SDA Vol. 4, No. 2
Dear At-a-loss,
In the nineteenth century a new company, called the Wax'N John Company, had invented a new coating that would make all furniture and toilets gleam forever. It was called Nu Clear. (It was the forerunner of Lemon Pledge, without the lemon.) During the testing program of Nu Clear, it was plain that this product was so good that it would drive the company out of business, since no one would ever need cleaning products anymore. So the company stopped Nu Clear testing. But the Nu Clear scientists were very unhappy and wanted to resume it.
They got their chance generations later when new glowing and gleaming substances were discovered in the twentieth century. Cobalt-60 glowed; cesium-137 glowed. These substances gave rise to hopes of eternal cleanup jobs. So the nuclear establishment decided to make these products and to make a mess by testing them. Nuclear testing began in this new form in 1945. Du Pont and Union Carbide and General Electric and Westinghouse took over the nuclear business from the long-since defunct Wax'N John Company.
Seriously though, a nuclear weapons test has never been officially defined. While the nuclear disarmament movement has sought a complete and total halt to all nuclear weapons testing, the nuclear weapons establishment has sought to create as many loopholes, exceptions, and escape clauses to any treaty that might stop nuclear testing. For many years, the argument was that tests of nuclear explosives of up to one kiloton (one thousand tons of TNT equivalent) should be allowed, since they could not be detected remotely, making verification of a test ban difficult. As comprehensive test ban negotiations made progress, new arguments against a CTB have been brought to the fore. Further, ever since the test ban movement of the 1950s, nuclear weapons scientists have been trying to perfect ways to design new weapons without full-scale testing of the actual warhead. (Remember that the very first nuclear weapon used in war, the Hiroshima bomb, was of a gun-type design that had not been tested prior to its wartime use.)
Several methods have been developed to obviate the requirement to test an actual warhead. The initiation of fission reactions in such a way that the reaction stops shortly before or shortly after achieving criticality can be used to mimic the start of a full scale nuclear explosion. Such tests can also be used to produce a slightly supercritical mass -- a growing chain reaction -- for a very short time. This produces small explosive yields (a few pounds of TNT equivalent) that can be contained within an engineered structure (unlike a full-scale explosion of a nuclear warhead). These laboratory events (shall we say) are called hydronuclear tests. They were first developed and used at Los Alamos during the 1958 to 1961 moratorium on nuclear weapons tests that was being observed by both the US and the Soviet Union. Los Alamos conducted the first laboratory hydronuclear test on January 12, 1960.(1)
Hydronuclear tests are tests of nuclear weapons in that they allow nuclear weapons design to be done and to be verified at least partly in the laboratory through a small-scale nuclear explosion. But they are not full-scale tests of all aspects of a nuclear warhead's functioning since they do not involve a full-scale explosion.
Since hydronuclear tests can be used to assist in the design of new nuclear weapons, the discussions on a comprehensive test ban treaty, the achievement of which was a commitment that the nuclear weapons powers made in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, have become complex. The United States weapons laboratories want hydronuclear tests. Other weapons powers believe that this would give an unfair advantage to the U.S., since these are "high-tech" tests and since they would be complemented by sophisticated computer programs and by a laser fusion facility that may be built at Livermore, California. This is called the National Ignition Facility. (Dr. Polly C. Wonk has observed that this facility may be so named because it is going to burn such a big hole in the nation's pocket book.)
The term "hydro" is used in the expression hydronuclear testing because the material being tested behaves like a fluid under the high temperature and pressure conditions of the test.
For more information on nuclear weapons testing and design, see the lead article in this newsletter,
or IEER's report, The Nuclear Safety Smokescreen.
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
Comments to Outreach Coordinator: ieer@ieer.org
Takoma Park, Maryland, USA
Last updated: August, 1996
1 Thorn, Robert N. and Donald R. Westervelt, "Hydronuclear Experiments," LA-10902-MS UC-2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, February 1987.