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The Clinton Administration recently announced plans to conduct six "sub-critical" nuclear tests at the Nevada test site. The first two are scheduled to be detonated on June 18, 1996 and September 12, 1996, nearly 1000 feet below the desert floor.

The tests are part of the so-called plan for a $30 billion "science based stockpile stewardship program" designed by rusty cold warriors to "keep the design team together," as they work on new nuclear weapons for space and earth penetrators. The weaponeers contend that their work is merely to insure the "safety and reliability" of the arsenal. But it would be far easier to just build the same old weapons again if we doubt their safety and reliability than to actually test new nuclear designs in underground explosions. The active "stockpile stewardship" program is part of a Faustian bargain made by the Administration with the weaponeers in return for their agreement to support a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB).

Rather than passively monitoring the nuclear arsenal while it awaits dismantlement, the U.S. has begun a whole new panoply of nuclear experiments, including the $1.5 billion contract with Bechtel for "subcritical" tests, and plans to equip the labs with technology for virtual reality computer simulation of new weapons, i.e., the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrotest Facility at Los Alamos, the Jupiter Facility at Sandia, and other diabolical technologies with a price tag of more than $5.5 billion of which $1.5 billion is budgeted in 1996.

Thus while negotiations continue in Geneva on the CTB for Clinton's announced goal of a "zero-yield" CTB, nuclear testing, on megacomputers, is going forward at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs making a mockery of the original intention of the CTB to end the development of new weapons. The "sub-critical tests," scheduled to begin on June 18th, in which the Dr. Strangeloves plan to detonate high explosives in proximity to plutonium at the Nevada test site, without quite setting off a critical chain reaction, will cost $20 million dollars each.

Citizens opposed to the further development of nuclear weapons are needed to make their voices heard. Write to President Clinton and ask him to end the development of new nuclear weapons, including the planned underground tests this June, and to close down the Nevada test site. Then work with us to call on the nuclear powers to begin negotiations on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons, just as the world has done for chemical and biological weapons. The Cold War is over. When will they ever learn?

-Alice Slater

Executive Director,

Economists Allied for Arms Reduction,

New York, N.Y.

(Reprint, Waging Peace Bulletin, Spring 1996 Edition)

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.