At Peace With The Bomb

...Generally, they are not terribly concerned about how their work on a particular warhead may fit into a deployable weapons system...

...At Peace With the Bomb The physicists lose no sleep BY HUGH E. DEWITT I'm often asked why intelligent and capable scientists, engineers, and technicians willingly participate in designing nuclear weapons—an enterprise that many people regard as a threat to human survival...

...The most extreme advocate for this viewpoint is Edward Teller, but his suspicion and hatred of the Russians are so pronounced that even some dedicated weaponeers in the labs find him too much to take...

...If Gorbachev can remain in power for several more years and continue his present course, the nuclear weapons labs may come to be viewed as dinosaurs that have outlived their usefulness in a changing world...

...Their rationale is that so long as the United States maintains a technological lead in weapons development, the Soviet Union will never dare to attack and will avoid any use of nuclear weapons out of fear that we will retaliate...

...there has, after all, been no use of nuclear weapons against an enemy since the two bombs dropped on Japan in 1945...

...In my first eighteen years or so on the lab staff, most of my time was spent on academic physics research of the kind published by university professors...

...Besides, the labs offer some of the best jobs available to scientists in the United States—high pay, job security, good benefits, excellent physical facilities, travel to scientific meetings, and generous retirement programs...

...There are very few women in the nuclear-weapons design business...

...Essentially, my entire professional career has been within the nuclear-weapons establishment, though I have never been directly involved with the design of any weapon...

...My colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos laboratories would say, "We work on nuclear weapons so that they will never be used...

...That is classic deterrence theory, and most staff members at the weapons labs regard it as sufficient justification for their careers...

...So long as the Soviets behaved like a repressive regime that threatened to expand into neighboring countries, it was easy for the weapons labs' leaders to maintain their status...

...Instead, most of my research has focused on physics problems that have some bearing on the work of the weapons designers...

...Those are matters decided by political leaders in Washington...

...They do their technical jobs as they are told...

...Many, possibly most, of the top managers of the nuclear-weapons labs have fairly hawkish political views...

...Similarly, when President Gerald Ford and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev initialed the 150-kiloton limit on testing in the 1976 Threshold Test-Ban Treaty, the lab managers were not happy, but they could easily live with a treaty that did not significantly curtail the development of new warheads...

...What motivates the top managers of the weapons labs is the power and prestige they derive from their positions—power because they keep a large, complex operation going on a permanent basis, and prestige because they are seen to be in charge of a program that protects their country against a malevolent external enemy, the Soviet Union...

...This role has not been welcomed by the lab, nor has it done much for my career...

...The possible use of modern nuclear weapons in warfare seems so remote from the consciousness of the bomb-designers that they are not likely to lose sleep over the matter or have pangs of conscience about their work...

...In 1963, the labs took leading roles in opposing the Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty that stopped atmospheric testing, but in the end they accepted the treaty since it allowed the nuclear program to proceed unhindered with underground explosions...

...The nuclear-design labs are not private contractors in the sense that such aerospace firms as Lockheed, Martin-Marietta, and TRW are, but in some respects the labs behave in the same way as their private-enterprise counterparts...

...weapons establishment had a keen interest in keeping the arms race going indefinitely, so I began to take strong public positions as an internal critic...

...Not many women receive Ph.D...

...In the mid-1970s, however, I came to believe that the U.S...

...Most of the lab staff and managers regard their work on nuclear weapons as a serious technical enterprise, and they want to do the best job they can...

...They view the Soviet Union as a permanent threat, and insist that military superiority starting with nuclear weapons is what preserves our "freedom...

...Lab people who do not share those views are not promoted to high positions...

...The lab managers can be counted on to mount strong opposition to any serious attempt to curb nuclear testing and to resist any arms-control initiative that might interfere with weapons work...

...Those who make it to the top of the labs' hierarchies generally hold a perception of the world as essentially bipolar—the United States and its allies versus the Soviet Union and its vassal nations...

...Even those lab people whose job it is to use computer war-game programs to assess various nuclear strategies view their work as technical exercises that have little relation to the possibility of nuclear war...

...the program going, providing good jobs to the lab employees and respectability and prestige to the lab managers...

...I hope this will prove to be the case...

...These are the people who travel to Washington to testify as experts on nuclear weapons before the appropriate Congressional committees, and who keep Defense Department officials informed about the current state of nuclear technology...

...I've been a theoretical physicist on the staff of the Livermore lab since 1957...

...But the recent Gorbachev initiatives have done much to erode the bipolar world of "us and them" that is needed to justify the nuclear arms race...

...I don't agree with those who characterize these men as little boys playing with their nuclear-bomb toys (though there are such cases...

...They also go to Washington to "sell" new nuclear-weapon ideas to Congress and the military services and bring back lucrative contracts for the labs...

...This helps explain why the nuclear arms race continues: Though most participants in the weapons program eventually come to recognize that nuclear arms have little if any real military usefulness, bureaucratic momentum keeps Hugh E. DeWitt is a theoretical physicist on the staff of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory...

...I have referred to the "men" who run the weapons labs, and I have done so intentionally...

...Little thought is given to how such devices might be used...

...It can be exciting and fun to design a nuclear device with an explosive yield of a hundred kilotons that is small enough to fit into a suitcase...

...The upper administration of the weapons labs is primarily a man's world, as is the upper administrtion of the aerospace defense industries...

...it simply reflects the realities that prevail in the American scientific and technical community...

...The relatively small number of men at the top of the weapon labs play a major role in the American side of the nuclear arms race...

...More significant is the hierarchical nature of the weapons labs, where a few men hold power and guard it carefully...

...degrees in physics in this country, and very few of those go into nuclear-weapon design work...

...Livermore and Los Alamos are large, permanent institutions, each with about 8,000 employees and an annual budget that approaches $1 billion...

...As Gorbachev continues to put forth serious arms-control and arms-reduction proposals while acknowledging that his government's central concerns are with the failing Soviet economy rather than with global expansionism, the justification for the work done at the weapons labs keeps getting weaker...

...What's important to the people employed at the weapons labs is that they have an ongoing mandate from Congress and the Executive Branch to develop high-quality nuclear explosive devices...

...They often enjoy the technical work...

...However, recent Congressional initiatives to bring the testing limit down to as low as one kiloton have induced the labs to engage in every form of legal opposition and sometimes even illegal lobbying...

...This article is adapted from a paper he delivered earlier this year at the thirty-third annual meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis...

...They do not intend to give up their lucrative weapons-design activity just because Mikhail Gorbachev has proposed a test ban...

...I don't see this dearth of women bomb-designers and weapons-lab managers as particularly significant...