the government was not only negligent about safety implications, but also out of sync with actual weapons-building plans. The result: Today we are producing plutonium at a rate of about one-quarter to one-half ton annually, lower than when Reagan took office. And the Department of Energy hasn’t learned any lessons. Admiral Sylvester R. Foley, DOE’s top nuclear weapons production official, told Congress at a closed hearing in March that projections of future nuclear warhead production show that stocks of plutonium will run out in 1991. This is in spite of a secret “reserve” of plutonium the department has been building.

Among the reasons a shortage of plutonium is projected is that the Reagan Administration plans a massive increase in the production of new high-yield warheads, on top of the warheads already in large-scale production. But the nuclear tycoons would prefer to create the impression of a nuclear production business in a potentially perilous state, and that U.S. security is equally threatened. In the next couple of years, a congressional debate about shortages of plutonium and tritium will most certainly skirt the main questions of why we continue to fatten the nuclear arsenal in the first place, why we need to continue to increase significantly the forces capable of striking the Soviet Union and why we build new nuclear warheads for land and naval use.

The production of nuclear warheads, of course, has little to do with American security in the end. New nuclear models with fancier features are needed to maintain the production complex, not to build up U.S. defenses and some mythical lead over the Soviet Union.

Now the clean-up costs for the nuclear mess at the Hanford reservation alone are estimated as high as $18 billion. The rest of the complex will cost tens of billions more. One of the biggest problems has been that DOE nuclear weapons factories are not required to meet stringent environmental standards and are essentially self-regulating. What Americans should also worry about is that “national security” is self-regulating as well. Government departments make their plans and carry out their programs in secrecy, assuming that departmental interests are national interests. They are wrong.