LAS VEGAS, Aug. 15 (UPI) -- A Pentagon adviser predicted the United States would resume testing of nuclear weapons in the coming years to confirm the aging warheads still perform as designed, it was reported Thursday.
Dale Klein, an assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on matters involving weapons of mass destruction, told reporters at Nellis Air Force Base Wednesday that "aging characteristics" were cropping up in the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, and full-scale underground test blasts would be required to make sure the warheads were still working like they were supposed to, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported.
Calls to the Pentagon were not immediately returned.
"I believe that over time we will need to verify some of the calculations that have been done," said Klein, who was scheduled Thursday to tour the Nevada Test Site where the tests would be conducted.
The desert test site, located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, since 1997 has been the venue for occasional "sub-critical tests" in which small amounts of plutonium are detonated in order to provide estimates as to how the nuclear stockpile is aging. Those tests do not include nuclear chain-reactions, however, which Klein said would eventually be needed to confirm the estimates.
Klein has said publicly that nuclear weapons were frequently checked and overhauled during the Cold War in order to upgrade their destructive capability, but such work has slackened in recent decades and the effects of storing nuclear materials over extended periods were not well known.
Klein told reporters the full-scale tests were five to 10 years away, if they will in fact occur at all.
Anti-nuclear activists contacted by the Review-Journal were horrified at the prospect of a resumption of Cold War-style blasts that they contended would violate international agreements and would spark a new nuclear arms race.
"If we decide to resume nuclear weapons testing, other countries are going to take notice of that," Stephen Schwartz, publisher of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, told the newspaper. "While we don't have anything to fear from India or Pakistan, both of those countries fear each other."
Critics also speculated that the tests could be a cover for the development of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons such as bunker-busters designed to penetrate fortified underground facilities.
Klein responded, "At the moment, there is not a plan to develop new nuclear weapons."
Activists nevertheless predicted that any attempt to revive full-scale testing in Nevada would be met by some stiff opposition in a state that had recently lost a bitter campaign in opposition of plans to open a nation nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, and where fallout from tests in the 1950s are blamed for a variety of health problems.
One study at the Los Alamos National Laboratory documented that individuals were exposed to both beta and gamma radiation from the atmospheric testing of nuclear devices. Some researchers have opined that many individuals exposed to fallout during the 1950s should qualify for compensation and medical care if the present rules for the adjudication of claims for atomic veterans and radiation workers at Energy Department sites were to be extended to the public.
The Department of Energy's Environmental Science Division reported in a recent study that from 1945 to 1980, more than 500 weapons tests were conducted in the atmosphere at a number of locations around the world and that the tests resulted in the release of substantial quantities of radioactive debris to the environment.
Although the data remains classified, reports state "the impact of weapons fallout will continue to be felt for years to come since a contaminant baseline has been imposed ... on the environment."
(Reported by Hil Anderson in Los Angeles)
