$1-Billion Laser for Nuclear Arms Study to Be OKd

A controversial proposal to build a $1.1-billion laser for nuclear weapons research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, located east of San Francisco, will receive formal approval today by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary.

O’Leary is scheduled to announce the approval to begin design work for the laser facility in a speech at the lab this afternoon, ending months of anxious waiting by scientists on a decision that is seen as crucial to the future of Livermore.

“It will make Lawrence Livermore a magnet for bright people,” O’Leary said in an interview Thursday with The Times, confirming her plans to approve the facility. “Our national security requirements are more sophisticated and more based on science in the post-Cold War world. Livermore is well equipped to take us into this new era.”

The laser, which will rank as one of the largest defense or energy research programs of the next decade, is intended to ensure the safety and reliability of the Pentagon’s stockpile of weapons by allowing bomb designers to probe the interior of nuclear explosions.

Known as the National Ignition Facility, the laser will be larger than a football stadium and powerful enough to create a brief thermonuclear fire. The laser experiments would substitute for underground nuclear tests, which the United States ended in September, 1992, and which are likely to be permanently banned under a future international treaty.

The Energy Department’s intention to locate the project at Livermore signals that the lab will probably have a key role in nuclear research, even though its weapons work has eroded considerably since the end of the Cold War.

O’Leary, however, stopped short of saying that the Energy Department would keep bomb design staffs at both Livermore and the rival Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. A federal commission is studying whether to consolidate the work at one lab.

The Energy Department considered building the laser at Los Alamos, and it retains the option to put it there. But O’Leary called Livermore the correct place for the facility, given its existing leadership in laser technology.

Although the laser will be built and operated by the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons branch, the machine will also conduct a broad range of unclassified non-military research, said Mike Campbell, Livermore’s associate director for the machine.

It will give scientists an unprecedented opportunity to analyze the titanic forces that fuel stars and supernovas. This information, in turn, could one day help harness fusion energy as a commercial source of electricity, scientists hope.

Nonetheless, arms control advocates and environmentalists have attacked the project, saying it undermines efforts to ban nuclear weapons testing and disengage U.S. defense policy from nuclear weapons.

“It gives the appearance that we are trying to circumvent a test ban,” said Spurgeon Keeny, director of the Arms Control Assn., a Washington group. “It is going to make the French and the Chinese and others want one too.”

Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had strongly supported the project until last June, when he wrote a seven-page letter to O’Leary outlining his concerns that the laser could undermine efforts to curb nuclear weapons proliferation.

In her decision to approve the laser, O’Leary agreed to a series of conditions to address Dellums’ concerns, including formal assurances that the laser would not promote nuclear proliferation.

Despite the Clinton Administration’s support of a comprehensive nuclear test ban, it also intends to keep a robust nuclear weapons capability long into the future. By some estimates, the United States will have a permanent stockpile of 6,000 nuclear weapons.

Senior Defense Department officials have been increasingly critical of O’Leary’s stewardship of the nuclear weapons complex, asserting that she was allowing its technical capability to atrophy too quickly and was not showing enough political muscle to defend weapons budgets in Congress.

O’Leary had a sharp response to her Pentagon critics Thursday.

“This answers the question, ‘Is O’Leary soft on defense?’ ” she said. “O’Leary is tough on national security.”

The laser would have 192 individual beams, amplified by glass lenses in a labyrinth of tubes, aimed into a spherical test chamber. At the center of the chamber, scientists would mount a tiny target of super-cold deuterium and tritium, heavy forms of hydrogen.

The laser would ignite the fuel indirectly by focusing beams inside a tiny gold chamber, which would vaporize and barrage the fuel with intense X-rays. Temperatures would rise to 50 million degrees, triggering a sustained fusion of atoms that would boost the temperatures to 400 million degrees. The laser is coveted by weapons scientists who are concerned about how, in the absence of underground nuclear tests, they can ensure that bombs will be safe from accidental detonation and will explode with predictable force.

The laser will allow scientists to refine top-secret computation codes used to design weapons and predict the explosive force that they will yield, said Victor Reese, assistant energy secretary for defense programs.

The project is also intended to retain a cadre of top scientists who would maintain the arcane knowledge of nuclear weapons, which is often described as much a black art as a science.

But Keeny, as well as others, has disputed that the laser will do much to help either safety or reliability. The various atomic powers have produced more than 100,000 nuclear bombs in the last 50 years without any accidental detonations, critics note.

Rather, Keeny characterizes the laser as an expensive sandbox used to keep top scientists interested in working on nuclear issues, which may be useful but not necessarily worth $1.1 billion.

Under O’Leary’s approval, Livermore will receive about $60 million for early engineering design and an environmental assessment. Today’s decision comes five months later than expected. O’Leary said she was not satisfied until now that the Energy Department had sufficiently studied all the financial and technical issues involved in the project.

Although the decision is a major victory for laser proponents, a second major approval must occur before detailed engineering can start, a point at which costs will rapidly mount. And a third approval would be needed to launch construction.

In addition to the $1.1 billion for construction, the laser will cost about $900 million to operate over the next 15 years, according to a memorandum by Reese.

The Energy Department estimates that the laser would support about 1,500 jobs at Livermore, industrial plants building the components and other laboratories.

“This laser is a marvel,” said Stephen Dean, president of Fusion Power Associates, an advocacy group in suburban Washington. “Just in terms of potential spinoff in the optics industry, it should be done.”

Vartabedian reported from Washington and Hotz from Los Angeles.