US to resume nuclear weapons' tests
By Eva Cheng On October 27, the US government announced plans to carry out six underground tests of nuclear materials, including plutonium, over the next two years. The tests could modernise and upgrade what is already the world's most powerful nuclear arsenal. Under arms treaties agreed with Russia, the US is obliged to decommission more than 15,000 nuclear weapons by 2003. However, that will still leave it with 3500 weapons which have the capability of blowing the earth up many times over or contaminating the earth irreversibly. The planned tests are designed to escape the so-called Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) which is currently being negotiated by the five official nuclear powers — the US, Russia, Britain, France and China — and scheduled to be signed next year. Washington is trying to fool the world that these tests are not real nuclear tests because, although they involve nuclear material, they are to be conducted so as to avoid reaching nuclear "criticality" or any self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Therefore the US government claims that no nuclear explosions will take place, nor will nuclear materials be released into the environment. These tests, officially described as "subcritical high-explosive experiments with nuclear materials" or "zero yield tests", are portrayed as being much less harmful than the five full-blown nuclear tests that France and China detonated in recent months, or the 2000-plus that the five nuclear powers have blasted since 1945. But such claims have been strongly disputed. US anti-testing activist Chris Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council warned that some fission products will be produced during the subcritical explosions through neutron multiplication. Further, if control fails, which is possible, a nuclear explosion could result from these hydronuclear tests. Such a possibility is common enough for scientists to refer to it as the "whoops" factor. Even the conservative British
Economist magazine warned, in its June 24 issue, of the risk of failing to prevent the neutron splitting reaction from going too far. It added that, "a bomb intended to fizzle occasionally misbehaves, and winds up producing a full-fledged nuclear explosion". Greenpeace believes the "whoops" factor may be a reason why the tests are to be held underground despite a US Department of Energy (DOE) assurance that "no nuclear materials will be dispersed to the environment that could endanger the health or safety of the public or test site workers". The first two tests, scheduled for June 18 and September 9 next year, will be exploded 300 metres underground at the Lyner facility in the Nevada Test Site. Similar hydronuclear tests conducted during the 1958-61 US-Soviet moratorium on testing were exploded 15-30 metres underground. Greenpeace says these tests served precisely the same purpose as the full nuclear tests, which is to maintain and modernise a nuclear arsenal into the indefinite future. They "will increase the ability of the US to design new nuclear weapons, even though bringing an end to new weapon development is the primary object of a CTBT". The US tries to justify the tests as necessary to maintain the "safety and reliability" of existing nuclear warheads, some of which are said to be degrading with age. However, it admits these tests are also designed to allow it to resume an uninhibited nuclear arms race should it choose to withdraw from the CTBT. Washington reserves the right to withdraw if the US president believes that "a high level of confidence and reliability of nuclear weapons ... critical to our nuclear deterrent could no longer be certified", in order to conduct "whatever testing might be required". Another condition of the US's participation in CTBT is that it maintain well-resourced facilities to continue its development of nuclear technology. If the US is allowed to get away with this, and the other four official nuclear nations impose the same conditions, the CTBT, when it is eventually signed, will not be truly comprehensive. This would also betray the spirit of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, extended in May by about 170 nations, under which the non-nuclear nations of the world agreed not to develop nuclear weapons and to accept the continuing nuclear weapons' monopoly of the club of five on the condition that they signed a truly
comprehensive test ban treaty next year.