Underground facilities are used extensively by many nations to conceal and protect strategic military functions and weapons' stockpiles. Because of their depth and hardened status, however, many of these strategic hard and deeply buried targets could only be put at risk by conventional or nuclear earth penetrating weapons (EPW). Recently, an engineering feasibility study, the robust nuclear earth penetrator program, was started by DOE and DOD to determine if a more effective EPW could be designed using major components of existing nuclear weapons. This activity has created some controversy about, among other things, the level of collateral damage that would ensue if such a weapon were used. To help clarify this issue, the Congress, in P.L. 107-314, directed the Secretary of Defense to request from the NRC a study of the anticipated health and environmental effects of nuclear earth-penetrators and other weapons and the effect of both conventional and nuclear weapons against the storage of biological and chemical weapons. This report provides the results of those analyses. Based on detailed numerical calculations, the report presents a series of findings comparing the effectiveness and expected collateral damage of nuclear EPW and surface nuclear weapons under a variety of conditions.

"Nuclear weapons, since their conception, have been the subject of secrecy. In the months after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American scientific establishment, the American government, and the American public all wrestled with what was called the "problem of secrecy," wondering not only whether secrecy was appropriate and effective as a means of controlling this new technology but also whether it was compatible with the country's core values. Out of a messy context of propaganda, confusion, spy scares, and the grave counsel of competing groups of scientists, what historian Alex Wellerstein calls a "new regime of secrecy" was put into place. It was unlike any other previous or since. Nuclear secrets were given their own unique legal designation in American law ("restricted data"), one that operates differently than all other forms of national security classification and exists to this day. Drawing on massive amounts of declassified files, including records released by the government for the first time at the author's request, Restricted Data is a narrative account of nuclear secrecy and the tensions and uncertainty that built as the Cold War continued. In the US, both science and democracy are pitted against nuclear secrecy, and this makes its history uniquely compelling and timely"--

Prepared for U.S. Atomic energy comm.

Originally published in 1983, this book presents both the technical and political information necessary to evaluate the emerging threat to world security posed by recent advances in uranium enrichment technology. Uranium enrichment has played a relatively quiet but important role in the history of efforts by a number of nations to acquire nuclear weapons and by a number of others to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For many years the uranium enrichment industry was dominated by a single method, gaseous diffusion, which was technically complex, extremely capital-intensive, and highly inefficient in its use of energy. As long as this remained true, only the richest and most technically advanced nations could afford to pursue the enrichment route to weapon acquisition. But during the 1970s this situation changed dramatically. Several new and far more accessible enrichment techniques were developed, stimulated largely by the anticipation of a rapidly growing demand for enrichment services by the world-wide nuclear power industry. This proliferation of new techniques, coupled with the subsequent contraction of the commercial market for enriched uranium, has created a situation in which uranium enrichment technology might well become the most important contributor to further nuclear weapon proliferation. Some of the issues addressed in this book are: A technical analysis of the most important enrichment techniques in a form that is relevant to analysis of proliferation risks; A detailed projection of the world demand for uranium enrichment services; A summary and critique of present institutional non-proliferation arrangements in the world enrichment industry, and An identification of the states most likely to pursue the enrichment route to acquisition of nuclear weapons.

A handbook for scholars, students, policy makers, journalists, and peace and environmental activists.A handbook for scholars, students, policy makers, journalists, and peace and environmental activists, Nuclear Wastelands provides concise histories of the development of nuclear weapons programs of every declared and de facto nuclear weapons power, as well as detailed surveys of the health and environmental effects of this development both in these countries and in non-nuclear nations involved in nuclear weapons testing and uranium mining. Among the more obvious but largely deferred costs of the Cold War are those related to the management of radioactive waste. The world is burdened with thousands of unwanted nuclear devices and mounting surpluses of weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium. In addition, the process of weapons production and testing has left many lands, aquifers, rivers, lakes, and seas contaminated by a multitude of weapons-related poisons. This book follows the production process step by step and country by country from uranium mining to the final assembly and storage of weapons, analyzing the potential hazards of each step and compiling the most complete information available on the actual health and environmental effects, in each country involved. Nuclear Wastelands includes a wealth of information that has only recently come to light, particularly on the nuclear weapons program of the former Soviet Union. It also features critical analyses of official public communications concerning the health and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons production, bringing to light governmental secrecy and outright deception that have led to the subversion of democratic principles, and have camouflaged the damage done to the very people and lands the weapons were meant to safeguard.