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The Politics and Future of Nuclear Weapons Testing

Weapons testing raises sovereignty issues in the Soviet Union and causes

problems for a treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons as U.S.

stands firm against pressure for a total ban

Michael Heylln, C&EN Washington

Novaya Zemlya is a big island. Shaped like a crooked finger, it extends the line of the Ural Mountains north­ward off the Arctic coast of the Soviet Union for 600 miles forming the eastern flank of the Barents Sea.

On Oct. 30,1961, this distant place was the site of the largest nuclear explosion in history—a blast equivalent to about 58 million tons of TNT. It was one of 30 or more tests conducted in the atmosphere by Soviet weaponeers that year at what was then their major test­ing site.

In 1964 the Soviets moved most of their nuclear weapons testing to a desert area about 100 miles southwest of Semipalatinsk in the Kazakhstan Republic. Since then the Novaya Zemlya site, which is closer to the North Pole than is the North Slope of Alaska, has been used sparingly. There have been only 35 tests, all underground, in the past 27 years. The last was on Dec. 4, 1988.

Now Novaya Zemlya is back in the news. M/V Greenpeace, a successor to the ship that monitored French nuclear tests in the South Pacific before being destroyed in 1985 in a terrorist attack by French securi­ty operatives in New Zealand, is on its way there after calls at the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel.

The reason for the voyage is the possibility that Novaya Zemlya could once again host a large testing program in the wake of fierce public protest by the Ka­zakhs that has halted all testing at Semipalatinsk. The last test there—the last test anywhere in the Soviet Union—was on Oct. 19, 1989. On May 22 of this year the Supreme Soviet of Kazakhstan, alarmed by health and environmental concerns, resolved there would be no more tests at Semipalatinsk.

This resolution by the Kazakh ruling body has impli­cations that go beyond any problems it may raise for

Soviet weapons makers. It goes to the heart of a central political question in the Soviet Union today—the ex­tent of the sovereignty of the 15 republics that make up the union. The sovereignty issue has been exacerbated by statements by Boris Yeltsin, the politically powerful president of the Russian Republic, that he wants no nuclear weapons tests in Russia. Novaya Zemlya is part of Russia.

Earlier this month in Moscow two committees of the U.S.S.R. Supreme Soviet held hearings to start sorting out the future of nuclear weapons testing in the Soviet

Union. At one, testimony was re­ceived from two U.S. arms control experts. At the other, sharp differ­ences arose between Soviet civil­ian and military witnesses.

In the U.S. the issue of nuclear weapons testing does not have the same political ramifications it has in the Soviet Union. It clearly has

no relevance to the viability of the U.S. as a nation. However, it is a somewhat contentious matter domesti­cally and could become more so.

Diplomatically the U.S/s reluctance to move expedi­tiously toward a total ban on nuclear testing is pushing it toward an increasingly isolated position, especially in the light of both greatly improved superpower rela­tions and indications from the Soviets and the French that they would stop testing if the U.S. would.

Earlier this month the Senate finally ratified bilateral treaties with the Soviet Union signed in 1974 and 1976. These agreements put no limits on the number of tests but they formalize a 150-kiloton upper threshold on the size of permitted underground explosions of both weapons and nuclear devices for peaceful use. This 150-kiloton limit, which has been observed since 1976, rep­resents an explosive yield about eight times that of the weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It puts no real constraints on the development of modern nuclear weapons.

October 8, 1990 C&EN 7

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The Senate vote to ratify the treaties was 98 to 0. But this unanimous support came amid questioning of the credibility of the Administration and accusations that finalization of the treaties had been delayed for many years by excessive concern over the ability to verify compliance. The Senate debate also brought criticism of the Administration's policy toward further testing lim­its.

The Bush Administration is taking a very hard line on nuclear testing, maybe even harder than that of the Reagan Administration. In 1986 President Reagan promised Congress, which at the time was threatening to cut funding for nuclear weapons tests, a three-step process. This first step was finalization and ratification of the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty and the 1976 Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty. An immediate start to talks with the Soviets on further testing limitations upon such ratification was the next step. The third, very long range, step was eventual negotiations leading to a complete testing ban.

The position today is that further talks can start only after experience has been gained with the complex pro­visions of the newly ratified treaties. Government spokesmen also state that at this time they can identify no further weapons testing limits that would be in the national security interests of the U.S.

Leonard Specter of Carnegie Endowment for Interna­tional Peace points out to C&EN that under the Reagan Administration it was the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars) that had to be saluted. Under Bush the con­tinuation of nuclear weapons testing is the acid test. Specter is a former chief counsel for the Senate Nuclear Proliferation Subcommittee.

The growing worldwide discontent with the nuclear powers' tardiness in putting meaningful controls on their nuclear weapons testing stems, in part, from provi­sions of the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963 and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968.

The 1963 test ban treaty drove nuclear testing under­ground by barring such activity in the atmosphere, un­derwater, and in space. It was triggered by intense worldwide health concern about U.S. and Soviet atmo­spheric tests such as the superblast at Novaya Zemlya. The agreement commits the nuclear powers that signed it—the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union—to contin­ue negotiations to discontinue all test explosions of nu­clear weapons for all time. The only thing they have to show for more than a quarter century of on-and-off ne­gotiations is the 150-kiloton limit.

France and China, the only other two nations with declared nuclear weapons capability, have not signed this treaty. But about 120 nonnuclear weapon states have.

The nonproliferation treaty, which went into effect in 1970, is an effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons "horizontally" to more nations. It is a bargain between the nuclear and nonnuclear worlds. Nations without nuclear weapons that have signed the treaty, more than 100, eschew ever manufacturing or acquir­ing them and open their nonmilitary nuclear facilities to international inspection to make sure they are not trying to do so.

8 October 8, 1990 C&EN

Under the treaty the nuclear powers commit them­selves to not transferring weapons technology to others while cooperating on peaceful nuclear developments. They also commit themselves, under Article VI of the treaty, to "pursue negotiation in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date." In addition, the preamble to this trea­ty makes reference to the commitment under the earli­er test ban treaty to achieve an end to all weapons tests.

Size of nuclear explosions can be determined by two methods

Very short range—by measuring speed of the initial shock wave

Very long range—by measuring seismic waves

Monitoring equipment

Emplacement hole

Satellite hole Recording

equipment

About 40 feet

Sensing cable

Speed at which sensing cable is destroyed by shock wave measured electronically

Weapon

Shock wave from detonation liquefies rock

Diagnostic equipment

Up to 6000 miles

Surface waves

Seismic station

Crust

Underground nuclear

explosion .

There has been diplomatic activity on both of these treaties lately. The nonproliferation agreement is re­viewed every five years. The fourth such review con­ference was in Geneva this summer. It was seen as a particularly important gathering because of two factors. One is concern that Iraq could be trying to acquire nu­clear weapons. The other is that during the next review conference, in 1995, the decision will have to be made whether to continue the agreement indefinitely, extend it just for a proscribed period, or renegotiate.

The 62 delegations that addressed the conference were generally very supportive of the treaty. During four weeks of deliberation, progress was made on a number of ways to strengthen the agreement. These included commitments to monitor more carefully the export of nuclear-related technology and equipment, encourage some strengthening of the inspection sys­tem, and explore constraints on the nuclear powers to not threaten the nonnuclear ones. France, which has not yet signed the treaty but indicates it might, partici­pated actively in the conference and indicated support.

However, the conference ended without a consensus declaration. The final logjam was the inability to agree on wording concerning weapons testing. This develop­ment left tentative agreements on other topics without legal standing, although some nations stated they would still abide by them.

Bradley Gordon, who headed the U.S. delegation to the conference and is assistant director of the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency, explained to C&EN that the Mexican delegation held out for wording that would have too directly linked achievement of a com­prehensive test ban to renewal of the nonproliferation treaty in 1995. This was something the U.S. delegation, among others, could not accept.

Gordon agrees that there is considerable internation­al sentiment for a test ban. But he stresses that at the conference most delegations stressed great support for the nonproliferation treaty's critical role in curbing the spread of nuclear arms. Although the nonnuclear pow­ers may not be entirely satisfied with the progress made by the nuclear powers toward nuclear disarma­ment and a test ban, according to Gordon, they are un­willing to allow such considerations to put the nonpro­liferation treaty at risk.

Gordon claims that progress on disarmament has been more substantial in the past five years than ever before. Developments include a U.S.-Soviet agreement to get rid of intermediate-range nuclear weapons, a pending agreement to reduce strategic nuclear arsenals, and the establishment of the 150-kiloton testing threshold.

Ben Sanders, who was secretary general of the 1985 review conference, has a somewhat different interpre­tation of the just-concluded review conference. He says it can be regarded in two lights. The positive light is that the gathering strengthened the overall nonprolif­eration system, if not the treaty itself, and that the fail­ure to agree on the disarmament/testing issue was idio­syncratic. The more negative view, with which he has sympathy, is that the conference foundered on the cen­tral issue of the unwillingness of the nuclear weapons powers to accept that their commitment under the trea-

October 8, 1990 C&EN 9

Another recent example of this concern is a commu­niqué from a meeting in Norway last month of the Nordic foreign ministers. It expressed displeasure with any renewal of testing at Novaya Zemlya. It also stated that "The ministers [of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland] pointed out that the Nordic coun­tries and general international public opinion demand that all nuclear weapons testing should cease/'

The growing activity on the limited test ban agree­ment will come into focus in January next year with a two-week conference in New York City to discuss a proposal to amend the agreement. The proposal is to make provisions to prohibit the underground tests still permitted under the current treaty and so change the pact into a comprehensive treaty banning all nuclear weapons tests.

The idea has generated considerable support. The general assembly of the United Nations in 1987 voted 128 to 3 in favor of the nonnuclear weapons states' sub­mitting such an amendment. The three no votes came from the U.S., the U.K., and France. The Soviet Union voted for it.

Aaron Tovish, executive director of Parliamentarians Global Action for Disarmament, Development & World Reform, a group that has actively promoted this ap­proach to a comprehensive test ban, admits the matter won't be settled with the one meeting in January.

The amendment process for the treaty calls for only a simple majority. However, the three so-called original parties—the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union—each have veto power.

The U.S. has been very cool to this approach to a to­tal test ban. According to Gordon, the limited test ban agreement is an important treaty and it should not be messed with. Any approach to a comprehensive ban should be independent of this pact. Gordon also ex­plains that a basic U.S. position is that nuclear testing issues should not be dealt with in a multilateral forum, but are best handled between the superpowers.

As to an alternative approach to a comprehensive test ban, Gordon points to the reestablishment this August, with U.S. support, of the ad hoc committee on nuclear

Under the Reagan Administration it was Star Wars that had to be saluted · . . under

Bush, nuclear weapons testing is the acid test

ty to seek nuclear disarmament and an end to testing is an integral part of the nonproliferation system.

Although Mexico ended up in a somewhat unpopu­lar and largely isolated position in Geneva for its ada-mancy on a weapons testing ban, there is no question that many nonnuclear states, especially the nonaligned ones, feel deeply on the issue. It has come up at every NPT review conference and has always proved to be a difficult issue. It will certainly be center stage again in 1995.

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testing at the United Nation's 40-nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva. This would seemingly be a mul­tilateral approach. However, the committee can only study the issue. It has been given no powers to negoti­ate.

There is the possibility of a confrontation at the Jan­uary conference with a substantial majority vote in fa­vor of amending the treaty being overridden by a veto from the U.S. and/or the U.K. But this is seen as unlike­ly by most observers. They point out it would achieve nothing. Those favoring the amendment would have embarrassed the U.S. But they would not have achieved their primary goal of stopping testing and they would have closed off one possible approach to doing so.

Tovish hopes the meeting will prove to be the start of an ongoing process. He believes that New York will provide a more political and public forum for debate on what until now has, in the public's eyes, been an ab­stract issue. He also believes that the process cannot be interminable as the majority of nations can call for an amendment vote whenever they want and so keep pressure on the nuclear powers to show real progress.

Tovish's scenario is unlikely to pan out. According to Gordon, the U.S. will attend the January meeting and contribute to it constructively. But he makes it very clear that the U.S. is committed to only one conference of finite duration.

While the U.S. holds to its traditional cautious ap­proach to any control on nuclear weapons testing, the Soviet Union in recent years has been aggressively seeking ways to bring testing to a halt. In one of his first arms control initiatives, Mikhail Gorbachev de­clared a unilateral pause in testing in August 1985 and urged the U.S. to do likewise. The U.S. didn't. After ex­tending their moratorium twice, the Soviets renewed testing in February 1987.

The Soviet Union now has another, this time de fac­to, moratorium on testing with no tests in almost a year. However, Vitaly Goldansky, head of the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, tells C&EN that it would be very difficult for President Gorbachev to formally declare another unilateral mora­torium after the U.S.'s lack of response to the first one. He explains it would be seen by the Soviet people as a humiliation. Goldansky believes that Gorbachev, who still apparently strongly favors a stop to testing, must seek some compromise, some sign of joint progress with the U.S.

Goldansky is a member of the U.S.S.R. Supreme So­viet's Committee on Foreign Affairs and a member of the Congress of Peoples Deputies. He says a hearing by his committee last month on ratifying the same treaties that the U.S. Senate just ratified brought out the strong polarization of views on this topic in the Soviet Union. One witness, Georgy Arbatov, the Soviet's leading ex­pert on the U.S. and a close adviser to Gorbachev, pro­posed that the Soviet Union should stop its nuclear testing regardless of what the U.S. does. This brought strong protests from Soviet military personnel. As to the sovereignty issue, Goldansky says a military officer testified that the Novaya Zemlya test site is "estranged" from the Russian Republic as it was acquired by the

10 October 8, 1990 C&EN

Ministry of Defense in the 1950s, a claim that was sharply challenged by Arbatov and others.

The same day as the Soviet Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Frank von Hippel and Ray E. Kidder testified before the Subcommittee on Armed Services of the Com­mittee on Defense & State Security. The subcommittee is chaired by Evgeny Velikhov, vice president for applied physics and mathematics at the Soviet Academy of Sci­ences and another close Gorbachev adviser.

Von Hippel is a physicist by training and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University. Kidder has recently retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Both discussed before the commit­tee the U.S.'s rationale for continuing to test.

The U.S. official position is that testing is needed to permit improvements in the safety and security features of nuclear weapons, to detect deterioration in stockpiled weapons, to ensure the reliability of the arsenal, to en­sure that military and communications equipment can survive in a nuclear environment, and to develop new weapons to meet shifting threats. Other arguments are that a halt to testing would cause a deterioration of the scientific personnel base of the weapons establishment and that neither a total testing ban nor a very low threshold limit could be monitored reliably.

Von Hippel says he has heard very similar arguments from members of the Soviet military and nuclear weap­ons establishment. He assumes they will testify to that effect when they appear this month before Velikhov's committee. He says they were scheduled to testify the same day he and Kidder did, but they asked for a post­ponement.

It is apparent that members of all nuclear weapons establishments remain convinced that the work they have devoted their professional lives to remains critical to the security of their nations. Even the late Andrei Sakharov of human rights fame, who helped develop Soviet hydrogen technology, stated at an international arms control conference in Moscow in early 1987 that nations with nuclear weapons have a sovereign right to test them.

Whatever happens in terms of treaties, the level of nuclear weapons testing will decline. It already has done so to some extent. This trend is due to a combina­tion of dwindling interest and dwindling funds. Worldwide there were 27 tests in 1989, the lowest total since 1961, except for 1986 when the Soviets did not test.

Since the birth of the nuclear age in 1945 there have been about 1800 nuclear detonations. About 130 of them have been for peaceful purposes, the rest related to weapons development.

The U.S. has been the most frequent tester with about 900 weapons-related blasts. The peak year was 1962, with 96, when the U.S. saw a need to catch up with the Soviets who had run about 50 tests the previ­ous year. Since 1971 the U.S. has averaged 16 tests per year. But last year it dropped to 11. So far this year there have been six. Budget constraints, if nothing else, will keep testing at a low level next year, too. Accord­ing to von Hippel, the number of warheads under ac­tive development may be brought down to as low as

two. At least three development programs have been canceled in recent months.

The precise number of Soviet nuclear tests is not known in the West. But since its first test in 1949 the So­viet Union has conducted at least 500 weapons-related tests. Throughout the seventies and the first half of the eighties, the Soviets tested weapons at about the same rate as the U.S. Last year they had seven tests. This year none. The where and the when of the next Soviet test remain unknown, probably even to the Soviets.

As Goldansky points out, apart from the other prob­lems with its testing program, the Soviet Union, with its economic difficulties and its improved relations with the West, is very eager to cut back spending on weapons development and on the military in general.

France has had a surprisingly large weapons testing program with an average of nine per year, all in the South Pacific, for the past dozen years. There have been four French tests so far this year. President François Mitterand has said that France will stop testing if the superpowers do so.

Since a flurry of testing in the late fifties, the British have averaged less than one test per year for the past 30 years. In recent times all of their tests have been at the Nevada Test Site in the U.S. They had one last year and none this year. Despite the small size of their program, the British remain about as adamant as the U.S. on the necessity of continuing testing.

China averages about one test per year. It has had two in 1990. The only other country known to have had a nuclear test is India, with one in 1974.

Another sign of encouragement for those who favor an end to testing is the growing, if still far from univer­sal, acceptance that a low testing threshold, such as 1 kiloton, or even a comprehensive testing ban could be monitored well enough to ensure that no party could cheat and so obtain a significant military advantage.

Nuclear weapons test sites range from the Arctic to the South Pacific

It was the cheating issue that was largely responsible for the 16-year hiatus between the signing of the treaty limiting underground weapons tests to 150 kilotons by President Nixon in 1974 and its Senate ratification last month. For many years the U.S. officially charged that the Soviet Union had "likely" violated this agreement, a charge that was at odds with seismic monitoring data and the seismologists, both government and nongov­ernment, who interpret them.

Arms control advocates complain that the lengthy process of negotiating a 107-page addition to this four-page treaty to spell out the testing protocol was a stall­ing tactic to show some activity on nuclear weapons testing while delaying serious consideration of real testing constraints.

There is considerable evidence that this charge is true. But some of the developments that went into working up the protocol for the 1974 treaty are relevant to a total ban.

For instance, joint U.S.-Soviet teams conducted ex­perimental nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk and Neva­da sites. By use of a hydrodynamic technique, these tests started the process of calibrating the two sites geo­logically and increased confidence in the ability of long-used, very long range seismic methods to detect and measure nuclear explosions. With the hydrody­namic approach, explosive yield is calculated from mea­surements of the speed with which the shock wave from a blast destroys a sensing cable placed in a satel­lite hole within about 40 feet of the emplacement hole containing the weapon.

The new protocol establishes on-site inspections of tests as well as the use of in-country seismic stations to measure tests announced in advance. In a development that is not part of the treaty, up to about a dozen state-of-the-art seismic stations are being established in the Soviet Union under a program initiated by the Natural Resources Defense Council and now involving a con­sortium of U.S. universities, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. These stations will be particularly sensitive to explosions as they can make use of certain seismic waves in Earth's crust—-waves that cannot cross oceans.

The next steps on nuclear weapons testing are not clear at this time. Much will depend on how the Soviet Union handles its current sovereignty and other dilem­mas.

Another major unknown is how the Bush Adminis­tration handles its desire to delay further negotiations with the Soviets in the light of what at least some in Congress see as the commitment to move ahead imme­diately. Other elements of the equation include the im­provements in East-West relations that have under­mined the primary reason for having a nuclear weap­ons development establishment and the negative impact of continuing to test on already strained North-South relations.

Yet another major factor of any comprehensive re­view of the U.S/s total nuclear posture is a weapons production complex that is crumbling from old age and plagued with massive environment and pollution prob­lems. But that is another story. D

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