Some Scientists Question Ban on Peacetime Use of Nuclear Explosions

Now that the world’s nuclear powers have agreed to end all peacetime nuclear explosions to protect man and Earth, some critics say man is tossing away chances to move mountains.

These scientists envision using controlled explosions to blast out vast underground storage caverns, stimulate oil fields, prevent earthquakes, generate energy and develop an asteroid defense for the planet.

The Chinese even have proposed blasting a 12-mile chunk from a mountain range to divert the Yarlung River.

China initially demanded an exemption for so-called peaceful nuclear explosions, or PNEs, during the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty negotiations in Geneva. China dropped the demand in July and signed the treaty Sept. 24 at the United Nations, after having successfully pushed a clause requiring the PNE issue to be reconsidered each decade.

The debate--all but over for now--asks whether mankind can be trusted with its own creation. The consensus is no.

Most scientists agree that peaceful-use explosions should be banned along with military tests. Any explosion can be studied for potential military applications. And the more nuclear bombs in the world, the more likely they could be used in war or by terrorists, the argument goes.

“The fact that you design a peaceful explosive in a different way doesn’t mean that you couldn’t put it in a plane and drop it on a city,” said Richard Garwin, an IBM scientist who studied PNEs for the United States before they were abandoned here in the 1970s.

Some scientists chafe under the ban. That includes Edward Teller, the nonagenarian father of the U.S. nuclear program.

“In my mind the test ban is a huge mistake,” Teller said. “We are going to fail to understand what can be done with nuclear explosions. All the countries should benefit. The only thing I would forbid is secret tests.”

Patricia Lewis, a former British nuclear physicist who campaigns against nuclear weapons, says the treaty’s clause requiring the ban to be reviewed every 10 years doesn’t bother her. It would take overwhelming international consensus to allow peacetime explosions, she said.

Still, scientists raise some intriguing possibilities for peaceful uses of nuclear blasts.

The Russians, before they discontinued their program in the 1980s, used underground nuclear explosions to stimulate oil wells, claiming a huge return on their investment. They said the energy produced by the extra oil was five to seven times that of the nuclear explosives.

They also used the bombs to staunch otherwise unstoppable gas gushers, and have created lakes, dug canals and built dams.

Russian scientists told American colleagues last year that they would like to devise a system of nuclear-tipped rockets to zap or deflect monster asteroids headed toward Earth.

Vadim A. Simonenko, deputy head of a nuclear laboratory in Chelubynsk, Russia, said he envisions space-age factories harnessing nuclear explosions as they float outside Earth’s atmosphere.

But Simonenko also said that earthquake-prone countries such as the United States and Japan should take note: Underground nuclear explosions could provide occasional nudges to the Earth’s massive tectonic plates, releasing stresses that cause large-scale earthquakes.

“Technological development is a permanent phenomenon,” said Simonenko, reached via e-mail. “It can be continued or interrupted. It’s like the choice of going two ways in the development of our civilization: to go to the jungle and eat bananas or to take the challenges Nature sends.”

Milo Nordyke, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory near San Francisco, is writing a book about the Russian PNE program abandoned in 1986. He says most peaceful applications are unworkable, but some are economically attractive, including the creation of underground storage areas.

“You could store oil under the North Sea,” he said. “Instead of having to lay pipelines to Scotland or Norway, you could have gone a few thousand feet under the surface and created big reservoirs.”

But the arms-control benefits of a test ban override any such applications, he said.

While an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that explosions for peacetime uses should be banned along with military development, a few want to continue testing nuclear weapons as a defense against a possible catastrophe--a monster asteroid colliding with Earth.

“People be careful,” warned Russia’s Simonenko. “The asteroid threat is a long-term threat, but a certain one.”

Many scientists who have examined the asteroid threat in the last decade agree that a nuclear weapon would be the most efficient option against a catastrophic asteroid--one with a diameter of more than half a mile--if there is little warning.

But other scientists say there is a negligible threat of another monster asteroid or comet on the scale of the one suspected of wiping out dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

“The chances of this ever happening again are so remote that there’s no need to think about it any further than we’ve thought about it already,” said Clark R. Chapman, a planetary scientist in Boulder, Colo.

Still, the next Big One could come, and with very little warning.

Its legacy could be what Simonenko and a U.S.-Russian panel of scientists described in a 1994 paper as “a devastating climate change, dwarfing the ‘nuclear winter’ long feared as collateral effect of a global thermonuclear war.”

Scientists in China and Russia have said they would like to test a nuclear-bomb defense system. Simonenko advised “large-scale explosion research for technological applications and planetary defense.”

Johndale C. Solem, a Los Alamos scientist who joined Simonenko in the 1994 paper, disagreed with him about the need for testing.

“For one thing, you wouldn’t have some other asteroid around for a convenient target,” he said. “If you had an incoming asteroid, you’d probably have several rockets for backup and then you’d simply launch them and go after it.”

A nuclear explosion would be used in one of two ways. One would be to blow up the asteroid or comet. The more accepted method would be to detonate at some distance from the object to produce a “standoff” impact, keeping it intact but nudging it off its deadly path.

Other methods under consideration would use solar power or large lasers.

Teller maintains that the fallout danger from controlled, peacetime explosions has been overstated and would be less than that from nuclear power plants.

He says the only death from U.S. peacetime explosions was a Japanese fisherman who unwittingly wandered into the danger zone of a test explosion in the Pacific in 1954.

“Sometime in the future, maybe 20 years, maybe 200 years, using nuclear explosions will become common, and it will be very hard to show people why we shied away from it,” Teller said.