ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´

The Cold War may be over, but nuclear weapons are still with us. The
two superpowers have over 50 000 nuclear weapons between them and, although
about a third of these will be scrapped under the terms of the START agreement,
the US will probably build new ones. As the US bureaucracy ponders the implications
of the Gulf War and the changes in the Soviet Union for its defence policy,
many of the scientists who design the US’s nuclear weapons see strong reasons
to continue their work. Their reasoning provides an insight into the institutional
and ideological tenacity of the nuclear weapons complex in America, showing
how military programmes develop a logic of their own that enables them to
adapt to changing circumstances and survive the death of their original
purpose.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is an American
Aldermaston where half of the US’s nuclear weapons are designed. Livermore
scientists designed the neutron bomb, the warheads for the MX and ground-launched
Cruise missiles and, in the 1980s, became heavily involved in the elusive
pursuit of ‘Star Wars’ weapons intended for the Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI) such as the X-ray Laser and Brilliant Pebbles – a system of computer-guided
space interceptors designed to collide with attacking Soviet missiles.

I came to know some of Livermore’s weapons scientists while I was studying
them as a social anthropologist interested in the beliefs of scientists
who work on weapons of mass destruction. I was lucky enough to do this research
at a time when the world changed dramatically in the space of a couple of
years. While I was doing fieldwork the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe collapsed,
the Soviets virtually stopped testing nuclear weapons, and the Gulf crisis
began. I was able to observe how the scientists’ beliefs about their work
shifted as the world changed around them. I found that, like so many other
people studied by anthropologists whose way of life is threatened by epochal
changes, they did not give up their beliefs but rather adapted them.

Some people are surprised to hear that nuclear weapons scientists have
elaborate belief systems about their work. Many scientists who refuse to
work on nuclear weapons assume their colleagues in the weapons laboratories
do not think about the consequences of their work (how could they do it
if they did?) and local antinuclear activists often accuse the weapons scientists
of only being interested in their pay packets and the intellectual excitement
offered by their work. For example, Hugh DeWitt, a rare example of a critic
actually working at Livermore, who has appealed for an end to weapons research
at the laboratory, calls his colleagues ‘PhD peons’. In a paper presented
during the American Academy of Psychoanalysis Meetings in San Francisco
on 4 May 1989 (‘The nuclear arms race as seen by a nuclear weapons lab staff
member’), De Witt said that his colleagues could not see beyond their various
perks, such as ‘high pay, job security, good benefits, excellent physical
facilities, travel to scientific meetings and good retirement programmes’.

I found that this view caricatured Livermore scientists, especially
the designers of the warheads and the managers who make up the laboratory’s
elite. They are well paid for their work, to be sure: an experienced warhead
designer can earn between $80 000 and $90 000 a year. But these men –
and they are almost all men – could often earn more working for private
corporations. They work long hours designing and testing nuclear weapons
not just for the material benefits, and not just for the exciting technical
challenges inherent in devising machines with up to 5000 components that
destroy one another instantaneously. They also work on nuclear weapons because
they genuinely believe this makes the world a safer place to live in.

If you ask these designers why they do their job, they tell you that,
if it were not for nuclear weapons, the superpowers would by now probably
have fought one another directly in a calamitous conventional war. Most
do not expect their weapons to be used, and a few told me frankly that they
could think of no situation in which they would ever order their use. But
they are proud to think that nuclear weapons might have saved millions of
lives by deterring war. As one warhead designer put it to me: ‘We’re an
interim solution until the politicians and social scientists figure out
a better way of organising the world. Until then, this is the best way to
keep the peace.’

When I began my research I presumed that nuclear weapons scientists
would all be conservatives and anticommunists. In fact, many are liberals
who opposed the Vietnam War, have actively supported the civil rights movement
in the US and donate money to environmental causes. About half the warhead
designers I knew voted against Presidents Reagan and Bush. Although there
are conservatives at the laboratory, most scientists work there not because
they hate the Soviet Union, but because they believe their work gives the
world ‘stability’ – the closest word in their lexicon to what the rest of
us call ‘peace’. They believe that, where political leaders failed to prevent
two world wars this century, the scientists have harnessed the power of
technology to prevent a third.

The current reforms in the Soviet Union, by offering the world a chance
to dismantle many, if not all, of its nuclear weapons, threaten both the
institutional interests and the philosophical approach to international
security of scientists at Livermore. This is especially the case now that
the failure of the coup in the Soviet Union has apparently weakened the
conservative forces in the Communist Party, the Soviet military and the
KGB, who were slowing down the reform process. Many Livermore scientists
say they are enthusiastic about Gorbachev and wish him well. Nevertheless,
glasnost and perestroika have created a situation in which many politicians,
including Livermore’s local congressman, Pete Stark, are calling for constraints
on nuclear weapons work such as a nuclear test ban and cuts in defence spending.
This would cause fundamental changes at Livermore and, some fear, even closure
of the laboratory. A complete ban on nuclear testing is the one arms control
agreement the laboratory has consistently and vigorously opposed in Congressional
hearings. It would be particularly damaging. Any weapons scientists who
remained would be experimenters without experiments, unable to test new
ideas except in computer simulations.

This situation has provoked unprecedented debate at Livermore. The main
response, especially among senior scientists and managers, has been to adapt
the laboratory’s Cold War philosophy to a world apparently moving beyond
the Cold War in order to show the continuing relevance of their work. ‘If
you get rid of nuclear weapons in the current political environment, you
make the world safe for conventional war,’ one manager told me. He and his
colleagues argue that, if nuclear weapons assured stability in the world
of the Cold War, nuclear weapons can continue to assure stability in the
1990s and beyond, albeit in new ways which may require new weapons and new
notions of stability. In making their arguments for further nuclear weapons
research in the coming decades, Livermore scientists advance four rationales:
the Soviet threat; the implementation of arms reductions; the Third World;
and the safety of nuclear weapons.

As far as the Soviet threat goes, the prevailing argument at Livermore
is that the situation in the Soviet Union is sufficiently unstable for it
to be premature for the laboratory to give up, or substantially cut back,
nuclear weapons research. A middle-level manager at the laboratory observed
that: ‘So far, the change in the strategic threat has been minimal. You
haven’t noticed that the Soviets have destroyed any of their SS-19s, for
example.’ He also argued that a disintegrating Soviet Union in the future
might be as dangerous, albeit in a different way, as a monolithic Soviet
Union was in the past. ‘The situation is, frankly, unstable. It’s not clear
whether Gorbachev will be there a year from now, or if it’s good to have
the Soviet Union break into 10 countries. We may have 10 countries each
with substantial nuclear weapons capability.’

Before the recent failed coup in the Soviet Union, some conservatives
at the laboratory argued that it was too early to be sure that the Soviet
reformers would triumph and that the Cold War was truly over. One prominent
laboratory conservative even called the Cold War ‘Cold War I’, saying he
expected ‘Cold War II’ to follow after an intermission. It is too early
to tell how such scientists will respond to the post-coup intensificiation
of perestroika – though the situation in the Soviet Union is sufficiently
volatile for the case for caution in American nuclear weapons policy to
be arguably as plausible now as it was before.

Some older scientists remember the moratorium on nuclear testing in
the years 1958 to 1961, when they believe the US allowed its weapons design
complex to atrophy. When the Soviet Union, quite legally but at very short
notice, withdrew from the moratorium with a rapid succession of nuclear
tests, it took the weapons laboratories several months to get back into
their stride again.

With that experience in mind, many older scientists argue that, regardless
of how well the Soviet reforms are going, it is still prudent to maintain
a substantial weapons design complex as an insurance policy against unpredictable
developments in foreign affairs. ‘If you don’t have anything for the laboratories
to do, it will only be a few years before you lose competence,’ one warhead
designer warned.

Many managers and weapons designers at the laboratory also argue that,
just as the arms race kept one generation of weapons scientists busy, arms
reductions can, paradoxically, provide a need for new weapons that will
employ another generation. Referring to the START agreement and the possibility
of even greater arms reductions in the future, one senior warhead designer
said: ‘The problem with START I, and particularly with START II, is that
we are poorly configured for that. It is clear that the nuclear weapons
we have today are not the nuclear weapons you want if the stockpile is reduced
by a factor of two, four, six or ten. We need to think about how to configure
our warheads properly. It would be better to have warheads which are safer,
more dispersed, more survivable.’

The argument here is that the multiple-warhead, high-accuracy missiles
developed by both superpowers over the past two decades would be destabilising
in small numbers. Arms reductions could leave a large proportion of warheads
on a few highly accurate missiles – ‘too many warheads in too few baskets’
in the words of the senior designer – on both sides. In such a situation,
one missile with several warheads that can be targeted independently could
destroy dozens of enemy warheads if it was used in attack. But if it was
itself destroyed on the ground, such a missile would be what weapons designers
call a ‘lucrative target’ – that is, a cluster of warheads concentrated
in one place so that a single incoming warhead could destroy as many as
10 on the ground. In other words there would be an incentive for each side
to launch a sneak attack on the other, especially in a crisis.

Some arms control experts argue that this kind of instability can be
avoided by carefully specifying the exact weapons dismantled by both sides
and by maintaining an invulnerable submarine-based deterrent. But Livermore
scientists have begun to argue that arms reductions should be coupled with
the deployment of a new generation of mobile missiles and single-warhead
missiles. They argue that this would provide arsenals on each side carefully
chosen for stability and effective deterrence.

The third part of the scientists’ argument concerns the developing world.
At a moment when the Soviet threat is, for the time being at least, in decline,
Livermore scientists are arguing that threats from the Third World are also
important. Even before the Gulf crisis, they were saying that the potential
proliferation of nuclear weapons within Third World countries justified
continuing American weapons research. As one middle-level manager put it
just after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait: ‘I’ve always thought the threat of
a war with the Soviets was overemphasised. That’s reliving the Second World
War and not thinking about what might be the real source of the next world
war. The Iraq situation today is a prime example of the kind of situation
we should have been considering.’

The scientists’ argument has obviously been given a boost by the Gulf
War – a war in which Western high technology was crucial in preserving the
international status quo against a Third World expansionist regime seeking,
among other things, to develop its own nuclear weapons. Some scientists
at the laboratory thought the Bush administration was ill-advised, even
reckless, to risk military action rather than rely on economic sanctions
to discipline Saddam Hussein. But most laboratory scientists still see the
Gulf crisis as typifying a new kind of security problem which, no matter
what happens in the Soviet Union, justifies a continuation of weapons research
at the laboratory.

Such research would emphasise not the huge inter-continental multi-warhead
missiles at the core of the US-Soviet relationship, but the development
of defensive weapons and medium-and short-range nuclear weapons to defend
US strategic interests and contain regional expansionist powers in the Third
World. As one engineer at Livermore commented: ‘I think we should go ahead
with new kinds of neutron bomb – weapons with low fallout, tactical weapons
that could be designed for the Middle East or somewhere like that. We don’t
need to plan for a war in Europe any more.’

Others believe the laboratory should focus on defensive weapons to protect
the US against a missile attack from the Third World. One laboratory administrator
was quoted in a local newspaper during the Gulf War as saying: ‘Suppose
Saddam Hussein has an intercontinental ballistic missile 10 years from now
and wants to destroy New York? It won’t do any good to try to prevent it
the day before. If we go ahead with Star Wars, then we’ll be able to protect
ourselves against those kinds of attacks.’ He added that strategic defences
would also offer protection against a ‘crazy Russian general who gets control
of some nuclear weapons and decides to let them off’.

Some laboratory scientists, even before the changes in the Soviet Union,
consistently doubted the wisdom of pursuing such weaponry. In the 1980s
the laboratory mortgaged much of its reputation and budget to the SDI, at
a time when the strategic sense and technical feasibility of defensive weapons
was greatly disputed. Some scientists argued that the technical challenges
in designing such a system were insurmountable. Others argued that it would
be impossible to build a system that the Soviets could not overwhelm or
outfox, or they feared that a defensive system, if it were possible, might
have, or be perceived as having, offensive capabilities that would destabilise
the relationship between the US and the Soviet Union. Many Livermore scientists
feared the laboratory was investing too much in high-risk projects which,
if cancelled, would blow a hole in the laboratory’s budget.

Defensive weapons research at Livermore began to run into trouble in
1985 when the laboratory was gravely embarrassed by the scandal surrounding
the resignation of its associate director for weapons development, Roy Woodruff.
Woodruff claimed that, in its reports to Washington, the laboratory was
exaggerating the capability and misrepresenting the test results of the
X-ray Laser, a potential defensive weapon. In the early 1980s Edward Teller,
the founder of the laboratory, had claimed that soon one X-ray Laser, the
size of a desk, might be capable of shooting down the entire Soviet land-based
missile force. By the end of the 1980s, with the programme dogged by controversy
and disappointing test results, the laboratory’s funding for the X-ray Laser
was cut by $60 million, sending many scientists scrambling for new projects.
Meanwhile another SDI project at Livermore, the Free Electron Laser, was
cancelled the same year when the Department of Defense decided it preferred
the rival design of the Los Alamos Laboratory. In terms of SDI research,
this only left Livermore with its Brilliant Pebbles research, for which
it receives $130 million each year. But Brilliant Pebbles is currently a
favourite target of congressmen who want to cut the defence budget, so its
future is also in question.

In the context of these developments, the prospective danger of a Third
World intercontinental ballistic missile looks like one of the last chances
to save SDI research at Livermore. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s who support this work argue
that a defensive system would work better against rogue Third World countries
than against the Soviets, since Third World countries would be unable to
build more than a handful of ICBMs and would therefore, unlike the Soviets,
be unable to overwhelm a defensive system. Also, the apparent success of
the Patriot missile in shooting down Iraqi SCUD missiles in the Gulf War
has given a boost to the general principle of strategic defence and may
mean a reprieve for Brilliant Pebbles, which would be a space-based analogue
to the Patriot missile.

Finally, weapons scientists at Livermore argue that recent revelations
about safety problems in America’s nuclear arsenal are another reason why
their work should not yet end. In 1990 the Washington Post ran a series
of articles on safety studies revealing unforeseen design flaws in the W-79
nuclear artillery shell, the W-69 SRAM warhead, and the W-88 Trident II
warhead. The studies found that the conventional explosive in all three
warheads might be accidentally detonated. When such accidents occurred in
1966 and 1968, the explosions dispersed highly toxic plutonium over wide
areas in Spain and Greenland. In the case of the W-79 artillery shell, the
safety studies suggested there was even a possibility of accidental nuclear
explosion. The US government was sufficiently concerned that it secretly
withdrew its W-79 artillery shells from Europe for re-engineering.

All three weapons designs would be safer if they contained Insensitive
High Explosive (IHE), which is much harder than ordinary explosive to detonate
in an accident. Currently only 25 per cent of American nuclear weapons incorporate
IHE. The weapons would also be safer if they were built in accordance with
Enhanced Nuclear Detonation Safety (ENDS) – a design system which isolates
the electrical components crucial in triggering a nuclear explosion behind
a physical barrier in the warhead. Currently only 52 per cent of American
nuclear weapons are designed this way. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s at Livermore argue that,
as long as there are nuclear weapons, they should be as safe as possible,
and that it is important for the nation to maintain a corps of weapons scientists
dedicated to that goal.

Perhaps the most intriguing of the scientists’ ideas about improving
the safety of nuclear weapons is the so-called ‘green bomb’. This is a bomb
which would take advantage of new developments in materials technology to
minimise the hazardous and radioactive waste by-products inherent in nuclear
weapons production. The Rocky Flats plutonium facility, the Hanford plutonium
production plant, the Fernald uranium plant, and the Savannah River tritium
production reactor have all been closed down in the past two years following
revelations of unsafe, even illegal, operating procedures and grave health
risks to local people. Some scientists argue that a green bomb would help
the American government to maintain and improve its nuclear arsenal without
producing the kinds of environmental catastrophes which have recently disgraced
many nuclear weapons plants nationwide and angered the communities around
them.

During the Cold War, the arms race with the Soviets provided a unifying
ideology and an expanding budget which made the laboratory a stable and
prosperous institution capable of guaranteeing its scientists long-term
employment and giving them an identity. Many scientists and managers have
responded to recent changes in global politics by trying to adapt the laboratory’s
traditional mission and ideology to new circumstances so that it can continue
to do what it does best: design nuclear weapons.

Not everyone at the laboratory agrees, however. Some of the younger
scientists in particular would like to see the laboratory boost its research
into technologies that would strengthen US security in nonmilitary ways.
The areas most commonly discussed where the laboratory could make a contribution
are: technologies to improve the competitiveness of US industry; alternative
energy sources such as laser fusion and magnetic fusion reactors; and environmental
research focused on such issues as the greenhouse effect and toxic waste
disposal.

The laboratory’s new director, John Nuckolls, sometimes talks about
moving further into these areas, but the obstacles are immense. First, the
laboratory is largely run by people who worked their way up through weapons
research and have a weaponeer’s world-view and expert knowledge of weapons
science rather than environmental science or industrial technology. Secondly,
the laboratory is largely dependent on the Washington bureaucracy for its
budget. Given the current budget-cutting atmosphere in Washington, it may
be easier for the laboratory to think of new reasons to design weapons than
to attempt to renegotiate its charter or seek out sources of funding for
new scientific missions. In this situation it is unlikely that the laboratory
will make any dramatic moves away from weapons work in the near future.

Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist, is visiting fellow at the School
of American Research in New Mexico and fellow at the Center for Psychological
Studies in the Nuclear Age, Harvard University. He is currently writing
a book about his field research from 1987 to 1990 at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory.

* * *

Designers of destruction who dress in denim

The Southern California Federation of ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s recently called it
‘an expensive, anachronistic monument to human wretchedness’. Its employees
call it a great place to work. It is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
of California, where half of the US’s nuclear weapons are designed.

Set amid vineyards and gently sloping hills in the small town of Livermore,
60 kilometres inland from San Francisco, the 800-acre laboratory is a sprawl
of huts, trailers and industrial low rises. The laboratory is encircled
by a barbed wire fence decorated with bold yellow ‘no trespassing’ signs.
Inside the fence the relaxed attitude and casual denims of its employees
tend to give the laboratory the air of a university campus.

The Livermore laboratory was founded in 1952 by the physicists Ernest
Lawrence and Edward Teller, the man who is said to have inspired the Dr
Strangelove character in Stanley Kubrick’s film. Until then, all nuclear
weapons were designed at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, established
under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer during the Second World War to
develop the nuclear bombs eventually dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Teller and Lawrence lobbied the US government for a second weapons laboratory
in the early 1950s when relations with the Soviet Union were deteriorating
and Teller wanted to intensify work on the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Nearly 40 years later, Teller, now in his mid-80s, still maintains an office
at the laboratory, of which he is Director Emeritus.

The laboratory at Livermore got off to a shaky start, its first two
tests being ‘fizzles’ (the designers’ term for failures). Since then it
has grown into a $1 billion-a-year enterprise employing 8000 people. The
laboratory devotes about two-thirds of its resources to nuclear weapons
research. Livermore scientists designed the warheads for the Minuteman,
MX and Polaris missiles. They also designed two of the most controversial
weapons deployed in Europe in the last two decades: the warhead for the
ground-launched Cruise missile, which sparked huge protests at Greenham
Common US Air Force Base in the 1980s; and the neutron bomb, which caused
an outcry in Europe in the late 1970s because, by maximising radiation over
blast effects, it seemed to target people rather than physical structures.

In the 1980s, as Teller lobbied vigorously in Washington on behalf of
the Strategic Defense Initiative, the laboratory became heavily committed
to defensive weapons research.

Livermore scientists tried to develop a ground-based Free Electron Laser
which, with the aid of orbiting mirrors in space, would shoot at missiles
through the atmosphere; a space-based X-ray Laser which would focus the
radiation burst from a nuclear explosion into beams capable of destroying
missiles; and Brilliant Pebbles – an array of satellites and rocket-boosted
interceptors that are designed to slam into enemy missiles in space.

In addition to weapons research, the laboratory does internationally
recognised research on laser fusion, the greenhouse effect, and the human
genome project. It is also developing a new laser technology for enriching
uranium.