US Commitment to NPT Article VI - Myths and Realities

This fact sheet was prepared by individuals from a variety of NGOs, including Penelope Simons of Lawyers for Social Responsibility and Michael Kraig of British American Security Information Council. The views expressed in this document do not necessarily represent the views of any one organisation. Some of the issues discussed in this document are addressed at a number of websites including: www.greenpeace.org; www.basicint.org; www.lasg.org; www.bullatomsci.org; www.igc.org/tvc; www.fas.org; www.nrdc.org. For a full listing of US Government sites, see "US Government Nuclear Related Sites" www.fas.org/nuke/hew/News/Usgov.html.

The fact sheet put out by the U.S. Department of State leaves out several crucial details. A fuller understanding of the issues leads one to question the credibility of the claim that "U.S. commitment to NPT Article VI is broad and deep."

Nuclear Strategy

Soon after President Clinton "reaffirmed that the U.S. remains committed to the pursuit of systematic and progressive efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of eliminating those weapons," he also signed the Presidential Decision Directive 60. According to public accounts, the directive affirms that the U.S. will continue to rely on nuclear arms as a cornerstone of its national security for the "indefinite future."¹ In addition, recent planning documents of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplate nuclear retaliation against the use of chemical and biological arms.² This conflicts directly with the U.S. pledge first initiated under the Carter Administration in June 1978, and reaffirmed during the indefinite extension of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1995, that committed the nation to a "negative security assurance," which ensures it would not use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states that are parties to NPT. The recent Pentagon "Doctrine for Joint Theatre Operations" even suggests the potential use of nuclear weapons against non-state actors such as terrorists operating from a foreign territory.³

"Cessation" of the Nuclear Arms Race

The claims made in the Fact Sheet about the number of warheads remaining after the implementation of START I are misleading. These numbers refer only to active operational weapons. The U.S. Department of Defense has in its stockpile, besides active operational warheads:

· spares kept at the bases where nuclear weapons are deployed;

· augmentation or "hedge" warheads for uploading to missiles if needed;

· reliability replacements.

Besides these categories, the Department of Energy has custody of retired warheads and the "strategic reserve", that is, additional warheads that are not counted among the above categories. It has been estimated that if all these additional warheads are included, the total would be over 10,000 warheads. ⁴

The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

While it is true that the U.S. has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it has violated the spirit, if not the letter of the Treaty, by initiating the Stockpile Stewardship Program. By retaining "all historical capabilities of the weapons laboratories, industrial plants and the Nevada Test Site," Stockpile Stewardship will provide design capabilities potentially greater than those available during the Cold War.⁵ It encompasses:

· the Nevada Test Site where subcritical testing is conducted and is maintained in a state ready to rapidly resume full-scale underground testing;

· a National Ignition Facility which attempts to achieve nuclear fusion; and

· several other facilities at Los Alamos and Livermore.

Furthermore, the DOE plans to spend more than $1 billion on expanded facilities for a substantial nuclear warhead production capacity located at Los Alamos.⁶

In addition to these new, high-tech, experimental laboratory facilities, Stockpile Stewardship will use high-powered supercomputers to "provide an integrated nuclear explosion testbed."⁷ Over the next decade, the U.S. plans to invest $45 billion in this program – an amount, in inflation-adjusted dollars, well above the average Cold War annual spending for nuclear weapons research, development, testing, and production.

Fissile Material

Likewise, while it is true that the U.S. has ceased production of fissile materials like Plutonium and Highly-Enriched Uranium, as of February 1996, its existing stockpiles constitute 85 tons of Weapon-grade Plutonium, 14.5 tons of Fuel and Reactor-grade Plutonium, and 750 tons of Highly Enriched Uranium.⁸ Only a small fraction of this has been declared "excess" and even less has been converted to forms where it cannot be used for weapons.

Tritium

Further, the Fact Sheet does not reveal that in December 1998, U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced that the United States will produce tritium at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar nuclear power plant.⁹ Tritium, a radioactive gas with a relatively short half-life, is used to increase the explosive power in nuclear weapons. The current U.S. stockpile is sufficient to supply 8,400 weapons with tritium until 2010. If the US were to reduce its total number of warheads to the levels stipulated by START II or START III, the United States would not need new tritium until 2025 or 2030.¹⁰

Nuclear Disarmament

According to the Fact Sheet, the U.S. "has made and continues to make real substantive progress towards the goal of nuclear disarmament in every sense of the term." However, the real facts suggest a different picture.

While the U.S. may have "dismantled more than 13,000 nuclear warheads and bombs," the components recovered from dismantled warheads, in particular the radioactive plutonium pits that provide the explosive capability to nuclear weapons, are mostly stored at the Pantex Facility in Texas.¹¹ The only plans for disassembly are at the demonstration level. These would deal only with some hundreds of pits. A decision about when and where to construct a full-scale pit disassembly plant has yet to be taken.¹² Nor has a final decision about how to dispose of the plutonium been made.

While the U.S. may have "completely eliminated more than a dozen different types of nuclear warheads," during the same period it has initiated programs to develop several new warheads, or modifications of existing warheads.¹³ These include:

· the B-61/11, anew earth-penetrating warhead;

· a new warhead to be deployed on the Trident I and II missile;

· a refurbishment for the W87, currently used on MX missiles; and

· improvements for the B83.

In addition, it is suspected that two advanced types of novel weapons are under development, possibly in "black" or super-secret, compartmented programs. One example of this is a high-power radio frequency warhead and an insertable, modular, warhead package that could be clipped into a variety of missiles, including those that normally carry conventional warheads.

¹ R. Jeffrey Smith, "Clinton Directive Changes Strategy on Nuclear Weapons," Washington Post, December 7, 1997.

² Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy, Washington, September, 1997, The Joint Force.

³ See for example: Joint Chiefs of Staff, Doctrine for Joint Theatre Nuclear Operations, JP 3-12-1, Washington, 9 February 1996, pp. VIII, III-6, III-7.

⁴ Robert S. Norris and William M. Arkin, "U.S. Nuclear Stockpile, July 1997," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 1997.

⁵ United States Department of Energy, Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for Stockpile Stewardship and Management, September 1996, p. S-3. For an expert analysis of DOE programs see also Christopher Paine and Matthew McKinzie, "End Run: The US Government's Plan for Designing Nuclear Weapons and Simulating Nuclear Explosions under the CTBT", Nuclear Program, www.nrdc.orgtnrdcpro/fpprog.html.

⁶ Los Alamos National Laboratory, Institutional Plan: FY 1999 - FY 2004 pp. 32-3 8; Peter Gray, "Stockpile Stewardship " of Nuclear Weapons, Project for Participatory Democracy, Tides Center, March 1998.

⁷ Gill Weigand, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Computation and Simulation, U.S. Department of Energy, "Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative," Presentation at the ASCI Academic Strategic Alliances Program, Pre-proposal Conference, December 5-6, 1996.

⁸ U.S. Department of Energy, Plutonium: The First 50 years: United States Plutonium Production, Acquisition and Utilization from 1944 to 1994 (Department of Energy: Washington, DC, February 1996); David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996. World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies (Oxford: Oxford University, 1997) pp. 79-94.

⁹ Rachel Zoll, "U.S., T.V.A. agree on Nuclear Gas Production; $1 billion contract includes military, civilian Power uses," The Boston Globe, 23 December 1998.

¹⁰ Charles Ferguson and Frank von Hippel, "U.S. Tritium Production Plan Lacks Strategic Rationale," Defense News 29 (December 7-13, 1998).

¹¹ U. S. Department of Energy, Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Continued Operation of the Pantex Plant and Associated Storage of Nuclear Weapon Components, November 1996, pp. 1-7 - 1-10.

¹² "LANL Wins Pu Pit Demonstration; Pantex, SRS Fight for Big Project," Nuclear Fuel, 24 August 1998.

¹³ William M. Arkin, "What's 'New'?," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1997, pp. 22-27.