COLUMN ONE : Sounding an Alarm on A-Arms : Even without the Cold War, U.S. maintains huge arsenal. Critics assail Energy Department management--citing Savannah River plant as example of how politics heightens budget woes.

The control room dials read zero. The uranium fuel rods are long gone. The cooling water, contaminated by radiation, has been drained into an underground holding tank.

But the crew at this dismal nuclear weapons plant, cut into the South Carolina pine forest, has not yet locked the door or turned off the industrial spotlights that burn around the clock at K reactor.

The reactor remains on standby, ready to resume producing fuel for nuclear weapons should urgent national security orders come from Washington. Upkeep for this and four other nuclear piles at Savannah River--all built before Elvis Presley made his first hit record--requires a crew of 400 workers.

The Cold War may be over, but the nation’s nuclear weapons industry is hardly out of business.

Although the United States quit producing bombs four years ago and has no plans to resume, the government is spending $4.4 billion this year on nuclear weapons. About 73,000 people report to work every week at 11 active nuclear weapons plants around the country, 41,000 of them maintaining America’s huge nuclear weapons stockpile and most of the rest doing environmental cleanup.

Examination of the nuclear weapons complex by many top experts, however, has left grave concerns about the adequacy of the Energy Department’s efforts to mind the bombs now that the end of the superpower arms race has lowered the profile of the nation’s nuclear defenses.

Even as U.S. concern grows over an overseas black market in plutonium and the proliferation of nuclear capability in the Third World, senior Defense Department officials, independent safety agency authorities, outside experts and even some Energy Department executives warn of a whole other set of nuclear woes. They say:

* The Energy Department has no comprehensive plan for restructuring the nation’s nuclear weapons industry. Critics fault both Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and James D. Watkins, her predecessor in the George Bush Administration, for failing to deal quickly with such pressing issues as management and safety.

* The nuclear weapons bureaucracy is bloated, with too many workers and too much capacity in areas where they are least needed. The Clinton Administration has budgeted $4.4 billion for its nuclear weapons program this year, down from a peak of $8 billion in 1990, and some critics believe much deeper cuts are possible as the nuclear arsenal is slashed by about 80% through the end of the century.

* Paradoxically, the government is losing some of the employees it needs most in the new climate. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, for example, experienced bomb designers in the weapons directorate number only a dozen, many near retirement age.

* The government has delayed investing in the new facilities it will need to ensure the safety and reliability of the nuclear stockpile.

The United States quit producing nuclear bombs in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, the government intends to keep a permanent stockpile of at least 6,000 warheads--a sharp drop from the 30,000 bombs at the Cold War’s peak, but still an enormous stash and by far the world’s most lethal.

Minding those bombs is no cinch--even without much concern in the United States, unlike overseas, about terrorists stealing plutonium. To ensure that the weapons are safe from accidental detonation and to guarantee that they will work reliably if they are needed, the government maintains a huge complex of laboratories, production lines for non-nuclear parts, assembly sites and storage bunkers.

The task is extraordinary, perhaps unique. Nobody has ever attempted to maintain any kind of electronic or mechanical device in perfect working order for two or three decades--the intended life of a nuclear weapon--without periodically testing or using it.

And nuclear weapons are not just any device. With an estimated 6,000 parts functioning next to a radioactive core and surrounded by up to 100 pounds of conventional high explosives, they are among the most complex industrial products in the world.

“Somebody has to deal with the long-term strategic issue here,” Watkins said in an interview. “What we want is to consolidate . . . cut costs, move some parts out to private industry. I don’t understand why this is not happening.”

Energy Secretary O’Leary rejects concerns--even those of her own subordinates--that nuclear bomb safety may be deteriorating. “We are in a position where we can ensure the safety and reliability of the stockpile,” she said in an interview.

In fact, if there are problems with the way the nation’s nuclear weapons are managed, the blame is bipartisan. John Conway, chairman of the Nuclear Weapons Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has issued dozens of safety recommendations to the Energy Department in recent years. Both Watkins and O’Leary, he said, have failed to heed calls for change from the safety board and others.

*

Whatever the merits of these charges, the problems run much deeper than politics.

In a top-secret letter to O’Leary in late May, Deputy Defense Secretary John Deutch raised a red flag.

“We are concerned that the present (Energy Department) nuclear weapons research development and test budget does not provide sufficient resources to maintain the technological capability that is required for future nuclear weapons missions,” he wrote.

Defense Department officials, in a series of interviews, point to two particularly worrisome consequences of the Energy Department’s failure to devise a plan for the nuclear weapons business.

First, they say, O’Leary has dragged her feet in deciding on a new source of tritium, an important explosive booster in hydrogen bombs. Tritium decays radioactively and must be periodically replenished in weapons.

The United States stopped making tritium at Savannah River in 1988, because of concerns about the safety of reactors there. After spending $2 billion to update K reactor--a massive concrete ziggurat--the decision to restart it was delayed and it continues in cold standby. But the lengthy shutdown has made it highly unlikely that the reactor will be used again.

The United States is on course to run short of tritium by 2008; construction on a new reactor must start as early as next year to fill the need. But O’Leary said new tritium might not be available until 2010. She called the two-year gap an “acceptable” shortfall--an assertion that raises hackles at the Pentagon.

Second, Defense Department officials worry that the Energy Department’s 1996 budget, still under preparation, will be so small that weapons work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory--one of two where bombs are designed--will be dropped.

Defense officials want two laboratories so that in the absence of underground testing--which has been subject to an informal global moratorium for five years--each can review the other’s work.

“The danger is that this is a complex where people have critical skills,” said former Energy official Donald Kerr, an executive vice president at Science Applications International Corp., a weapons contractor in San Diego.

Tight budgets already have led the Energy Department to stop work on some nuclear safety enhancements, including a bomb trigger that would have used optical fibers and lasers in place of electronic components. One weapons designer at the Energy Department’s Pinellas plant in Largo, Fla., said the optical devices would have been more resistant to electrical disturbances, lightning and terrorism.

The trick: To cut what is no longer needed and to keep what is, even as special interests from coast to coast try to protect their own pieces of the nuclear weapons business.

*

The saga of the Savannah River plant shows how politically difficult achieving that goal will be.

Savannah River’s patron in Washington is no less a figure than Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), whose 40 years of service make him the nation’s most senior senator. And the plant, operated by Westinghouse Electric Corp., is by far the largest employer in South Carolina.

The plant’s future “is a very big deal,” said Hunter Howard, executive vice president of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce. A major cutback, he warned, “would devastate the state’s economy.”

After Savannah River was built in the 1950s, it operated five nuclear reactors and two chemical processing plants for making tritium and bomb-grade plutonium, the explosive pit in most U.S. weapons. Today, the plant’s only job is to recycle tritium from old bombs, providing a source of the radioactive substance for the remaining stockpile.

Despite 2,600 layoffs last year, Savannah River has 18,000 workers, more than it had at the peak of the Cold War, according to Victor Rezendes, the General Accounting Office’s top expert on nuclear weapons. Although nearly half are working on cleaning up radioactive waste, 9,000 workers are collecting paychecks from the bomb production program--even though no bombs are being produced.

“Do you think for a second that we could lay off 9,000 workers at Savannah River even if we wanted to?” conceded one senior Energy Department official. “You have got to be kidding. Even if we tried, Strom Thurmond would make sure we had enough money so we couldn’t do it.”

In his efforts to ensure Savannah River’s future, Thurmond has lashed out at O’Leary.

“It appears the men who built our successful nuclear deterrent have no impact and are ignored,” Thurmond thundered in a Senate speech this summer. “Mr. President, it is said that one of the first things Mrs. O’Leary did at DOE was to take down the pictures of nuclear warships like the Nautilus. Mr. President, that was a symbolic indication of what was to come.”

In a reflection of the success of the plant’s patrons, the Energy Department’s own inspector general has found Savannah River’s staff to be bloated. Its investigation asserted that 1,206 of Westinghouse’s 3,088 managers were excess baggage, kept on the payroll at a cost to taxpayers of $81.7 million annually.

The January report found that Westinghouse workers took three times longer than standard industry practice to paint a wall and three times longer to seed a lawn. At the facility’s 15 maintenance shops, workers required an average of 16 hours to change several standard water filters--not unlike residential filters--compared with three hours for Navy workers.

Westinghouse executives declined to be interviewed. Mario Fiori, the chief Energy Department official managing the Savannah River operation, said the work force was no bigger than in 1988, even though the administrative and environmental workload had increased.

Fiori said he has tried to save money where he could, reducing lawn mowing along the roads, for example. And he manages to sell $3 million worth of timber from the site every year.

But Christopher Payne, a noted nuclear critic at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group in Washington, D.C., called Savannah River a “boondoggle. . . . Sen. Thurmond and the rest of the South Carolina delegation is well-positioned to protect that plant, which is exactly what they are doing.”

Savannah River is not the only nuclear weapons installation drawing such flak. The House Energy and Commerce Committee found that workers at the Rocky Flats nuclear plant near Denver had so much free time that they set up a volleyball court. A committee investigator said supervisors eventually ordered that the games be played inside a top-security area, to avoid giving visitors a bad impression.

*

Even as the Energy Department’s rank and file resists change, one layer of the nation’s nuclear weapons managers is stampeding out of government service: those at the very top, who find little future in a dying industry and have the credentials to go elsewhere.

Thus the Energy Department is fast losing the top scientists who are best positioned to maintain the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons. As they depart, they are frequently leaving no substantial records about the bombs they designed.

The Nuclear Weapons Facilities Safety Board reported last year that “the level of scientific and technical expertise in the (Energy Department) defense nuclear facilities and operations has been declining.”

Conway, the board’s chairman, warned: “A case can be made for the need for greater vigilance now throughout the weapons complex because of increased risk of equipment mishaps in aged facilities, loss of technical expertise through attrition and downsizing and a reduced inclination for young engineers and scientists to get involved in the nuclear weapons field.”

Some of the nation’s leading nuclear weapons contractors are also getting out of the business. AT&T;, duPont and General Electric have recently walked away from Energy Department contracts to run the bomb plants, a tacit vote of no confidence in the agency and a reflection that the contracts pose sizable liability risks.

Former Energy Secretary Watkins, in an acid letter to the GAO this summer, cited a “decline of attentive, committed and skilled leadership among those who have the responsibility for maintaining a safe and credible nuclear weapons posture.”

“A lot of people have left . . . “ said Victor Reese, assistant Energy secretary for the weapons program. “As I’m facing the new mission, which was described as a scientific stewardship program, I’m not sure we might not have gone too far.”

In Reese’s view, the problems posed by the nuclear weapons are unprecedented.

The average nuclear bomb, he says, is good for roughly 30 years before it must be torn down and fully rebuilt. With a stockpile of 6,000 weapons, an average of 200 weapons will have to be replaced or remanufactured every year.

“These things age,” Reese said. “They were not designed to last for a long period of time. It’s like an airplane that is designed for a 10-year life cycle. Now, we expect it to last indefinitely into the future. How long, we don’t know. You’ll never get an opportunity to see if it works, but we’ll expect it to work 10 years, 20 years, 30 years down.”

Failures have occurred in past tests when bombs fizzled, Reese said. Since 1950, the Energy and Defense departments have acknowledged 32 major accidents involving bombs, though none have been catastrophic. The Energy Department has set an official standard that limits the probability of an accidental nuclear detonation to 1 in 1 billion.

Despite the difficult tasks ahead, Reese acknowledged that the Energy Department does not have a comprehensive, formal plan to restructure the industry, although it is making progress in developing such a plan.

Critics are correct when they charge that the nuclear complex is as large today as it was during much of the Cold War, Reese said. But the high costs are justified, he insisted, because many of the agency’s big, old factories--which still are needed--have high fixed costs.

In addition, the agency is dismantling 2,000 bombs per year, as well as storing many thousands of bombs in bunkers.

“You don’t get that for nothing,” he said.

All this is happening just at a time when, in Reese’s view, the nation needs to invest in major new facilities to conduct sophisticated computer simulations of weapons and advanced types of laser testing. These would cost billions of dollars.

Critics such as the NRDC’s Payne and others in the arms control and environmental movements distrust these ideas, saying they betray an intent to perpetuate an unnecessarily large and costly nuclear weapons complex.

Payne argues there is no evidence that nuclear weapons age in unpredictable ways. “We have as much nuclear weapons research as we ever will need,” Payne said. “We don’t need a big, bulky nuclear research Establishment. We can afford to let these people go. We can let technical staffs atrophy.”

The root problem, critics contend, is the Pentagon’s plan to maintain up to 6,000 nuclear warheads.

Experts such as Sidney Drell, the influential physicist who is director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator--a nuclear physics research facility--have argued that a stockpile of 1,000 to 1,500 weapons would provide sufficient deterrence for the future. With that many bombs, the entire nuclear complex could be consolidated to a single site, many experts contend.

As the Cold War was ending in 1989, the Energy Department was in the midst of an ambitious effort to rebuild the nuclear weapons industry--a project of which the $2 billion invested in Savannah River’s K reactor was only a small part.

“The Energy Department was slow to recognize the political changes that were going on in the world,” said Rezendes, the GAO nuclear expert. “As a result they still are coming to grips with what the national nuclear strategy should be.”

Next: Physicists and politicians want to build a multibillion-dollar laser at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Critics call it nuclear pork.

Where the Bombs Are Made

Although the United States quit producing nuclear bombs four years ago and has no plans to resume, the government is spending $4.4 billion this year on nuclear weapons. About 73,000 people work at nuclear weapons plants around the country--41,000 of them maintaining America’s huge nuclear weapons stockpile and most of the rest doing environmental cleanup. Here is a listing of contractor employment at major nuclear weapons installations*:

Name Weapons- Non-weapons- (chief function) Location related jobs related jobs Savannah River S. Carolina 11,514 7,929 (Recycling tritium) Sandia National New Mexico 4,467 4,081 Laboratory (Engineering detonators and triggers) Lawrence Livermore California 3,239 4,105 National Laboratory (Designing bombs) Los Alamos New Mexico 2,987 4,030 National Laboratory (Designing bombs) Nevada test site Nevada 2,907 3,975 (Testing bombs) Rocky Flats (Casting and Colorado 2,768 4,042 machining plutonium) Pantex (Assembling and Texas 2,707 455 disassembling bombs) Kansas City (Producing Missouri 3,824 300 non-nuclear components) Mound (Producing Ohio 910 737 non-nuclear components) Pinellas (Producing Florida 930 184 non-nuclear components) Oakridge Y-12 (processes and Tennessee 4,936 2,000 disposes of uranium) Total 41,629 26,459

Name (chief function) Total Savannah River 19,443 (Recycling tritium) Sandia National 8,548 Laboratory (Engineering detonators and triggers) Lawrence Livermore 7,344 National Laboratory (Designing bombs) Los Alamos 7,017 National Laboratory (Designing bombs) Nevada test site 6,879 (Testing bombs) Rocky Flats (Casting and 6,810 machining plutonium) Pantex (Assembling and 3,162 disassembling bombs) Kansas City (Producing 4,124 non-nuclear components) Mound (Producing 1,647 non-nuclear components) Pinellas (Producing 1,114 non-nuclear components) Oakridge Y-12 (processes and 6,936 disposes of uranium) Total 73,025

* Excludes plants in which the only remaining activity is environmental cleanup, principally Hanford, Wash., and Fernald, Ohio.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy