Las Vegan to advise DOE chief

Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2001 | 11:11 a.m.

A Las Vegas nuclear weapons expert said today that the United States could one day conduct limited nuclear weapons experiments at the Nevada Test Site, where such underground explosions have been banned since 1992.

From Nevada Test Site miner to presidential adviser, Troy Wade of Las Vegas has spent his professional life as a Cold Warrior in the nuclear age. He was appointed to President-elect George W. Bush's transition team to advise the new energy secretary on Tuesday.

The announcement of Spencer Abraham to head the Department of Energy surprised Wade and others. "We had heard numerous names for the position," he said. While Abraham's position on nuclear weapons is unclear, he has strong feelings about ridding the nation of its nuclear waste, Troy said. Abraham has backed a high-level nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

At one time the former senator wanted to get rid of the DOE, Wade recalled, "because he considered the agency had failed at managing nuclear waste."

Wade's expertise is nuclear weapons, and he believes some experiments could be conducted 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, if necessary.

Wade, who has been a consultant on nuclear defense since leaving the DOE in 1989, said that if a major problem occurred in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, experiments could be done at the Test Site.

"If we found a major problem in our own weapons system, we'd have to fix it," Wade said, adding, "I don't think we'll ever need a sustained underground test program like we had for many years."

More than 1,000 nuclear warheads exploded above and below the desert at the Test Site from 1951 until 1992, when then-President George Bush called a halt to the experiments. President Clinton has continued the ban, allowing only subcritical tests, or explosions that do not sustain a nuclear reaction, to occur.

Wade has spent more than 40 years working on nuclear weapons. He began in the 1950s as a miner drilling tunnels and holes for nuclear experiments.

As Ronald Reagan's defense chief in the Department of Energy, Wade was part of the U.S. team that conducted the joint verification nuclear weapons experiments on both sides of the Iron Curtain in 1988. It was an exchange of the best Russian and U.S. scientific minds, he said.

"That was one of our biggest accomplishments at the time," Wade said, recalling the U.S.-Soviet tensions at the height of the Cold War. "We were all very surprised to see Russians at the Test Site and Americans at Kazakstan."

Wade on Monday will join as many as 30 others on the transition team to discuss energy policy.