U.S. Has No Need to Test Atomic Arsenal, Report Says

The United States does not need to explode nuclear weapons in order to be sure its aging arsenal is still potent, and its ability to detect weapons tests by others is good, according to a report released Friday by the National Academy of Sciences. Those conclusions run counter to some of the arguments raised by opponents of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was rejected by the Senate in a landmark vote in October 1999. The report, updating one on the same subject 10 years ago, said it is highly unlikely the United States would need to resume testing, even though many weapons are decades old, because the weapons can be refurbished with a high degree of confidence that they will still work. “We’ve done life extension programs, and we’ve shown we’re able to reset the clock on these weapons,” said Marvin L. Adams, a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University and a co-author of the report. Judging from the last ten years, he said, “the summary conclusion is that: yup, it’s difficult, but, gosh, we can do it.” Even if other nations conduct tests and develop nuclear weapons capabilities, that would probably not be a reason for the United States to resume testing, the report said, and if the United States needed to develop new weapons, like an earth-penetrating bomb or a very low-yield weapon, it could probably do so without testing. Testing might be needed, though, to develop a bomb intended to release an electromagnetic pulse, the report said. Such a bomb could be detonated at high altitude to destroy electronic and electric systems. The report said that American intelligence agencies have the technology to be confident in their ability to identify the nuclear blasts of other nations. The agencies use satellites, seismic instruments and underwater microphones that can detect explosions, and sniffers that distinguish between chemical or nuclear blasts. Some very small blasts have a good chance of avoiding detection, but these would be too small to be useful in developing a thermonuclear weapon, the authors said. The study was described as a technical effort and explicitly avoided analysis of whether the treaty should be ratified. When brought to a vote in October 1999, the treaty fell 19 votes short of the two-thirds needed for ratification. It was the first time the Senate had voted down a major international security agreement since the Treaty of Versailles, which created the League of Nations, failed to win approval in 1920. The treaty would take effect if ratified by 44 countries that had either bombs or reactors in 1996. But only 36 have ratified the treaty, according to the National Academy of Sciences. Those include Russia, the United Kingdom and France. Arms control advocates say the United States, which already has a large stockpile of advanced nuclear weapons, would benefit if a ban on testing became the norm, because that would slow the spread of weapons. But even the treaty’s supporters acknowledge there is no prospect of another attempt to ratify it in the near future. The report “should dispel the doubts and the concerns that senators who voted no had in 1999,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said. “It makes the case very clearly that this treaty is in our national security interest, because we do not need nuclear test explosions, but other nations could benefit from a world in which we have nuclear testing.” Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement that “10 years after the Senate debated the nuclear test ban, the world is much more technologically advanced,” with higher confidence in maintaining a stockpile without testing and catching countries that signed up for a test ban but cheated. “But the political reality is that the Senate’s still not there yet,” he said. “Groundwork has to be laid and the case developed so this issue can ripen and senators can look anew at the science, and make a decision on the technical merits.” He said that “obviously we need to get past this election season and see what the political landscape looks like.”