Nunn Sees Military Role in Aiding Environment : Pentagon: He says Defense Department assets can help in climate research, pollution cleanup and toxic and radioactive waste disposal.

With defense cutbacks looming and environmental concerns soaring, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday proposed a new strategic program that would bring military assets to bear on environmental research and pollution cleanup.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) endorsed using the scientific expertise, supercomputers and other high-technology equipment of the Defense Department and the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons laboratories for climate research, pollution cleanup, and disposal of radioactive and toxic wastes.

Nunn, regarded as one of the Senate’s most influential members, said that he and other committee members will push for creation of a new Defense Environmental Research Council when they meet next month to begin work on the $295-billion defense authorization bill for 1991.

Referring to the disintegration of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in recent months, Nunn said that he is convinced “there is also a new and different threat to our national security emerging--the destruction of our environment. The defense establishment has a clear stake in countering this growing threat. I believe that one of our key national security objectives must be to reverse the accelerating pace of environmental destruction around the globe.”

The concept of classifying environmental protection as a national strategic objective was proposed by Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.) in a 1989 speech to the National Academy of Sciences.

Gore, a member of the Armed Services panel, joined Nunn in outlining ideas for using defense resources for environmental work as part of a Strategic Environmental Research Program.

Military aircraft and naval vessels, he said, “could be of invaluable assistance” in collecting atmospheric and ocean data needed by scientists who are constructing computer models used to study the greenhouse effect and global climate change.

Gore said that he has had a series of conversations with officials involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative about using its supercomputers for climate modeling work. SDI already has been cut back dramatically from its original concept as a continental missile defense system.

Nunn said that the first task of the new Defense Environmental Research Council would be to develop a comprehensive five-year program for research affecting the national security.

“Our real peace dividend will consist of the research talent that will be made available as our defense establishment is reduced--thousands of highly trained and educated scientists, engineers and technicians,” Nunn told the Senate.

“As our defense requirements change, we have an opportunity to redirect this tremendous national resource toward the environmental challenges we face in the 1990s: understanding what we are doing to the environment today, cleaning up the damage we had done in the past and modernizing U.S. industries and government to establish and maintain technological leadership in this critical area in the future.”

Specifically, Nunn said that he will propose to include in defense legislation the authorization for the Pentagon and Energy Department to undertake programs in the fields of data collection and analysis, development of alternative energy technologies and environmental cleanup technologies.

The two agencies already have responsibility for some of the nation’s most staggering environmental cleanup problems--radioactive pollution of nuclear weapons sites belonging to the Energy Department and massive toxic pollution of military bases about to be closed in the United States and Europe.

“U.S. technologies for more effective identification, treatment, and cleanup of hazardous wastes will find ready markets in other countries, particularly in the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and in Third World countries,” Nunn said.

“Development of these new technologies will also help DOD and DOE meet their environmental cleanup and treatment obligations more quickly and more efficiently and at lower cost.”