Anti-nuclear activists call the shrinking Department of Energy budget an illusion. Nuclear weapons experiments at the Nevada Test Site will continue, they say.
"Nuclear weapons are still the big stick in the U.S. arsenal," said Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation of Oakland, Calif., during an international conference at UNLV Tuesday.
Under current treaties, the U.S. may keep up to 8,500 nuclear weapons in the stockpile.
Cabasso and other groups across the nation are tracking the Department of Energy's proposals for post-Cold War activities at the Nevada Test Site and and at nuclear laboratories, including Livermore in California and Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico.
On June 18 and Sept. 12 this year, the DOE is planning to conduct subcritical experiments using small amounts of nuclear materials that will not become a nuclear explosion, according to Terry Vaeth, acting manager of the DOE's Nevada Operations Office.
The two subcritical tests will be detonated in the Lyner underground area, 1,000 feet beneath the Test Site's surface. Lyner stands for Low-Yield Nuclear Explosive Research Facility. A 20-kiloton test was conducted there in 1990.
Cabasso called it "a nuclear shell game" with the results anything from earth-penetrating weapons to tactical and battlefield mini-nukes that could be used in the next Middle Eastern war.
Each subcritical test will cost at least $10 million with costs split by the Test Site and the sponsoring lab, either Los Alamos or Livermore, said Alice Slater of Economists Allied for Arms Reduction.
The proposed tests and new facilities already on the DOE drawing boards could hurt U.S. efforts to get a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed this year, both Cabasso and Slater said.
Dr. Robert Livingston, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, said he had worked on the problems of nuclear weapons since he was a student at Stanford University.
"In our lifetime, 50 years, it has become possible to destroy all life," he told a session of the Nuclear Abolition Summit, about 36 groups working to stop all things nuclear.
Today there are enough nuclear weapons to destroy all major cities, Livingston said. "If all the nuclear weapons in the world were used, there would be little chance for our survival," he said.
Physicist Leo Szliard, one of the scientists who figured out how to make atomic bombs, left Livingston his watch.
"Not to watch time, but to watch the world," Livingston said. "The stakes are terribly high."
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