Nevada Nuclear tests might resume

New projects planned for the Nevada Test Site are raising concern that nuclear bomb testing may resume there.

Local and national military watchdogs say all indications are that President Bush, if re-elected, would begin testing some types of nuclear weapons before the end of the decade at the NTS, located about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and upwind of Utah.

"You put all the pieces of the puzzle together," said Steve Erickson, director of the local Citizens Education Project, "and it leads to the conclusion that yes, we may very well be on the road to a resumption of nuclear testing."

Those concerns had Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, trying to amend the annual Defense Authorization Act this week to require clear permission from Congress before such testing could resume. The GOP-controlled Rules Committee blocked consideration of it.

"If this country is going to resume the testing of nuclear weapons, the people's representatives — the U.S. Congress — should be involved," Matheson complained Wednesday in a speech to the full House.

Often, during above-ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and early 1960s, radioactive fallout swept from the NTS into Utah and other regions. This contamination led to some cancer deaths and illness among downwind residents, said a later court ruling.

Although more-recent tests were conducted underground, sometimes accidental venting released radioactive material. All nuclear-explosion tests were halted in 1992.

Frank von Hippel, who teaches public and international affairs and works on nuclear weapons issues at Princeton, was a White House adviser on national security, concerned with science and technology policy, and was one of those responsible for arranging the present moratorium on nuclear testing.

He told the Deseret Morning News on Monday that a Defense Department official told him earlier this year that "based on the way he saw things going inside the administration, that if the Bush administration is re-elected that we would resume testing in 2007 or 2008."

The latest federal budget request calls for funding to improve the NTS so it could resume testing, if needed, in 18 months instead of the present 36 months. Also, researchers were working on new types of nuclear weapons that presumably would need testing before they could be added to the stockpile.

However, Linton F. Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in a March Senate hearing the administration had no plans to resume nuclear tests in the foreseeable future. Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, has indicated he might attempt to write that into law.