Pentagon Aides See Perils in Stewardship of A-Arms

Senior Defense Department officials are becoming worried about the safety and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons under the stewardship of Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and are concerned that they soon may be unable to meet the nation’s potential military needs.

In a top secret-letter to O’Leary in late May, Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch said that the Energy Department was failing to maintain the nation’s nuclear weapons plants and lacked the political muscle to obtain sufficient funds to do the job.

“We are concerned that the present (Energy Department) nuclear weapons research, development and test budget does not provide sufficient resources to maintain the technological capability that is required for future nuclear weapons missions,” Deutch told O’Leary.

Deutch wrote the letter as chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Council, the joint defense and energy authority that sets policy for nuclear weapons. It has two other voting members: an Energy Department executive and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

O’Leary was traveling in India this week and could not be reached for comment. In recent interviews, Energy Department officials have defended her but also acknowledged that the department is facing a rapid erosion in its capabilities.

The Defense Department’s concerns have prompted serious suggestions that the Energy Department get out of the weapons business. Though the Pentagon is not seeking a transfer of weapons responsibility to itself, defense officials acknowledged that the subject has been broached.

“It is a serious question,” Frank Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for international security policy, said at a seminar in June on strategic weapons.

Such suggestions reflect widespread concern among military leaders that the nuclear weapons complex’s labs and factories are rapidly losing the expert staff necessary to ensure the safety and reliability of the 6,000 warheads that the United States intends to hold permanently.

Congress has also signaled concern. A Senate subcommittee approved legislation earlier this year that transferred responsibility for the production of tritium, an important explosive booster used in hydrogen bombs, from the Energy Department to the Defense Department. The provision, although it did not become law, indicated the level of anxiety.

Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, charged in a Senate speech recently that “Mrs. O’Leary has surrounded herself with a team of professional anti-nuclear activists,” who have put the U.S. nuclear stockpile at risk.

Thurmond asserted that O’Leary’s advisers come from, among others, the Natural Resources Defense Council, a prominent critic of the weapons complex. The Savannah River nuclear weapons site, which processes tritium and at one time produced plutonium, is the largest employer in Thurmond’s home state.

But Mario Fiori, the Energy Department’s chief at Savannah River and a former Navy submarine captain, said in a recent interview: “I am not going to criticize Hazel. . . . Hazel O’Leary is working very, very hard to create credibility for a department . . . that never had much for many many years.”

An Energy Department spokesman said that, even before Deutch wrote the letter to O’Leary, the department had notified the White House National Security Council that it would need a budget increase in 1996 and beyond to maintain the stockpile. “We believe today the stockpile is safe and reliable,” he said.

Since coming into office, O’Leary has made a number of controversial disclosures about the Energy and Defense departments’ nuclear weapons experiments on Americans several decades ago. Defense officials said that those embarrassing disclosures are not the underlying reason for their concern about her leadership, however.

Defense officials cited two crucial concerns about the nuclear weapons stockpile: that it remain safe and that future presidents have absolute assurance of its reliability if it must be committed to war.

Under federal policy, the risk of an accidental nuclear detonation under normal conditions is not supposed to exceed 1 in 1 billion, a standard far higher than the reliability of any spacecraft, medical device or complex computer.

In the production and handling of 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War, there have been no accidental detonations, according to Sidney Drell, a noted weapons expert and physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.

“That’s one hell of a record,” Drell said.

Whether that record can be maintained is what concerns the Pentagon. Officials worry that O’Leary is unwilling to commit the political capital necessary to fight off efforts to cut the nuclear weapons budgets in favor of environmental and other programs not related to weaponry.

“They (Energy officials) have been good stewards but their inability to defend the kinds of budgets needed is a cause of grave concern,” said a senior defense official, speaking on background.

Assistant Energy Secretary Victor Reese, who is responsible for the department’s weapons complex, voiced his own concerns that its capability may be eroding too rapidly. “I’m not sure that we might have gone a little too fast,” he said, particularly in ensuring the health and safety of the nuclear stockpile.

Former officials of the George Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations are among the most outspoken critics of O’Leary, saying that she lacks the depth of knowledge to manage the nuclear stockpile.

“While clearly a very bright person, Secretary O’Leary has no background in this area and as a result the department lacks the necessary clout in Washington to carry out its linchpin mission,” said former Defense Undersecretary Don Hicks.

One crucial issue is whether the Energy Department will have the funds necessary to support the two existing nuclear weapons labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. Because the United States has agreed to a moratorium on underground testing, Pentagon officials said, it will be crucial for several years to have two labs that can review each other’s work.

Bob Barker, assistant to the president at Livermore, said that the fiscal 1995 Energy Department budget may not be adequate to ensure the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons. Funding for stewardship has dropped below the levels recommended by an interagency study, he said.

“You don’t want to turn this job over to amateurs,” Barker said.

Fiscal 1996 funding will be even tighter, perhaps too low to support two labs, according to an expert involved in a major nuclear weapons study. This year, the overall budget for the Energy Department’s defense program--essentially the weapons complex--is about $4.4 billion, down from $5.8 billion in fiscal 1993.

Ensuring the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons in the absence of underground testing, which was abandoned during the Bush Administration, is comparable to ordering General Motors to stop making new cars and even to refrain from starting any old cars--and at the same time having complete confidence that in two or three decades GM could start a car at a moment’s notice and restart production.

To maintain a stockpile of even 6,000 weapons, about 100 bombs a year should be torn apart and rebuilt. Electronics, wiring and batteries must be routinely replaced and decayed tritium replenished. That would require a new nuclear reactor to produce tritium, production of special batteries, electronic wiring and detonators, as well as special facilities to test conventional explosives used to trigger the plutonium pits in the warheads.