U.S. Launches Race to Save Nuclear Arms Know-How : Science: Experts say without archive, weapons skills, ability to maintain nation’s stockpile would be lost.

In secret laboratory vaults in New Mexico and California, the nation’s top weapons scientists are busy chronicling the detailed scientific and engineering know-how of America’s nuclear bombs--a historic record akin to weapons manuscripts left from the Middle Ages.

The archive, known as the Knowledge Preservation Project, was launched out of growing concern that nuclear weapons skills accumulated during five decades of the Cold War are quickly atrophying.

The black art of nuclear weaponry--handed down from scientist to scientist since World War II--would be lost to history without the archive, leaving the nation unable to maintain in 10 or 20 years its powerful stockpile of nuclear weapons or to restart nuclear arms production, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory say.

“We don’t want to push the erase button on our memory and go back to where we were 50 years ago,” said John D. Immele, director of nuclear weapons technology at Los Alamos. “You have to have the intellectual capability to respond to future developments. This lets our adversaries know that we still know what to do.”

The archive is part of a $40-billion federal program during the next decade to maintain the reliability and safety of the 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons that will form the Defense Department’s permanent stockpile.

Ultimately, the archive will include a top-secret computer web linking U.S. weapons laboratories, providing a cornerstone for scientific research crucial to maintaining nuclear forces.

But many arms control advocates are aghast at the project, saying much of the knowledge is better forgotten. The preservation of nuclear skills can only serve to create paranoia that would reignite the arms race in the distant future, they say.

The bitter disagreement over the project reflects a much larger ideological fracture: While arms control advocates think the world is moving toward eliminating nuclear weapons, the Pentagon and the Energy Department are creating a scientific infrastructure that will underpin a permanent nuclear force.

Scope Unprecedented

Working inside a low-slung, concrete-block room monitored by motion detectors and wired with secure communications lines, the archivists at Los Alamos are collecting blueprints, drawings, technical reports, manufacturing records and test data, attempting to record how and why the bombs were built as they were.

Retired weaponeers are being brought back to the lab for videotaped interviews intended to reveal details about nuclear bombs that could never be gleaned from blueprints.

Unlike the elaborate handwritten weapons manuscripts of the 1400s, the nuclear weapons archive materials will be recorded on optical disks, magnetic tapes and massive printouts--enough to fill a major library.

Scientists say the scope of the work is unprecedented and should enable the United States to keep intact all the key secrets learned from the crude bombs developed in the Manhattan Project of World War II to the lightweight 1980s bombs that designers affectionately describe as “Indy 500 racers.”

“Without this effort, we would be hard-pressed to reconstitute nuclear weapons production,” said Don McCoy, a weapons manager at Los Alamos where, five decades ago, scientists developed the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

Anti-nuclear groups concede that the archive is a necessary first step in winning military support for a treaty to permanently ban underground nuclear testing. But they remain worried. Someday, the archive should be destroyed, according to groups such as the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But Charles Herzfeld, a former top Pentagon official and a Los Alamos consultant, disagrees, calling such activists “nothing more than information fascists.” Others at Los Alamos say they believe that anti-nuclear groups have an ulterior motive: to force the United States into unilateral disarmament by creating public doubt about the safety of nuclear weapons.

Arms control advocates consider the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and an upcoming ban on underground nuclear testing as steps in “denuclearization.” U.S. military leaders, however, see the treaties as an enhancement of U.S. security by denying nuclear weapons to other nations.

U.S. Policy Defined

President Clinton laid out U.S. policy in July, 1994, saying: “We will continue to maintain nuclear forces of sufficient size and capability to hold at risk a broad range of assets valued by such [hostile] political and military leaders.”

The problem is how to assure the reliability and safety of these forces without testing, and how to retain the expertise of scientists when nuclear weapons are neither being designed nor produced.

A nuclear bomb contains roughly 6,000 parts, including 50 pounds of high explosives wrapped around a radioactive plutonium sphere. Jas Mercer-Smith, a Los Alamos scientist, compares nuclear bombs to a 747 jetliner in terms of technical sophistication.

Is it possible, Mercer-Smith asks, to park a 747 for two or three decades and have 100% confidence that the engines will start and the plane fly at a moment’s notice? Some nuclear weapons are more than 20 years old, and, experts say, to remain effective, must be renovated and updated no longer than 30 years after they were built.

Scientists are increasingly worried that plastic explosives in the bombs will chemically change over the decades, the plutonium pits will corrode and electronic components will degrade during exposure to radioactivity.

The archive is expected to preserve knowledge aimed at assuaging these fears. The library will allow scientists to compare bomb components as they age to the original design and examine old test results to see how anomalies may have affected bomb performance.

In addition, the Energy Department’s $40-billion “stockpile stewardship” program will construct massive testing machines, including the $1-billion National Ignition Facility laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the $124-million Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrotest Facility here.

Despite 50 years of research, scientists say they have only a primitive understanding of the precise physics that occur during a nuclear detonation. These machines will conduct high-energy experiments that simulate conditions in a nuclear bomb, allowing scientists to refine computations that are central to weapons science.

Officials Worried

While anti-nuclear activists argue that the Energy Department is going overboard, defense officials believe the effort remains inadequate.

“I have not seen a plan put forward by the Department of Energy that assures the reliability of the stockpile over the next 10 years,” Adm. Henry G. Chiles Jr., commander of the U.S. Strategic Command, said at a classified meeting in Omaha two months ago, according to Energy Department officials.

Although defense officials support plans for physics experiments and the archive, they worry that the Energy Department lacks a coordinated maintenance schedule for each nuclear bomb and is paralyzed by indecision about providing a new source of tritium, a gas used to boost the explosive force of nuclear bombs.

“What they want is a Maytag washing machine repairman approach to the problem,” said one Los Alamos scientist.

Yet the labs are fast losing expertise to even fulfill the Maytag job, making the archive all the more important, many nuclear weapons experts say.

Merri Wood, a weapons scientist, said she is just one of three or four weaponeers left at Los Alamos who have experience designing thermonuclear packages for functional bombs. The design crew for fission packages is even thinner, numbering just two or three scientists at Los Alamos, according to Wood.

“If one of these people were hit by a truck, it would destroy our ability to get quick answers to problems,” said Wood, whose cramped office is adorned by a large poster of Worf, the Klingon warrior of “Star Trek” fame.

The expertise to conduct underground nuclear tests is also depleted, she said. Such tests involve boring a 12-foot hole through granite to a depth of half a mile and lowering a 17-story rack containing the bomb and various instruments. The million-pound assembly must be aligned so that measurements can be taken within millionths of a second during detonation.

The archive is considered essential for the preservation of such esoteric skills. Los Alamos has created 10 archive sites, including a main “Weapons Data Vault.”

Rummaging in Safes

The vault is a windowless room with a combination lock on the door, guarded by custodian Helen Newton, who said she personally knows every individual authorized to delve into America’s treasure trove of nuclear secrets.

So far, Los Alamos researchers have collected about 800,000 drawings, 1 million photographs, 2,000 videotapes and 7 million pages of documentation, but they expect to find at least an equal amount once they begin to rummage through hundreds of individual safes scattered through the complex.

A similar effort is going on at the Lawrence Livermore lab and the Sandia national laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and in Livermore. Los Alamos has budgeted about $7 million this year and expects to spend $8 million next year on the archive.

In one case, researchers found a virtually unknown vault that contained thousands of documents that were supposed to have been destroyed years ago, a discovery “that has saved our butts,” said scientist Bill Anderson.

In another case, a scientist who could not bring himself to destroy his life’s work preserved boxes of unclassified calibration data in his garage, which eventually proved to be a gold mine for scientists.

Preservation of full-scale blueprints of bombs is one of the biggest problems in the archive, as well as rescuing thousands of microfilm documents that are beginning to mildew.

One of the biggest worries is that a malfunction of the sprinkler system or a fire in the vault could wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars worth of research, Anderson said. “The loss would be incalculable.”