The nuclear testing controversy has been one of the most challenging aspects of my job. I have testified often in Congress during the past 10 years about the technical importance of nuclear testing since I am the one who has to sign on the bottom line that the nuclear weapons we design are safe, secure and reliable. Testing was critical when we were developing new weapons. We also considered it vital to the stewardship of the enduring stockpile. From a strictly technical standpoint, testing is the most effective way of ensuring the nation's nuclear deterrent.
Last Friday, President Clinton announced his decision to seek a "zero" yield comprehensive test ban treaty. He said that he made this decision to advance one of his administration's highest priorities -- "to negotiate a CTBT to reduce the danger posed by nuclear weapons proliferation." Committing to a CTBT is not new; all U.S. presidents in the past few decades were committed to negotiating a CTBT. The decision to go for "zero" yield is new. In the end, President Clinton decided that the potential technical benefits of low-yield tests (including what we call hydronuclear experiments) were outweighed by the gains of having the United States take a strong leadership role in reducing nuclear weapons proliferation.
During the final deliberations leading up to the President's decision, I was asked by Acting Deputy Secretary of Energy Charles Curtis if I would endorse the President's statement that he was "assured by the Secretary of Energy and the directors of our nuclear weapons labs that we can meet the challenge of maintaining our nuclear deterrent under a CTBT through a Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship program without nuclear testing." I told Mr. Curtis that I would endorse the statement with the proviso that the safeguards developed during the deliberations were part of the strategy.
A. Conduct a Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship program including a broad range of effective and continuing experimental programs.
B. Maintenance of modern nuclear laboratory facilities and programs in theoretical and exploratory nuclear technology which will attract, retain and ensure the continued application of our human scientific resources to those programs on which continued progress in nuclear technology depends.
C. Maintenance of the basic capability to resume nuclear testing.
D. Continuation of a comprehensive research and development program to improve our treaty monitoring capabilities and operations.
E. Continuing development of a broad range of intelligence gathering and analytical capabilities and operations to ensure accurate and comprehensive information on worldwide nuclear arsenals, nuclear weapons programs and related nuclear programs.
F. Understanding that if a high level of confidence in the safety and reliability of a nuclear weapon type critical to our national deterrent could no longer be certified, the President, in consultation with Congress, would be prepared to withdraw from the CTBT under the "supreme national interest" clause in order to conduct whatever testing might be required.
In addition, the President called for a new annual certification process by which the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Energy -- advised by the Nuclear Weapons Council, the directors of DOE's nuclear weapons laboratories and the commander of U.S. Strategic Command -- would ascertain if the nation has high confidence in the safety and reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile.
Now, we can turn our full attention to developing the new paradigm of science-based stockpile stewardship, and, together with the Department of Defense, annually assess our confidence in the stockpile. This is a big assignment, but one we understand and accept. We must make certain that the weapons we designed are safe, secure and reliable. To some extent this job is made easier because there will be fewer weapons systems in the stockpile, and no new weapons requirements have been identified by the DoD. On the other hand, our job has become more challenging because we will not be able to test, and existing weapons will remain in the stockpile much beyond their originally designed lifetimes.
Therefore, stewardship must change from a nuclear-testing based approach (that was always supported by science) to a more fundamental science-based approach. We will rely even more heavily on scientific computing and experiments than before. Weapons surveillance must change dramatically from fact-finding to preventive maintenance and predictive capability. And remanufacturing must become flexible and fully integrated with R&D and surveillance. Moreover, jointly with Vic Reis and the DOE, we realized that to make stockpile stewardship effective and affordable the nuclear weapons complex must be changed from a capacity-driven to a capability-driven model.
Several issues will remain to be resolved as the United States enters into the CTBT negotiations. The "zero" yield limit will have to be negotiated with the other declared nuclear powers. I should point out that the President's statement had zero in quotation marks because it was understood that a strict zero nuclear yield would eliminate the types of experiments with nuclear materials that the President included in his safeguards to make up for the loss of testing. In his statement, he specifically said that a "zero" yield CTBT would ban "any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion." The intent was to rule out low-yield nuclear tests and hydronuclear experiments, but not other experiments.
The other key issue, of course, is verification of a "zero" yield CTBT. The President recognized the shortcomings of present monitoring systems and committed to a comprehensive research and development activity in treaty monitoring capabilities. I believe that we will be able to improve treaty verification technologies, but an exact "zero" yield will not be possible to verify. Hence, this issue will also come down to a tradeoff; in this case, between showing leadership toward worldwide nonproliferation goals and achieving precise treaty verification.
Over the past 10 years, I have been involved in intense discussions about the ratification of the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (which finally entered into effect Dec. 11, 1990); a moratorium on testing as proposed by President Bush in 1992; the possibility of a number of tests to allow for a transition to a CTBT (called out in the Hatfield-Exon-Mitchell amendment of 1992); the utility of hydronuclear experiments; and the benefits of subkiloton tests within the confines of a CTBT. I was present at a joint verification nuclear test experiment with the Russians at our Nevada Test Site in August 1988 and in June 1994, I explained the necessity of a science-based approach to stockpile stewardship to the Russians on their turf.
Through all of these deliberations it became increasingly obvious that the key to future stockpile stewardship is our ability to attract and retain talented, experienced people in the nuclear weapons program. To do so, we must have a science-based approach to stewardship and we must improve weapons surveillance and integrate both with a flexible remanufacturing capability.
I believe that we can accomplish these long-term objectives with the President's Aug. 11 decision. So, now we must turn our efforts to accomplishing the task set before us -- stewardship of the nuclear stockpile without nuclear testing. We must marshal our capabilities to do this job with the goal that at each annual certification we can tell the President that we still have high confidence in the nation's nuclear weapons.