July 15, 1998
Fusion-Research Effort Draws Fire
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
A multibillion-dollar Federal effort to create tiny blasts of pure fusion energy like that of a hydrogen bomb violates the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and shows that the United States is pursuing a double standard on the control of nuclear weapons, a new report says.
The study, published by an American scientific group, is the first to make that specific accusation but echoes growing criticism that the United States is heading down a dangerous nuclear road.
The nation, critics say, is at risk of becoming a nuclear hypocrite, talking eloquently of disarmament and the virtues of a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing while quietly investing billions of dollars in advanced technology that can perfect new kinds of weapons.
The new study is by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, of Takoma Park, Md., a respected scientific group founded in 1987 that has won praise from private experts for its critiques of the Federal nuclear establishment. Its analyses have prevailed in lawsuits against the Energy Department, mostly involving contaminated nuclear weapons plants, and led to out-of-court settlements.
In its new, 92-page report, to be issued Tuesday, the group warns that
fusion research like that now under way by the Government could be used to develop a new generation of hydrogen bombs and that it is thus illegal under the test ban. Some 150 countries, including the United States, are signers of the treaty.
The Energy Department, which runs the research program, strongly denies the institute's accusation.
The department said yesterday that its fusion research would produce no new weapons and instead was meant to help keep the nation's existing nuclear stockpile in good working order, as well as to help harness nuclear fusion for peaceful energy production.
Dr. Ray E. Kidder, a former nuclear bomb designer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who reviewed the institute's report for technical accuracy, praised the group's work as rigorous and thorough, and said the issue of a possible treaty violation was important.
"This question needs to be taken seriously and discussed in an open forum, and some decisions made about it," Dr. Kidder said in an interview yesterday. He added that he and two colleagues had prepared a proposal for limiting pure-fusion research and that the proposal would appear in a coming issue of Physics Today, a professional journal.
One of his colleagues, Dr. Frank von Hipple, is a former adviser to the Clinton White House who now works at Princeton University. He has warned that pure-fusion research could result in devices "compact enough to be used as weapons," a prospect taken increasingly seriously.
Dr. Hans A. Bethe, a Nobel laureate who was a main architect of the first atomic bomb, a half-century ago, wrote President Clinton last year to warn of the dangers of "pure-fusion weapons."
The institute's criticism focuses on a sprawling Federal program that, in all, involves a dozen or so new major scientific projects at the nation's weapons laboratories and will cost roughly $4.5 billion a year for at least 10 years.
The ostensible aim of that program is to shift national efforts away from developing nuclear arms and toward maintaining stockpiles in good condition, using computer simulations and a battery of other advanced techniques to insure the arsenal's potency.
But the institute says in its report that the fusion-research aspects of the colossal effort are so ambitious that they violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, long a holy grail of arms controllers. The Clinton Administration promoted the treaty and signed it in 1996. Its aim is to end all nuclear blasts as a way to stop nuclear innovation, which customarily must be tested explosively.
Specifically, the institute criticizes a huge laser complex now under construction in Livermore, Calif., known as the National Ignition Facility. The $2.2 billion complex, about the size of the Rose Bowl, is to be completed in 2002, the world's first machine to generate tiny thermonuclear explosions, igniting hydrogen without the usual atomic match.
The laser would fire a titanic bolt of energy onto a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel, heating it hotter than the surface of the sun and causing hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium in a burst of pure fusion energy. Weapons scientists have also been pursuing a number of smaller projects that strive at miniaturizing the machinery needed for such feats.
Weapons scientists and the Energy Department are lobbying to continue such work, saying it is permitted under the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
But critics fear that proposed ignition systems are getting quite small, raising the prospect of pure-hydrogen bombs that could be easily transported to distant targets.
Arms controllers worry that the fuel for hydrogen fusion is relatively easy to obtain and that a pure-hydrogen bomb, if perfected, could in theory be cheap to build. The main fuel for nuclear fusion is deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that is ubiquitous in sea water. By contrast, atomic bombs are fueled by uranium and plutonium, which are scarce and costly to acquire.
Questions about the fusion work's legality arise because the test ban treaty bars "any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion."
Despite the treaty, the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories and allies in Washington argue that the comprehensive test ban has a loophole that allows pure-fusion research, including explosive tests.
But the institute, in its report, strongly disagrees.
"There is no technical basis on which laboratory thermonuclear explosions can be excluded from this ban," the report says, adding that work to achieve that goal is illegal.
The report's authors are Arjun Makhijani and Hisham Zerriffi, both physicists. Dr. Makhijani, the institute's president, holds a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of California at Berkeley.
"This debate is similar to the one before the hydrogen bomb," he said in an interview. "Once pure-fusion weapons are demonstrated, they will be very difficult to stop. So the time to act is now."
Robin Staffin, who oversees fusion-energy research for the Energy Department, dismissed such worries, saying international opinion and prior arms control agreements both held that fusion experiments were not "nuclear explosions" as defined by the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Dr. Staffin further disparaged the idea that any sort of pure-fusion research could ever turn dangerous. "All these methods strike out on the criteria of being useful as a weapon," he said. "We have no fusion-weapon program."
In addition to faulting the American work, the institute's report criticizes a large effort under way in France known as the Laser Megajoule project, which also seeks to ignite fusion with powerful lasers.
The institute's report calls for a halt to the big French and American laser efforts, and for bans on certain types of smaller research.
It also calls on the next international test-ban conference to consider formally and specifically outlawing such work. That meeting may occur as soon as next year.
If the United States adheres to its present path, Dr. Makhijani said, it will only further alienate the developing world, which has sometimes criticized the American program of fusion research as provocative and resents Washington's insistence that there be no further members of the nuclear club. In May, India and Pakistan stunned the world by conducting a series of underground nuclear blasts.
"Part of the reason we're in this very messy situation in South Asia is the double standard by which nuclear powers can go on possessing nuclear weapons indefinitely but deny them to other parties," Dr. Makhijani said. "This technology provides one more illustration of that double standard."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company