Los Alamos scientist criticizes federal approach to nuclear arsenal

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Los Alamos scientist criticizes federal approach to arsenal
James Sterngold, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 13, 2007


(02-13) 04:00 PST Los Alamos, New Mexico -- With the Bush administration and Congress fighting over how to rebuild the nuclear weapons complex, one of the country's top weapons designers said he believes it is time for the United States to consider a radical shift in policy that would ultimately eliminate the nuclear arsenal.
Joseph Martz, leader of a team designing a new generation of warheads at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a series of interviews last week that he is troubled by how the debate on nuclear weapons policy in Washington is focused narrowly on the number of weapons needed for the future, and how they would be built, rather than on how to eradicate them entirely.
Lab officials originally refused to give Martz permission to be interviewed for this article. Martz, however, said he decided to speak anyway in order to press ideas that he believes can reduce the risk of nuclear war and carve out a central role for the weapons labs, which have been threatened with budget cuts. Martz emphasized that he was expressing only his personal views and not those of the lab. But his comments still represent the first time in recent years that a senior scientist inside the weapons program has proposed making disarmament a concrete policy goal.
Martz said the discussion in Washington needs to reflect technological breakthroughs found in two prime areas: the weapons maintenance program, known as stockpile stewardship, and the new weapon design initiative called the Reliable Replacement Warhead, or RRW.
Martz's aim is to help policymakers understand that, because of a more sophisticated grasp of weapons science, the United States can slowly dismantle its warheads and still protect itself. The country could also bolster its credibility as a leading voice for disarmament by ratifying the long-stalled treaty banning underground testing.
"The time is right," Martz said. "A confluence of events has now allowed the debate to progress, including the changes in Congress, the maturation of the stockpile stewardship program and the recognition by the military that RRW is feasible. A few years ago, we didn't have that."
The key to the new policy, he said, would be slowly reducing the number of warheads over a period of years, and during that time replacing older weapons with the new Reliable Replacement Warhead weapons as an interim phase. But the final goal, according to Martz, should be the elimination of the entire arsenal.
What the United States would retain in its place, he argued, would be the technology to assemble warheads from stockpiled materials if a grave threat to national security arose. The labs now have the capability to do that in a relatively short period of time, he said, without the need for testing. The U.S. nuclear deterrent would be transformed from thousands of weapons deployed on high alert to what has come to be known as the "virtual stockpile."
Martz, 41, described this view as part of the evolution in the thinking of a younger generation of weapons designers eager to rely more on science than missiles to deter foes.
"You understand what I'm offering here," he said. "I'm offering through our technological achievements the security we need to enter into a real discussion" of nuclear disarmament.
Martz believes the U.S. nuclear arsenal has been critical to the country's security and should be maintained for some years. But the nuclear policy debate, he said, has focused too much on producing new bombs and not enough on the next steps needed for broader arms control initiatives.
"I'm trying to offer solutions that say, 'How can we get the benefits of deterrence without having to put thousands of warheads on hair-trigger alert?' " he said.

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http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/13/MNGI1O3N0G1.DTL