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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] UNILATERAL DISARMAMENT [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
(11/9/88)
Editorial, The Wall Street Journal, 4 November 1988, p. A14:1
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
In a congressional hearing on September 30, the United States
embarked on the course of unilateral nuclear disarmament. No
arguments were offered about the Soviet Union, NATO, arms talks
or the place of a nuclear deterrent in ensuring the security of
the United States. But a New York Times report struck the tone
for the extraordinary and in some ways incredible chain of
political events that has occurred in the month since.
"The Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, an enormous
government complex that produces fuel for the nation's nuclear
weapons, has experienced a number of serious reactor accidents
that have been kept secret from the public as long as 31 years,
two congressional committees disclosed today." Melodramatic
press coverage, led by the Times's Keith Schneider and echoing
through Time [31 October 1988, "The Nuclear Scandal", cover;
"They Lied to Us", p. 60] and Newsweek [31 October 1988, "The
year the bomb makers went boom", pp. 35], and demagogic
statements by Members of Congress have focused the nation's
nuclear phobia squarely on the U.S. nuclear-weapons production
complex. Indeed, the reactor complex is now closed down by
concern over "accidents" in which no one was hurt and nothing
harmed.
The White House and Pentagon have dumped the problem on the
Department of Energy, which runs the defense production plants.
Secretary John Herrington and his department have responded to
this assault with a firm policy of pre-emptive surrender.
This is not merely a matter of producing new weapons. The
nuclear reactors at the Savannah River plant produce tritium, a
rare form of hydrogen essential for nuclear warheads. The
Tritium in existing weapons, with a radioactive half-life of only
12 1/2 years, melts away like ice and must routinely be replaced.
With the Savannah River reactors closed since August, no new
tritium is being produced in the U.S. The Defense Department
says it has about a nine-month supply. Secretary Herrington
promises to restart one of the reactors in December, but the
National Resources Defense Council promises to sue to stop him.
James Schlesinger, former secretary of both energy and defense,
says, "If you want the shortest route to unilateral nuclear
disarmament, just shut down those reactors for a while."
* * *
The U.S. nuclear deterrent now faces its most serious threat
not from Soviet ICBMs or KGB sabotage or START bargains, but from
NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act [1969]. For any
"major federal action," whatever that means, NEPA mandates an
environmental-impact statement, which today concerns not what
happens to the environment but what legal hoops have to be jumped
through. Over the past few years, a series of little-noticed
lawsuits have established NEPA as an effective anti-defense
weapon.
These court precedents have been won primarily by Jeremy
Rifkin -- former promoter of the "People's Bicentennial" and
one-time sponsor of a bounty for secretaries informing on their
bosses. With the assistance of extensive coverage from the
Time's Mr. Schneider, Mr. Rifkin has more recently established
himself as the scourge of biotechnology. His peripatetic
lawsuits against gene-splicing and the like have by now been
pretty well defeated; the scientific community branded his
contentions as nonsense and judges have recently decided he
lacked standing to supervise federal regulators. He has,
however, found a softer target in the Pentagon.
o In 1985, federal Judge Joyce Hens Green of the D.C. district
ruled favorably on Mr. Rifkin's NEPA suit against the Army's
plans to build a biological-weapons-defense research complex at
the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. Judge Green said the Army's
environmental assessment was "clearly inadequate" under standards
laid out in previous appeals court rulings. Last month -- three
years after Judge Green's decision -- the Army announced that the
capabilities of its as-yet-unbuilt facility would be scaled down.
NEPA had been used to defeat the U.S. Army.
o Subsequent to the Green decision, Mr. Rifkin filed a suit
charging that the Army's entire biological antiwarfare program
was in violation of NEPA. Faced with the possibility of delays
and nightmarish publicity campaigns of the sort that plagued
Dugway, the government as "an expeditious way to resolve the
case." agreed in a February 1987 court settlement to do a major
study of the program's environmental effects.
o The month following this settlement, Mr. Rifkin filed suit
to halt so-called "electromagnetic pulse experiments" being
conducted by the Pentagon in five states, partly to develop
countermeasures against a potential Soviet directed-radiation
weapon that could disable U.S. command and communications systems
during a nuclear attack. This past May, the Defense Department
settled, agreeing to turn off or reduce the project's generators.
After a preliminary, six-month environmental assessment of the
project's effect on wildlife and humans, Commander in Chief
Rifkin would agree to allow the Pentagon to operate some of the
generators at reduced power. A full, two-year environmental-
impact statement is to follow.
So an anti-defense strategy had been born: Find sympathetic
judges to lend credence to environmental lawsuits built out of
frightening, Strangelovian scenarios of "disaster." Intimidate
frightened politicians. Trap the military in the NEPA red-tape
spiderweb. Make the point that even if your opponent may win
eventually, his program will face intolerable delay, then dictate
your settlement. Jeremy Rifkin provided the first-wave shock
troops; now the heavy artillery of the Natural Resources Defense
Councils [sic] is zeroing in on the heart of the nation's
deterrent posture.
* * *
An NRDC unilateral disarmament suit would ensure delay and
paralysis. To do a full-blown impact statement on Savannah River
could require two tiers of public hearings and perhaps three
comment periods consuming two years, not counting possible
judicial review and supervision of the project. To argue that
national security required a restart of the reactors, the
government would most probably have to file affidavits containing
highly classified data from defense officials, and the
plaintiffs' lawyers would have to be cleared to see this
material. Meanwhile, the U.S. nuclear deterrent would dissipate
as the tritium in warhead after warhead degraded.
The Savannah River defense reactor has been operated under a
non-profit contract by DuPont Co. since 1951 and jointly with the
Department of Energy since 1977. Following the 1986 Chernobyl
accident, the Department of Energy asked the National Academy of
Sciences to evaluate safety and management issues at the U.S.
defense reactors.
In its report last year the academy's team did cite specific
areas of DOE's management of the reactors that need improvement
to ensure future safety. The shutdown of the Savannah reactors
in August, for example, occurred because workers failed to follow
proper safety practices when the reactor failed to respond during
a restart procedure. No harm came of that incident, but groups
are in place to work on the issues raised in the academy's
report.
As to the reactor's safety record over the past three decades,
the academy committee states: "The contractors responsible for
the operation of the N Reactor and the reactors at Savannah River
have excellent records of safe operation. There have been no
major reactor accidents at these facilities. Both facilities
have records of avoidance of lost workdays as a result of
on-the-job injuries at least 10 times better than that of U.S.
industry as a whole." No one questions that ultimately funding
has to be made available to construct new facilities and reactors
for the defense complex. In any event, restoring the complex to
an operational level that meets both long-term security needs and
safety will require more than the lurid sensationalism that the
issue is getting now.
The short-term imperatives, however, could hardly be more
compelling. U.S. security needs the Savannah River reactor's
tritium. While it may surprise nearly everyone but the
environmentalists that NEPA has become the Supreme Law of the
Land, it is also true that the Department of Energy, Congress and
the Pentagon have mismanaged the current situation. Even now
there is little evidence that officials at the Pentagon or the
National Security Council fully appreciate the legal bind that a
succession of NEPA suits has put them in. A Pentagon spokesman
says, "We have no specific solutions for DOE." The line at the
NSC is, "DOE has the lead on that right now."
Yet over at the Department of Energy, its lawyers are mainly
talking about the position of legal strength now occupied by
potential NEPA plaintiffs. Instead of pressing the case for a
reactor restart, its officials have been mainly conceding
hypothetical safety problems, as if this would somehow make the
political assault on the defense complex abate.
Senator John Glenn [D, Ohio] has described exactly what will
be needed to stop this unacceptable threat to the deterrent from
getting further out of hand: "It's not overstating that we've
gotten to a situation where the President has to make a
decision."
* * *
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