U.S. Facing Huge Outlays to Upgrade A-Arms Plants

In the wake of World War II, Edward Teller, often called the “Father of the H-Bomb,” presided over the development of sophisticated nuclear weapons that helped establish one of the enduring dogmas of the nuclear age--that atomic weapons are a cheap way to wage war and keep the peace.

By the late 1950s, Teller’s Lawrence Livermore Laboratory had increased the efficiency of nuclear bombs so much that a single one could kill 10 million people at a cost of only 12 cents for each death--vastly cheaper than conventional explosives.

But, 30 years after defense analysts spun this macabre bit of arithmetic, nuclear warfare economics are now on the brink of disintegrating. Beset by dangerous spills, obsolete facilities and shoddy management practices, the U.S. production complex for this key defense component is crumbling and unsafe.

The cost of fixing it, according to some analysts, could surpass $155 billion over the next 25 years, making maintenance of a nuclear arsenal suddenly a very costly proposition.

“After decades of failing to plan properly, to develop sound procedures, invest or upgrade when it should have, this nation’s bomb-making industry is about to enter a serious bust cycle,” said Robert Alvarez, an analyst with the Washington-based Environmental Policy Institute. “No matter what happens, the cost of nuclear weapons is going to go up astronomically.”

With the government saddled with a huge budget deficit, the new equation is already pushing U.S. policy-makers to shift more emphasis to conventional weapons for the nation’s defense and creating added pressure for negotiating nuclear weapons reductions with the Soviet Union.

At the same time, officials acknowledge that there is no avoiding a thorough--and expensive--overhaul of U.S. nuclear arms production. A nuclear missile force, regardless of future treaty initiatives, now unalterably is a part of being a global superpower.

The United States has 14 military nuclear facilities, managed by the Energy Department, spread across the nation and occupying a land area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. Many were built in the 1940s and 1950s and, although upgraded over the years, are now approaching the end of their useful life, experts say.

In recent months, problems in the aging complex have come to a head. The nation’s sole nuclear reactor for producing the critical tritium ingredient, at Savannah River, S. C., was shut down in August. At the Hanford Reservation in Washington state, the Department of Energy closed the plutonium-producing N-reactor last February because of growing concern over the safety of its operations.

Environmental neglect and irradiation have been documented at several other bomb-making facilities. At the Feed Material Production Center in Fernald, Ohio, the release of radioactive wastes has become so serious that Ohio Gov. Richard F. Celeste recently called the facility a “time bomb” and urged its permanent closure.

The governors of Colorado and Idaho, where the Energy Department maintains nuclear production and waste storage facilities, respectively, last month urged the department to slow or stop nuclear production until some of the problems have been resolved.

Comprehensive Plan Needed

What is needed, federal and independent experts say, is a comprehensive program to phase out obsolete bomb factories, rebuild essential ones and, using new management and technology, bring a basic production complex up to safe and modern working standards.

But coming up with the money for such an endeavor has, so far, been a daunting challenge.

Even if the $155-billion-plus cost estimated by the General Accounting Office was spread out evenly over the next 25 years, the annual outlay would be $6.2 billion--or almost as much as the Energy Department now spends for all nuclear weapons activities.

“This situation presents a formidable task for the Congress and future administrations . . . “ the GAO observed in a study released last July. They will have to weigh “the enormous cost of correcting problem areas in the nuclear defense complex against competing budget priorities in a deficit-conscious era.”

Accepting the huge retooling challenge is made slightly easier by the fact that half of the cost is unavoidable no matter what national defense choices the United States might make in the future. That much is needed just to clean up the nuclear hazards left by past weapons production.

“The fact that these costs were not considered” when the nation was building its nuclear arsenal “might have changed the calculations,” said Albert Carnesale, a Harvard University nuclear engineer and defense analyst. “You’re having to pay an enormous penalty for doing it wrong.”

The magnitude of the full job is expected to give support to experts who assert that now is the time for the nation to begin looking more to conventional weapons for its defense.

In the past, ambitious proposals to build up the nation’s non-nuclear fighting power have had to struggle against the old bargain-price economics of nuclear alternatives.

But now, according to budget analysts, equipping a new heavy armor division for battle in Europe would cost no more than a single year of nuclear complex fix-ups. Three years of nuclear investment--about $18 billion--would build a new aircraft carrier battle group.

“In recent years, there’s been growing doubt about the usefulness of nuclear weapons in a war” anyway, Alvarez said.

At the same time, the nuclear production dilemma is expected to spur a growing clamor for more ambitious arms control initiatives that would make the problem moot.

One option expected to gain new consideration was first proposed in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower challenged the Soviets to a mutual ban on the production of nuclear materials such as plutonium, uranium alloy and tritium. The United States continued to promote this idea until 1969.

Last November, 35 leading American scientists and arms control experts reissued what they called “the plutonium challenge,” arguing that the time is again ripe to consider a mutual moratorium on the production of nuclear materials.

Curtailing Tritium Suggested

A more refined version of the challenge, outlined in September’s Science magazine, would ban further production by the superpowers of tritium, which is used widely in nuclear warheads to boost their power.

Because tritium, the most perishable of nuclear materials, decays at a rate of 5.5% a year, about half of each superpowers’ warheads would become impotent within 12 years if the supply were not replenished.

“The tritium factor would serve as a ‘clock on the table,’ as in a chess match,” wrote J. Carson Mark, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory official, and three co-authors. “It would provide a mechanism for automatically maintaining a minimum pace of reductions.”

Nevertheless, few experts believe that either nuclear disarmament efforts or new conventional forces could render making nuclear weapons, or retooling the production process, unnecessary.

As long as U.S. adversaries continue to maintain nuclear missiles that could be used in an attack, most say, America will insist on a modern nuclear force.

Nuclear Deterrence Needed

“Certainly, the cost (of these repairs) doesn’t compare to trying to protect our interests without nuclear weapons,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft. “To forgo nuclear deterrence would be a much more serious cost.”

Rather, experts see these approaches as valuable ways of buying time and relieving pressure while the costly and long-running renovation process is accomplished.

Current arms reduction schemes require only the destruction of missiles, not their nuclear weapons’ warheads or their nuclear materials. As a result, even if the United States and Soviet Union reach a long-sought agreement on strategic weapons retiring 50% of the nation’s nuclear missiles, the United States would reap a windfall of salvaged plutonium and tritium to replenish its remaining arsenal.

“That could buy you several years of time,” Alvarez said. And time, says the Energy Department’s growing body of critics, is what the United States will need to reform the management and safety practices at the U.S. weapons complexes to prepare for the role of nuclear weapons in the future.