PERSPECTIVE ON NUCLEAR TESTING : A Pentagon Shell Game With Everything to Lose : Stockpile tests aren’t necessary. The first Casualty would be the test ban threat we promised the world.

Around the world, expressions of outrage have greeted French President Jacques Chirac’s decision to carry out major nuclear weapons tests--some perhaps as large as 100,000 tons TNT equivalent--in the South Pacific this winter. France characterizes the tests as the “last” before a comprehensive test ban is signed next year. Little attention, however, has been paid to France’s determination to conduct powerful “small” tests--100 or 200 tons TNT-equivalent--forever.

This would be a perfect time for the United States to urge Chirac to reconsider this position. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration is not doing so. Instead, its attention is focused on a Pentagon proposal to leapfrog the French position and require that the comprehensive test ban allow tests with even larger yields.

A test ban that allowed tests with yields of hundreds of tons would create an opening for efforts to develop “usable” “micro-nukes” and “mini-nukes.” It would therefore be seen as a fraud by virtually all of the 170 non-nuclear states that agreed this spring to an indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty after receiving a commitment that the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty would be signed next year.

The Pentagon, like the French military, argues that it will lose confidence that its weapons will retain their destructive power if it cannot see their fission triggers tested now and then at partial yield. Lack of confidence is a psychological state, however, in this case largely self-inflicted by the Pentagon’s requirement that the power of warheads be guaranteed to within a margin for which there is no military justification. Any objective assessment of the record of more than 1,000 U.S. nuclear tests would give great confidence that the immense destructive power of the current stockpile can be maintained without detonation tests. This confidence extends to faithful copies of these weapons if it becomes necessary to remanufacture them.

Those arguing the contrary position often ask rhetorically, “Would you expect your car to work if you stored it for 20 years without testing?” Of course not, but the analogy is misleading. A nuclear warhead “works” only one time. Still, if you supported multibillion-dollar laboratories to test the components of your car under stressful conditions, adjusting and replacing them as necessary, would it work? You bet it would!

The functioning of nuclear warheads is also checked by replacing the plutonium with an inert simulant and then using a powerful X-ray machine to verify that it implodes into a configuration that would produce a nuclear explosion of the desired yield. All of our nuclear weapons have been designed with these and other sophisticated implosion tests before actual testing. As a result, the nuclear tests were successful with remarkably few exceptions.

Test ban opponents have made much of the few cases where there were surprises in tests of new warhead designs. But in every case, a new feature--for example, a new type of chemical explosive--had been introduced whose performance was known by the designers to be questionable under some conditions. Such problems have little relevance to the well-tested designs in the stockpile.

To the argument that use of a new plastic or a change in the technique used to manufacture plutonium components might degrade the performance of the warheads, we would respond, “Don’t fiddle with them!” At the same time, experience has shown that the designs are robust enough to tolerate the inevitable minor changes that would occur in remanufacture. There were more differences between the warheads in the stockpile and the prototypes made by the nuclear-weapons laboratories than there would be with future remanufactured warheads. Yet both worked.

Based on U.S. experience, the objective value of “reliability” tests is negligible in comparison with the cost of reneging on the deal with the non-weapons states, which promises that we will all work together against the spread and to reduce the numbers of these terrible devices. President Clinton should reject the demands of those who would test forever and should urge President Chirac to do the same.