New weapons tests worrisome

Gone are the days of open-air nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site. Yet news reports of an underground "subcritical test" conducted in late February give us pause.

The test reportedly examined the behavior of plutonium as it was "strongly shocked by forces produced by chemical high explosives," according to a Nevada Test Site press release. That data, to be analyzed by supercomputers, will help predict how nuclear warheads will perform. All of this comes as Great Britain is secretly developing a new generation of nuclear warheads, according to press reports. British officials will say only that the development of a new weapons system is under consideration.

The Bush administration says full-scale nuclear weapons testing is not currently planned at the Nevada Test Site but it is apparently keeping its options open, according to news reports. The United States has observed a moratorium on full-scale nuclear testing since 1992, but it has not signed the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Although the United States has demonstrated restraint for more than a decade, the door remains open. Cautions Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project in Utah and a longtime opponent of nuclear testing in Nevada, "We have never fielded a brand-new design for a warhead without nuclear testing it first."

Linton F. Brooks, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, quoted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, said only a major problem with the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile would prompt the resumption of full-scale testing at the Nevada Test Site. "You're certainly not going to see a return to testing for developing new weapons," Brooks said.

The problem, of course, is the secrecy surrounding weapons development and testing. For obvious reasons of national defense, weapons development must be kept under wraps. That's understandable. But Nevadans and all of those downwind from the Nevada Test Site endured more than 1,000 nuclear detonations between 1951 and 1992. One hundred of the trials were atmospheric tests. Radiation from those tests drifted downwind, resulting in cancer. Congress later apologized and established a compensation fund for some downwind cancer victims, many of them Utahns.

Because those deaths are not distant memories, Utahns are well within their rights to be skeptical about any weapons testing that occurs upwind.