Concerns over NTS tests ‘premature’

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

The CNN video was ominous. It showed an explosion of dust traveling rapidly from an arid, underground blast - and was being used Monday as a background clip on TV to illustrate the grim announcement by North Korea that it had detonated a nuclear bomb.

But a caption on the screen noted that the video wasn't of the North Korean blast. It showed an underground blast at the U.S. government's own site for exploding nuclear weapons - the Nevada Test Site in Nye County. The video was taken more than a decade ago, before the United States unilaterally announced an end to nuclear testing in 1992.

In its way, the video provided a nexus of what is unfolding in North Korea and what some people worry is still in store for the Nevada Test Site. Will North Korea's decision to ignore international opprobrium and test a bomb lead to renewed nuclear activities just an hour's drive northwest of Las Vegas?

For some, the North Korean test sparked memories of the military's since-sidelined plans to detonate 700 tons of conventional explosive at the Test Site last summer.

That test, dubbed Divine Strake, was indefinitely postponed after environmental, peace and American Indian groups protested. Critics feared that the test, designed to simulate a blast to an underground structure, could be used to develop a small nuclear weapon for use as a "bunker buster."

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the military agency that had planned the test, emphasized repeatedly that Divine Strake would not contain any nuclear components. However, the government agreed that the test could lead to the development of nuclear or conventional weapons.

The agency declined comment on the North Korean test Tuesday, and referred only to a written release from August, saying that it was "assessing other possible sites for the experiment."

The earliest the experiment could be conducted would be several months into 2007, the federal agency said.

Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, a Nevada-based group that opposed Divine Strake, said the North Korean blast could give the government a political wedge to expand activities at the Test Site.

"There is plenty of concern," Johnson said.

"Is this going to bring back Divine Strake? I hope not. I think we have to be really vigilant now and make sure none of that is happening at the Test Site ... We are going to be monitoring it very closely."

Hans Kristensen, project director for the Nuclear Information Project at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, said North Korea's test "will definitely reaffirm the thoughts and analysis that has gone into creating experiments like Divine Strake It will affect the commitment to those kinds of weaponeering projects."

He said he worried that the design and building of nuclear weapons might be rhetorically promoted because of the North Korean test. But such a push would be misguided, he said, since the United States already has had advanced nuclear weapons targeting North Korea for decades.

More atomic weapons or more nuclear testing would not likely intimidate the Pyongyang regime, Kristensen said. And U.S. intelligence has reported that North Korea has had nuclear capability for perhaps a decade in any event.

"If there are cool heads in the administration, they need to step back and think about what this means," he said. "Is this (the North Korea blast) fundamentally changing anything? I don't think so."

Government officials suggested that concerns about new or resumed activity at the Test Site would be premature.

"We're the same today as we were yesterday, as we were last week, as we were last month," said Darwin Morgan, a spokesman for the Energy Department, which runs the Test Site and oversees nuclear research programs. "Nothing has changed."

He said the research activities at the Test Site are programmed 24 months in advance. The North Korean development "does not mean anything as far as research."