The dove of war: the arms-controllers won't even think about fusion weapons. But that won't make it go away.

IN THE spring of 1958 1 visited the Livermore nuclear-weapon laboratory. I had been consulting there since the lab was founded in 1952. As a military analyst I was searching for new ideas that fitted into notions I had developed, most importantly for a small, discriminate battlefield weapon that made political sense--namely, one not producing widespread urban destruction and radioactive contamination of the sort that would result from using our inventory of tactical nuclear-fission weapons.

In short, I was looking for the neutron bomb, which I had conceptualized a few years before. However, up to that point the lab had had nothing under way to make this weapon feasible. This visit proved to be more of the same, as the scientist in charge of battlefield weapons updated me on his programs. As I got up to leave, he requested I stay on for a bit, to hear about their peaceful-explosives program. I sat down and he called in one of his assistants, who had initiated work on a nuclear-fusion device.

This device, code-named DOVE, fascinated me. It contained no fissile material; rather, its explosive power derived from heavy hydrogen--deuterium and tritium. Because of its extremely low nuclear cost and its high yield-comparable to that of a very large conventional bomb--it would, in a military application, represent a revolutionary new class of weapons. A device of this nature, having a yield the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT, could kill enemy troops with radiation out to hundreds of yards, with no significant urban destruction and contamination. It could thus fulfill the long-held objective of civilized nations: to defeat the aggressor without destroying the civilian fabric, a goal not achievable with conventional weapons.

After calculating the effects of such a warhead I introduced this concept around Washington. One person I briefed was Paul Nitze, the high priest of nuclear-arms control, who then headed the policy branch of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. While not openly hostile, he was guarded when I informed him of the very low nuclear cost of a DOVE warhead--roughly one-hundredth that of a battlefield fission weapon, meaning that these things could be turned out by the hundreds, in contrast to the relative handful of fission weapons usually assigned to a new nation joining the nuclear club. Put another way, were such weapons feasible, the problem of stemming nuclear-weapon proliferation could become a nightmare---which plainly was on Nitze's mind.

Shortly after briefing Nitze, I paid another visit to Livermore. Thanks to my promotional efforts they had been directed by Washington to give DOVE top priority. The most promising approach was to use a large spherical high-explosive charge to concentrate the explosive energy in a very small capsule containing deuterium and tritium. In theory, this would cause the desired thermonuclear reaction. The program proceeded for some years and finally was terminated for lack of progress. Later, the Los Alamos laboratory had a go at it. But to my disappointment, and theirs, the problem remained intractable. The program ultimately was ended.

Several years before Livermore began DOVE, the Soviets had started their own "pure-fusion" development. Unlike the U.S. they were quite open about it, claiming it was directed solely for peaceful applications. In 1957, Soviet nuclear-weapon designer L. A. Artsimovich presented a paper in Geneva describing experiments done in 1952, based on the same high-explosive implosion technology used in DOVE. He claimed progress had been made. Shortly thereafter, however, Soviet researchers stopped all public mention of the project,

On the other hand, the Soviet military had no hesitation in writing about such devices in their open military literature. In 1961, Colonel M. Pavlov, writing in Red Star, discussed almost precisely what I had briefed Paul Nitze on. Pavlov's calculations of weapon effectiveness were almost identical to mine, which were classified. This indicated to me that although the Soviets were not talking about research on DOVE, they were doing it.'

Cross Their Hearts...

WHEN Boris Yeltsin visited Washington a couple of years ago, he addressed a Joint Session of Congress and declared that the Russians no longer would lie to us. For this he received a prolonged standing ovation. If the U.S. Congress took him at his word, who am I to be skeptical? I accept the statements by him and other Russian officials who publicly comment on matters of military importance.

Last year, in discussing what they call "third-generation nuclear weapons," Russian general/academician Ye. Negin stated that his country already is producing very-low-yield nuclear explosives "in which a doubling of yield is achieved with a hundredfold reduction of weight compared to existing weapons." Two years earlier Viktor Mikhailov (now Russian Minister of Atomic Energy) had commented on these weapons: "You can drop a couple of hundred little bombs on foreign territory, the enemy is devastated, but for the aggressor there are no consequences."

Before analyzing these statements, let me ask whether anyone can imagine a U.S. Secretary of Energy or a Defense Department general making any such remarks about nuclear weapons. In this respect the candor shown by the Russians, as Yeltsin promised, has been truly remarkable.

As to being able to double the yield at a hundredfold reduction in warhead weight, without getting into classified material I can unequivocally say that this simply isn't possible today for small battlefield weapons using fissile material. This has to do with the problem of "critical mass," where some minimum weight of fissile material, at the kilogram level, is required to produce any yield at all. For example, a team of really clever scientists could design a fission warhead to produce a very low yield with a kilogram or two of plutonium, the whole warhead weighing perhaps 10 to 15 kilograms. But to double the yield while bringing the weight down a hundredfold implies a warhead weighing less than the amount of plutonium required to get the device to work.

This clearly implies the Russian general was referring to some version of DOVE, based on a detonation technology that doesn't exist in the United States. And considering U.S. policy toward improving nuclear-weapon technology, it is doubtful that it will in the foreseeable future.

In a pure-fusion weapon, such as DOVE, the weight of the nuclear material required may be as low as a thousandth of that required in a fission weapon. So if we take General Negin at his trustworthy word, just what has been going on in Russian labs to allow this fantastic claim? What reason do we have to believe that Russia-- and maybe other nations as well--has accomplished what we haven't?

The Hunt for Red Mercury

AN ARTICLE appeared in Barron's this February ("Nuclear Shell Game," by Andy Zipser) that discussed an exotic new material known as "red mercury," an antimony mercury oxide. It was originally explored and developed by the Soviet Union as a more efficient detonating mechanism for nuclear warheads, so efficient, according to one Russian, that "a bomb the size of a grenade could blow a ship out of the sea." So precious is this material that it reportedly has fetched under-the-counter prices ranging from $150,000 to $500,000 a kilogram.

Typically, this substance was derided, debunked, and dismissed by the American anti-nuclear-proliferation community. When asked about it, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, responded: "We have seen the reports, we have not seen any hard evidence to substantiate the reports, but we take all the reports seriously." (Whatever that means.) My interpretation of Gates's response is that this business is for real but we can't afford to take it seriously in public at a time when U.S. policy has effectively eliminated the relevance of nuclear weapons to "real world" problems.

The point here is that, if the new warhead, instead of using plutonium, uses tritium (which, like plutonium, is produced in nuclear reactors), we are faced with a substance the existing nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) does not deal with.

The NPT contains no provisions for monitoring tritium production, primarily because at the time the treaty was signed in 1967 it was assumed that pure-fusion warheads were little more than a theoretical possibility. This may have seemed a valid assumption at the time, but time marches on.

In recent years unclassified research has been conducted on a new class of materials (including red mercury), referred to as ballotechnics. These materials use a number of elements in lowdensity powder form. When they are subjected to high-pressure shock compression, chemical reactions take place which under certain conditions can produce energy concentrations considerably in excess of those from high explosives. Ballotechnics therefore offer a significantly greater prospect for success in attaining a verylow-yield pure-fusion weapon than the high-explosive techniques we and other nations have explored. Such success would open a nuclear Pandora's box that U.S. policy would just as soon see closed.

Star Wars, or Trust?

TEN YEARS ago, in his famous Star Wars speech, President Ronald Reagan proposed a joint U. S .-Soviet venture toward achieving defenses against nuclear ballistic missiles. Nothing happened. Today it is the Russians who are pressing for such cooperation. Leonid Fituni, director of the Center for Global and Strategic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, has noted that at their summit meeting in April, Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin discussed a joint project called "Trust," in which plasmas (volumes of heavily ionized gases) produced by new non-nuclear high-tech methods would be created to form an extensive shield in the upper atmosphere against incoming nuclear re-entry vehicles (RVs). As explained in Izvestia, "The energy is not concentrated on the target itself (as is the case for conventional U.S. schemes), but on the area of atmosphere directly in front of it, in its flight trajectory. It ionizes the area and completely disrupts the flight aerodynamics .... "

Far and away the most effective way of producing such a shield would be to use low-yield pure-fusion warheads, utilizing high-energy neutrons (which constitute the bulk of the energy release of the explosive) to ionize the area to a far greater extent and intensity than would be possible with any non-nuclear method. If such explosives are able to be developed using ballotechnics, the opportunity exists for cheaply producing a shield which may throw RVs sufficiently off course as to seriously reduce their accuracy or perhaps even cause their destruction. American nuclear strategy has been based principally on achieving long-range ballistic missiles with sufficiently high accuracy to enable the destruction of heavily hardened enemy missiles and command centers. Were the Russians to achieve such a means of nullifying our attack strategy, the consequences could be grave indeed.

The ABM treaty of 1962, which the Clinton Administration rigidly adheres to, would forbid the testing of such a system. However, it is one thing to prohibit the Russians from testing such a system and quite another thing for us to actually verify that they are complying. The warheads in question would be so devoid of tell-tale radioactivity that it is extremely improbable that our verification system would even be aware of what was going on.

Of course, it is now politically incorrect to imagine a serious Russian nuclear threat against us. But politics may change, and Yeltsin, whom Congress feels we can trust, may be replaced by a Stalinist hard-liner whom we can't trust. In which case, the U.S. Government should be taking the redmercury issue far more seriously than it appears to be doing.

The Next War

THE Clinton Administration's defense policy has emerged as pretty much the same as the Bush Administration's. We plan to keep our conventional forces sufficiently strong to cope with two foreign wars at the same time. And since President Bush, after the Gulf War, ordered the destruction of U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons, including neutron bombs, if we engage in such wars we had better hope our non-nuclear capabilities can do the job.

If perchance ballotechnic pure-fusion technology were to fall into the hands of troublemakers such as Iran and North Korea, and if we intervened in any subsequent aggression against their neighbors, we would not get off so easily as we did against Iraq. These nations might not have military forces of our caliber, but they could have a class of battlefield and air-defense weapons whose effectiveness vastly exceeded that of our most advanced conventional systems. In which case a distinct possibility exists that we would lose on the battlefield, leaving us with the unhappy and immoral prospect of using strategic nuclear weapons against enemy urban-industrial complexes. This is a situation the U.S. should do everything possible to avoid. We are not doing this.

The Terrorist Threat

THAT nuclear terrorism against the United States has not occurred so far into the Nuclear Age is a great blessing. Considering the thousands of warheads around the world, it seems little short of miraculous that one hasn't been stolen, or sold, or given to terrorists for malicious purposes--and used. In many ways the U.S. is just as porous to the infiltration of nuclear terrorists as to that of drug smugglers or illegal immigrants.

On the other hand, were ballotechnic pure-fusion technology to be developed by such acknowledged terroristsupporting nations as Iran, Syria, Libya, North Korea, and perhaps even Iraq--or transferred to them (by, say, unemployed Russian nuclear scientists), the terrorist threat takes on new dimensions. These warheads could be clandestinely tested underground. Being neutron bombs, their blast component would be minimal and their small radioactivity could be easily contained. We have been good at observing from a satellite the construction of an underground test site for regular nuclear weapons. But how does a satellite observe the construction and operation of a test facility where the blast explosive power to be contained is the equivalent of only I or 2 tons of TNT? How can a seismic monitoring system differentiate such a burst from a high-explosive one? It can't.

Were terrorist states to develop or buy these weapons, the specter of a new kind of nuclear threat would loom over the West. It would not be the fear of weapons of mass destruction blowing up our cities, but rather the infusion of perhaps hundreds of mini neutron bombs. One of these devices---carried in a brown paper bag and deposited in a trash can between the two World Trade Center buildings, could kill thousands of people but leave the buildings quite intact. Morover, these devices are highly efficient producers of the so-called Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), to which modern high-tech electronic equipment is extremely vulnerable. It is fair to say that for the above-mentioned ground zero for this device, a substantial area of lower Manhattan would suffer the destruction or dysfunction of its software and communications facilities. There goes the Wall Street Journal.

Lest We Succeed

NOT HAVING proper security clearances, I cannot comment responsibly on what U.S. nuclear-weapon laboratories are doing about "red mercury" weapons. However, for anti-proliferation reasons, I very highly doubt that we are pursuing a serious program that would lead to actual testing. In fact, given our continuing suspension of nuclear testing, which is tantamount to the cessation of new weapon development, I would imagine that the government is giving the labs every possible disincentive, if for no other reason than that they might succeed. Many who opposed the H-bomb program in the late 1940s had such fears and invented every reason to show the weapon was not feasible. However, once President Truman gave the program the green light, the detractors were proved wrong in very short order.

If our policies for fighting ground wars and defending ourselves and our allies against ballistic-missile attack are to remain the same--namely, no nukes, of any kind--it is difficult to argue a vigorous U.S. pursuit of ballotechnic pure-fusion weapons. Either we'll make out with non-nuclear means or we may someday have to face up to nuclear realities and suffer the consequences. But a more sensible approach wold be at least to determine the feasibility and utility of these weapons. These are not weapons of mass destruction, which the NPT basically deals with. Rather they offer prospects for defense against missile attack which are far more effective and moral than any conventional weapons in our arsenal and vastly more moral than the thermonuclear warheads in our strategic weapons.

We should also find out to the extent possible what other countries are up to in this area--starting with the Russians. If we are to take Russian statements on these weapons and their applications at face value, as Boris Yeltsin says we should, we should close with Russia on this issue and propose a joint development and testing effort.

At the same time we should demand access to the laboratories of every signatory to the NPT to determine whether work is going on in this area which the NPT so foolishly left wide open by not requiring monitoring of tritium production.

As to whether we will take any such steps, don't hold your breath. If we don't, however, we may be risking world considerably more dangerous than we now foresee.

Mr. Cohen is a retired nuclear-weapon analyst.