From: dave@ratmandu.esd.sgi.com (dave "who can do? ratmandu!" ratcliffe)
Subject: U.S. Nuclear Weapons Labs:  A Bulwark Against Test Bans
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Summary: nuke wep labs are quiet, powerful force, driving the arms race forward
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: nuclear weapons lab lobby washington in blatant and subtle ways
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1992 21:54:26 GMT


        "The laboratories have given to themselves the task of deciding
     which nuclear forces and arms-control approaches are appropriate for
     U.S. policy," said Christopher Paine, an arms-control specialist
     working for U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.  "And their
     preferred objective is an endless technical competition in nuclear
     arms." . . . 
        [During Carter's administration t]he directors corresponded with 
     lawmakers like conservative U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, R-New York, urging 
     opposition to the [Comprehensive Test Ban] treaty.
        Paine . . . said such letters--and similar testimony before 
     Congress--suggests the laboratories are overstepping their 
     responsibility to offer technical advice.
        "They have unilaterally taken it upon themselves to declare before
     congressional committees that U.S. treaty commitments regarding
     nuclear testing should be made obsolete, should be forgotten and
     dispensed with," he said.  "They did this even when the president of
     the United States was attempting to negotiate a comprehensive test
     ban.  I consider that conduct reprehensible."


    there has never been a more propitious opportunity to end the nuclear
    weapons "race" than at the very time our dedicated singular adversary 
    for more than four decades has ceased competing and existing.  WHY do 
    we blindly continue testing and developing better ways to incinerate
    evermore surface area of the planet in a single burst?  how are we made 
    more "secure" by continuing to threaten the entire biosphere with
    absolute toxification and obliteration of biological life?  continual
    psychic numbing practiced by all of us is not solving this primary
    problem.  rather than simply debating which of the evil of two lessors
    to choose this november, we MUST begin to question the very foundations
    of the system itself that produces such "leaders."     
								-- ratitor
     


                   from "The Sacramento Bee" August 2, 1987
  ____________________________________________________________________________

                   Nuclear Labs:  Bulwark Against Test Bans

                              By  Deborah Blum
                             Bee Science Writer


     Since President Eisenhower first tried to end testing of nuclear
     bombs, the California-run weapons laboratories have taken on every
     president through Carter who pursued that goal.
        The labs stand undefeated.
        Despite arms-control treaties, dating back to 1963, declaring it
     national policy to achieve an end to weapons testing, the United
     States still explodes a nuclear bomb beneath the Nevada desert at
     least once a month.
        Physicists from within the laboratories and arms-control experts
     from without say the labs are a quiet--but powerful--national force,
     driving the arms race ceaselessly forward.  Three federal
     investigations are now under way into alleged lobbying activities by
     Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories in favor of nuclear
     testing.
        Their angriest critics accuse them of increasing the odds of
     nuclear conflict.
        "The labs have made an enormous contribution toward setting the
     stage for nuclear war," said Charles Schwartz, a University of
     California, Berkeley, physics professor. "They may have made it
     unavoidable."
        Lab offlcials flatly deny that.
        "What we perhaps differ in is the approach to avoiding nuclear
     war," said Paul Brown, Livermore's assistant associate director for
     arms control.  Brown upholds the laboratory position that a strong
     arsenal is the best way to preserve peace.
        Lab officials say that in raising objections to a test ban treaty,
     they are simply doing their jobs as the country's designated experts
     on maintaining nuclear weapons.  The position of the weapons labs--
     and it has not faltered before one president--is that nuclear tests
     are essential to a first class weapons program.
        "We should either do the job the country has asked us to do or
     change it," said Robert Selden, director of national security studies
     at Los Alamos.  "Lab statements provoke huge furor and disagreement
     and charges that the labs are making national policy.  But we're
     simply doing what we've been asked to do."
        Unlike that of previous administrations, Reagan's policy has been
     to encourage nuclear weapons testing and development.  Both
     laboratories--U.S. Department of Energy facilities managed by the
     University of California--have almost doubled their budgets in the
     past seven years.  This year's budget for each was $835 million.
        The recent challenge to test explosions has come, instead, from
     Congress.  For the last two years some frustrated legislators have
     tried to block the tests.
        This year, the laboratories responded to that with a vigorous
     "education" effort.  An internal memo from a Los Alamos Weapons
     expert recruiting the best lab scientists to "brief congressmen about
     the importance of nuclear testing" was recently made public.
        Three congressional investigations, including a formal query from
     the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, are now trying to
     determine if the laboratories have gone beyond technical advice into
     political lobbying, which is forbidden by law.  No results are
     expected before fall, but the initial facts have angered arms-control
     supporters.
        "The laboratories have given to themselves the task of deciding
     which nuclear forces and arms-control approaches are appropriate for
     U.S. policy," said Christopher Paine, an arms-control specialist
     working for U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.  "And their
     preferred objective is an endless technical competition in nuclear
     arms."
        He and other critics also complain that Livermore and Los Alamos
     have influenced national policy more subtly.  They say that despite a
     series of treaties urging an end to nuclear testing, the labs have
     not produced the kind of sturdy weapons that would do well under such
     an agreement.
        Those treaties began with the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty with
     the Soviets forbidding nuclear testing anywhere but underground.  Its
     preamble states that a principal aim of both countries is a complete
     test ban.  Later treaties--signed by Presidents Lyndon Johnson,
     Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter--have reaffirmed that.
        Still, Livermore's director, Roger Batzel, recently testified
     before Congress that the labs have continued, for the last several
     decades, designing weapons with the assumption that they would be
     tested.
        Bill Scanlin, Livermore's deputy associate director for defense
     systems, said that experts at the laboratory, with their better
     understanding of nuclear explosives, consider the old treaty language
     "a little naive."
        "We're smarter now about weapons than they were then," Scanlin
     said.  "The philosophy then was that we could do away with nuclear
     weapons.  The idea that we could do that--complete elimination--is
     naive."
        But John Jungerman, head of the University of California, Davis,
     physics department and a member of the scientific team that developed
     the first atomic bomb, said the labs were opposing test limits before
     the first treaty was signed.
        In 1957, the Soviets proposed a several-year moratorium on testing
     as preparation for a possible ban.  Eisenhower liked the idea,
     according to Glenn Seaborg, a presidential adviser and later director
     of U.S. energy programs.
        But Edward Teller, then director of Livermore, and two fellow
     nuclear scientists visited the White House and discouraged him,
     Seaborg said in his book, "Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban."
        "The scientists stated that with continued testing, U.S.
     laboratories could develop `clean' (fallout-free) weapons within
     seven years and that the Soviets could negate any test moratorium by
     undetectable clandestine tests," Seaborg recalled.
        Jungerman, who became--and remains--a strong arms-control
     advocate, said the laboratory arguments included the suggestion that
     the Soviets might hide nuclear tests behind the sun.
        "Of course, that was ridiculous," Jungerman said.  "And, of
     course, the clean weapon never happened.  But the point is, that it
     was political lobbying and that they took it all the way to the top."
        Eisenhower never arrived at a treaty--chiefly because of questions
     about Soviet cheating--but did agree to a moratorium on testing,
     which lasted from 1958 to 1961.  President Kennedy then picked up the
     question.  Two years later, he approved the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
        Herbert York, the first director of Livermore, credits laboratory
     scientists with successfully keeping underground tests out of the
     treaty.  But even with that exclusion, lab scientists worked against
     its approval.
        Jungerman, who supported the treaty, recalled visiting Washington,
     D.C., shortly before the vote.  He was riding a shuttle bus in from
     the airport and discovered a fellow passenger was the powerful
     Democratic senator, Russell Long of Louisiana.
        "So I said, `Senator Long, I'd like to put in a good word on the
     test ban treaty,'" Jungerman said. "And he said, `Well, Edward Teller
     has already told me that it's a bad idea.'  And this was just a
     random meeting.  So, obviously, he'd been out there lobbying senators
     about it."
        That treaty marked a critical time when halting nuc1ear tests
     might have halted the arms race, according to York, who now heads the
     Institute on Global Connict and Cooperation at the University of
     California, San Diego.  York said that in the 1950s and early 1960s,
     weapons development drove the race.  Now, it is paced by new and
     exotic missiles to deliver the warheads.
        "Was it a missed opportunity?  Probably," he said recently.  "It
     might very well have come unstuck due to all the problems in our
     relationships with the Soviets.  But, on the other hand, it might
     have worked."


   _________________________________________________________________________
  |                                                                         |
  |                  [2 photographs and their captions:]                    |
  |                                                                         |
  |  A hole melted through a rock by a nuclear particle beam at Los Alamos  |
  |  shows the potentially destructive power ot the weapon.  At right, a    |
  |  technician works at the control panel ot the accelerator, which is     |
  |  part ot the particle beam experiment.  Los Alamos is an empire built   |
  |  on some four decades of refining and expanding nuclear weapons.        |
  |_________________________________________________________________________|



        Still, president after president has indicated support for ending
     nuclear tests.  And Carter reopened negotiations on a full-scale
     Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.  The laboratory response was
     immediate.  The directors corresponded with lawmakers like
     conservative U.S. Rep. Jack Kemp, R-New York, urging opposition to
     the treaty.
        Livermore researchers insisted that the Soviets would cheat.  And
     Harold Agnew, then director of Los Alamos, in a 1977 letter to Kemp,
     also warned that a lack of tests could give the untrustworthy Soviets
     an advantage in number of weapons.
        "As Custer found out, there comes a time when there is no
     substitute for quantitative advantage," Agnew wrote, referring to the
     American general killed with his troops in 1876 when he attacked an
     encampment of Indian warriors who outnumbered him more than 3-to-l.
        Paine, Kennedy's staffer, said such letters--and similar testimony
     before Congress--suggests the laboratories are overstepping their
     responsibility to offer technical advice.
        "They have unilaterally taken it upon themselves to declare before
     congressional committees that U.S. treaty commitments regarding
     nuclear testing should be made obsolete, should be forgotten and
     dispensed with," he said.  "They did this even when the president of
     the United States was attempting to negotiate a comprehensive test
     ban.  I consider that conduct reprehensible."
        Los Alamos's Agnew took credit for talking Carter himself out of
     the treaty negotiations.  He and Roger Batzel of Livermore were
     invited to appear before the president to explain their views on a
     comprehensive test ban.  According to Agnew, it was their resistance
     that persuaded Carter in 1978 to drop the idea.
        York, who was then Carter's chief negotiator on the treaty, said
     the labs were only one voice in a chorus of opposition.
        "The labs are a substantial political force," York said.  "But
     they aren't the only ones dedicated to a nuclear future.  I think
     some of the groups working more directly with the Pentagon may have
     even greater influence."
        Still, in Washington, D.C., the recent discovery that David
     Watkins, Los Alamos defense program manager, drafted a memo this
     March lining up pro-weapons speakers to brief lawmakers has raised
     new concern--and the official probes.
        Investigators with the House Energy and Commerce Committee,
     chaired by U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell, D-Mich., have collected more
     than eight boxes of correspondence between lab employees and federal
     lawmakers.  Five legislators have requested a General Accounting
     Office investigation.  And U.S. Rep. Fortney Stark, D-Oakland, is
     looking into laboratory activities.
        Federal regulations bar the use of government funds by contractors
     to influence matters before Congress.  The weapons labs fall under
     that provision because the University of California operates them
     under a contract with the federal government.
        DOE spokesman Jack Vandenberg said a preliminary inquiry by the
     department suggests the lab employees acted legally, within their
     charge to provide information.  And lab representatives say they did
     nothing wrong.
        "The real issue is, are DOE and the administration right to go out
     and inform Congress on nuclear tests," said Livermore's Brown, who
     said he talked with several lawmakers at the department's request.
     "I believe they are."


--
   I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes 
   me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . .  Corporations have been 
   enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the 
   money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working 
   upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few
   hands and the Republic is destroyed.

              --- Abraham Lincoln (quoted in Jack London's "The Iron Heel").
--
                                              daveus rattus   

                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
        in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.  
          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.



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