Texas Bunkers House Nuclear Arms Material : Plutonium: Components will remain indefinitely in ground because no decision has been made on future.

Think of William A. Weinreich as the warden of a maximum security federal institution--miles of razor wire, electronic sensors, fortified watchtowers, heavy steel doors, guards with automatic weapons.

The occupants are dangerous and potentially explosive. But this is not a prison, and Weinreich’s charges are not people. As the general manager of the Energy Department’s Pantex plant northwest of Amarillo, Weinreich is the custodian of more than 6,000 bowling-ball-size “pits” of highly toxic plutonium retrieved from dismantled nuclear weapons.

Removed from bombs and missiles and separated from casings of high explosive, these pits--each the former trigger of a nuclear weapon capable of incinerating hundreds of thousands of people--are stored in racks in earth-covered bunkers. There they will remain indefinitely because the U.S. government has not decided what to do with all that surplus plutonium. It’s a sensitive issue, because as little as 15 pounds of plutonium can easily be fashioned into a crude bomb, a potential goal for terrorists.

As the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile shrinks rapidly in the post-Cold War era, Pantex is the only one of the Energy Department’s network of nuclear weapons facilities that is getting busier. This is where the old weapons come to meet their end, and Pantex is to plutonium what Ft. Knox is to gold.

Not that big a deal, according to Weinreich, who--like many people who have spent their careers working with nuclear weapons--views them with respect but not fear.

“We put people through a lot of training and we have a lot of security,” he said. “We’re fairly comfortable with our procedures” for preventing either of the two worst things that could happen here: a nuclear accident, or invasion and seizure of plutonium by terrorists or other rogue groups.

Weinreich and other officials of Mason & Hanger-Silas Mason Inc., the Energy Department’s operating contractor here, point out that Pantex workers have been assembling nuclear weapons and taking them apart for more than 40 years without a major accident or breach of security.

But for most of that time the plutonium was recycled into new weapons. Now the United States is not building nuclear weapons, so the weapons-ready material has nowhere to go. As the U.S. stockpile of strategic nuclear warheads heads down from an estimated peak of 12,000 in 1987 to a target of 3,500 in 2003, about 1,400 weapons a year are being disassembled here and their plutonium pits are added to the surplus.

The Energy Department promised in January to limit the number of pits in “interim” storage here to 12,000 “until further decisions are reached concerning long-term storage of plutonium.”

The Energy Department is coordinating a Clinton Administration study of long-term disposition options for the plutonium, but in the meantime the Administration has not yet officially made the most fundamental decision: whether the material is waste to be destroyed or a potential energy resource to be kept available if needed.

Pantex lies in the approach path of Amarillo airport, and officials acknowledged some concern about what might happen if a plane crashed into one of the bunkers and started a fire that would spread plutonium in the atmosphere.

As for terrorists, security supervisor Dale F. Morgan smiled as he displayed the weapons carried by Pantex guards, including an M-60 light machine gun. It is theoretically possible for someone to parachute into Pantex or land a helicopter, he said, “but it wouldn’t do ‘em much good. They might get in, but they wouldn’t get out.”