From the dawn of the atomic age, the factories that build nuclear weapons have been shielded from outside scrutiny. The people that run the nuclear weapons plants have been free to engage in their ventures with little public awareness or accountability. This summer, the shroud of secrecy around nuclear weapons production began to be removed, and what was exposed has shocked and embarrassed even the industry's most zealous supporters.
An astounding series of recent events has revealed that the agency responsible for the production of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has engaged in gross misconduct that has endangered the safety and health of those living and working around nuclear weapons plants.
The most dramatic example of the unveiling of the Department of Energy's wrongdoing took place in early June at the nuclear weapons trigger factory at Rocky Flats, Colorado. In an unprecedented surprise raid under the code name "Operation Desert Glow," 70 agents from the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) swooped in on the Rocky Flats plant to uncover evidence of illegal waste disposal practices and a massive public cover-up.
The investigation of Rocky Flats mismanagement took a bizarre twist last December when the FBI sent a surveillance plane to gather data about the operations of the weapons plant, a rare example of an intelligence agency spying on another department of the federal government. Following the June 6 raid, the FBI charged that the Energy Department, along with the company that operates Rocky Flats, Rockwell International, had "falsely certified" the plant's compliance with environmental and safety regulations and concealed Rocky Flats' "serious contamination."
In addition, the FBI said the weapons plant "criminally violated the Clean Water Act" with its dangerous waste disposal practices, and charged DOE and Rockwell with lying to cover up its illegal conduct. Such dubious practices at the facility have been under DOE investigation for a number of years, but despite findings that "some Rocky Flats waste facilities were 'patently illegal,'" the Energy Department awarded Rockwell bonuses of more than $13 million in 1987 and 1988 for meeting production targets.
The scandal at Rocky Flats has caused several collisions between the federal government and state and local authorities. The Denver suburb of Broomfield, Colorado constructed a ditch to divert streams contaminated by the plant's errant waste, even though the project was forbidden by the EPA. "As far as we're concerned, they're lying to us," the city public works director said, "and we're going to do what we have to do to protect our city."
There have been examples of illicit and hazardous activity throughout the Energy Department's 12-state weapons production system. In a de facto admission of government guilt, the DOE agreed in late June to pay $73 million to settle a lawsuit brought by neighbors of the nuclear weapons plant in Fernald, Ohio, a facility operated "with willful and wanton disregard to the health and safety of offsite residents," according to an attorney for the plaintiffs.
The operator of the Fernald facility shut down the plant in July because it could not be run safely. The halting of uranium production there occurred just before a group of DOE inspectors was to descend on the beleaguered facility for an investigation.
ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS FOR DECADES have pointed to government impropriety regarding health and safety at nuclear plants, the most recent example being a Sierra Club lawsuit filed earlier this year charging Rocky Flats operators with the same criminal misconduct that is now being investigated by the FBI -- although the environmental organization did not have the ability to gather evidence with spy planes or surprise raids. The new element in the current charges is their source: the highest levels of the federal government. Even the Energy Department's new secretary, James Watkins, admitted that a culture of mismanagement and ineptitude has pervaded the agency.
The exposure of hazardous and deceitful actions at Rocky Flats and Fernald has reinvigorated the call for independent oversight of DOE nuclear weapons activities. Congress recently created a board to oversee the nuclear weapons complex, but all the members nominated by President Bush come out of the industry. The cozy relationship between watchers and watched promises only that the conflicting interests that run the weapons business will continue unrestrained.
However, even properly independent oversight of the nuclear production industry misses the main point. Weapons production, like the arms race itself, is not something that is merely in need of proper management. Rather, the nuclear factories should be shut down, and the arms they produce abolished.
And now is an opportune time to do so. For the first time in the nuclear age, this country has no operating reactors that produce the fuel for nuclear bombs, because all such plants have been shut down for environmental and safety reasons. The Soviet Union has given indications that it would be open to a treaty banning such facilities, and recently announced it would close five of its military production reactors.
The Energy Department hopes to spend hundreds of millions of dollars for the construction of new facilities to produce tritium and plutonium for nuclear weapons. Energy secretary Watkins, in the wake of the fiasco at Rocky Flats and other safety violations at nuclear facilities, agreed to delay construction of the new weapons-grade plutonium plant near Idaho Falls.
Congress should make this moratorium permanent and just say no to any further funds for new weapons facilities. Instead of replacing the factories that helped fuel the hot part of the Cold War, the country should take advantage of the unique opportunity presented by the aging of technology and a transformed political environment.
The decision to end the arms race is a political one, but throughout the nuclear age technology has driven such political decisions. Now, for once, technology -- and its limitations -- can be a driving force in the right direction. The U.S. weapons production complex -- and its Soviet counterpart -- is old, obsolete, and unsafe. Instead of using this as an excuse to begin a new, expensive, and dangerous round of nuclear weapons production, we should take the opening that circumstance provides and move toward ending a shameful chapter of human civilization.
Jim Rice is editor of Sojourners.
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