Continued Nuclear Testing Not Necessary, Study Says

LIVERMORE, Calif. — A new classified study by a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has concluded that the lab’s director was incorrect when he told Congress that continued nuclear testing is required to ensure the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

The study, the most detailed of the U.S. nuclear testing program ever undertaken, appears to provide factual support for an emerging body of scientific opinion critical of the Defense Department’s insistence on continued testing. Last week, a report by University of California scientists concurred in the Livermore study’s overall conclusions, and at least two leading weapons scientists recently have written to Congress questioning the continuing need for testing.

The views set forth in these studies and letters contradict written testimony delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year by Roger Batzel--director of one of the country’s two nuclear weapons labs. He alleged that “one-third of all modern weapons designs placed in the U.S. stockpile have required and received post-deployment nuclear tests for resolution of problems. In three-fourths of these cases,” Batzel wrote, “the problems were discovered only because of the ongoing nuclear testing.”

The accuracy of that statement has become a matter of unusual importance because it subsequently has been echoed by Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger and others within the Administration who oppose pending legislation to significantly lower the permissible size of U.S. nuclear tests. The question of Weinberger’s views took on additional importance Thursday, when Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze announced the resumption of negotiations on a comprehensive test ban.

“Any claim that nuclear testing is unnecessary is simply and demonstrably false,” Weinberger argued in The Times last May. “Over one-third of all nuclear-weapons designs introduced into our stockpile since 1958 have encountered reliability problems,” he wrote, “and 75% of these were discovered and subsequently corrected thanks to actual explosive testing.”

Those assertions are directly contradicted in a new study by physicist Ray E. Kidder, a 31-year veteran of the nation’s nuclear weapons program and the author of more than 100 classified reports on the weapons’ design and effects.

After finishing the most thorough review of classified test data in the history of the U.S. arms program, Kidder bluntly summarized for The Times the conclusion of his still-secret report:

“The bombs work,” he said. “They’ll blow up whatever you want to blow up, a city or a dam. You don’t need to test them anymore; they work. Maybe Weinberger doesn’t know that, but I’ve studied the data and it’s true.”

Accuracy Shown in Study

Kidder said that his five-month study--which was made at the request of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-Wis.) and five other congressmen--shows that weapons removed from the stockpile and tested at random have proved remarkably accurate and that most of the problems cited by Weinberger occurred decades ago and have no bearing on the reliability of the current arsenal.

The Livermore physicist contends that not one warhead properly tested in the first place and used for its intended purpose has required retesting.

Kidder’s overall conclusion was corroborated Thursday in a report to the UC regents, who operate the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos weapons labs for the government. Acting on a request by faculty members, the university had asked its Scientific and Academic Advisory Committee to investigate the reliability question.

“We conclude,” the committee wrote, “that the weapons currently in the stockpile are remarkably robust and designed so as to minimize the requirements for continued nuclear testing to assure their reliability.”

Kidder’s report currently is making its way through the Livermore and Energy Department clearance procedures. But he agreed to disclose some of his non-classified conclusions because he believes that Batzel, Weinberger and other test ban opponents are using a spurious technical argument to derail a policy they oppose.

“The public is being hoodwinked,” Kidder charged.

At least one other veteran Livermore physicist, Hugh E. DeWitt, concurs not only in Kidder’s technical conclusion but also in his charge that test ban opponents are manipulating classified information in support of their objections. In a letter last June to Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), DeWitt wrote:

“Clearly Dr. Batzel’s statement is considered to be extremely important by high-level officials in the U.S. government. The statement is based on classified weapons testing data. The accuracy of the statement can be independently judged only by an examination of this classified data and this data is not normally available to most of the audiences . . . who hear the statement from U.S government representatives. Dr. Kidder and I have examined the classified data on which the statement is based and we conclude that Dr. Batzel’s statement is misleading to the point of being false. Dr. Kidder will back this up in a classified report . . . .

“In my opinion, as a longtime staff member of the Livermore lab, the main purpose of present-day nuclear testing is not to identify and correct stockpile reliability problems but to develop new nuclear weapons (often called modernization).

Misuse of Data Cited

“Batzel’s alarming statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee is a scare story that does not hold up when the supporting classified testing information is examined. His statement is a serious misuse of classified information. He could get away with it only on the assumption that nobody outside the weapons labs would challenge his statement by actually examining the classified data.”

DeWitt, restricting his comments to unclassified data, argued that Batzel’s claim to Congress that one-third of the weapon designs required retesting was based on a group of 14 warheads. DeWitt noted--and the lab’s directors agree--that all of those problems were subsequently solved and that there is no reason to think there is a current problem with any weapon in the stockpile.

Kidder and DeWitt further contend that most of the 14 cases do not involve “modern weapon designs,” as Batzel claimed. In fact, nine of them--four strategic and five tactical warheads--date back more than two decades. Three of the nine are not even in the stockpile at this time.

Seven of those nine shared a common problem that in the words of physicist George Miller, Livermore’s associate director, “had to do with unexpected effects of radioactive aging of the boost gas (tritium).” Kidder noted that this problem was cleared up in the early 1960s and is not a factor in more recent weapons designs. The other two weapons--the warheads for the Sergeant and Polaris ballistic missiles--are among the three no longer in the arsenal.

According to Kidder and the UC report, only five warheads tested in the last 10 years are relevant to the discussion of current arsenal reliability.

Of those five, Kidder said, three--the B-61 tactical bomb, the air- and sea-launched cruise missile and the ground-launched cruise missile--were not tested under low temperature conditions before being put into the stockpile. Subsequently, scientists at Los Alamos realized that the cruise missile would be carried under the wings of B-52 bombers at high and, therefore, very cold altitudes. At that time, low temperature tests were ordered for all three warheads.

The other two--the warhead for the Poseidon missile and an eight-inch artillery projectile--required retesting because they were substantially modernized.

Kidder concludes that none of the examples cited by Batzel justify the argument that continued testing is required to ensure the reliability of previously tested modern weapons.

The Livermore physicist’s study will be submitted to Congress sometime in the next few months, along with another report by associate director Miller.

Miller would not comment on his findings, but if it follows the recently expressed position of the lab management, it will probably accept Kidder’s basic contention that the nuclear stockpile is robust. But it will argue that this is true only because of past testing and that such testing is required to ensure future reliability. Livermore director Batzel refused to respond to The Times’ questions on this subject.

House Curbs Test Size

During its last session, the House--acting in response to a recent series of Soviet initiatives in pursuit of a comprehensive test ban--approved a measure reducing the permissible size of U.S. and Soviet nuclear tests from 150 kilotons to five or less. The Senate also passed a non-binding resolution requesting the President to pursue such an agreement. The measure has been reintroduced in the current session.

Weinberger, Batzel and Siegfried Hecker, director of the Los Alamos lab, have consistently opposed these proposals. Their critics, such as Kidder and DeWitt, contend that the secretary and lab directors actually are concerned that a test ban would seriously, if not fatally, hobble key elements of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, including the nuclear pumped X-ray laser, which is being developed at Livermore.

Advocates of a very low level nuclear testing threshold or of a comprehensive test ban tend to favor this policy because they believe it would curtail the nuclear arms race. Developing new nuclear weapons, including the X-ray laser, would require rather large explosions. Just how large is a matter of some debate but there is little disagreement that a five-kiloton testing threshold would prevent serious advances on the project.

Two Technical Objections

Whatever its impact on the “Star Wars” project, congressional efforts to reduce or halt U.S. nuclear testing previously have foundered on two technical objections: Could the United States verify that the Soviets were not cheating on such an agreement? Could America ensure that its nuclear deterrent was survivable and reliable without testing?

In recent years the matter of verification of a test ban agreement has receded. New and more sophisticated methods of verification involving seismological techniques as well as satellite surveillance have refined the nuclear detectives’ art.

Recently, the Soviets have indicated that they would accept on-site inspection and, indeed, teams of U.S. scientists are currently in the Soviet Union on a private basis evaluating geological conditions close to the test site.

Top Soviet scientists stated that they would accede to a U.S. request to conduct Cortex monitoring of their test sites. This procedure is more invasive of a nation’s security because it involves drilling a second hole parallel and close to the one with the explosion and subsequently revealing much more about the nature of the explosion than through seismological means.

Because of all of these improvements, verification no longer looms as a matter of serious controversy. The lab directors themselves have testified to Congress that they do not believe the Soviets have been cheating on the existing test ban treaty.

Stockpile Reliability

So, with the verification issue removed, the technical argument against a test ban now rests on the matter of stockpile reliability.

Frederick Reines, the UC Irvine physicist who directed the report for the regents, tends to side with Livermore’s Kidder and DeWitt on this question. U.S. nuclear weapons, he said, are designed “to last one hell of a long time . . . . We should not be prevented (by doubts of stockpile reliability) from thinking in a constructive way about the possibilities of test bans. We are not precluded from this by any means.”

Physicist J. Carson Mark, who headed Los Alamos’ nuclear weapons design program for almost 20 years, echoes DeWitt’s contention that the current debate may not be about the reliability of the existing weapons but about the lab’s ability to produce new ones. In a letter to Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), Mark wrote: “It is extremely rare--and, in fact, may never have happened--that a unit has been selected from the stockpile and fired just to make sure that it still performed. Obviously, one would learn very little from such a procedure . . . . In practice, confidence in reliability has been based on a stockpile surveillance program whereby on a scheduled basis units are pulled at random, disassembled and subjected to intensive examination to ascertain if any changes appear to be taking place.”

However, Mark said his view--one which he shares with Batzel and Kidder--is that without testing a nation cannot “have . . . new weapons or weapons modified.”

“Do you want new weapons or not? That,” Kidder said, “is the only real question.”

Researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.