Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
Keeping It Secret
Bases Busy In Post-Cold War Era
European Stars And Stripes August 6, 1998 Pg. 1
By Thomas Hargrove, Scripps Howard News Service
The underground installations, ultra-secure manufacturing plants and
once-secret laboratories America needed to wage the Cold War are still
intact despite federal
downsizing policies that have gutted many other military and civilian
programs.
During its first five years, the Clinton administration increased the staff
at the massive Cheyenne Mountain Air Force and Army complex in the Rocky
Mountains of
Colorado. That famous underground vault - where thousands of military
strategists and technicians were, and still are, prepared to fight World War
III - is
undergoing a $1.7 billion renovation to improve its computer systems that
track missiles and orbiting space vehicles.
Nearly as healthy are the Department of Energy installations still used to
assemble, refurbish and maintain the estimated 10,000 warheads in the United
States'
nuclear stockpile. And more hale than ever are the four major national
laboratories that discovered atomic fission, the much more destructive
nuclear fusion and the
means to develop them into history's most dangerous weapons.
"It's like the sorcerer's apprentice," said John Pike, director of the Space
Policy Project for the Federation of American Scientists. "We created this
infrastructure
originally to deal with Hitler half a century ago, switched it over to deal
with the Soviets - and now we can't turn it off."
A Scripps Howard News Service study of federal civilian pay-roll records at
10 of these facilities found that employment at these institutions has
declined about 8.8
percent during the Clinton administration. That's only about half of the
manpower reductions made throughout the military and in the rest of the
civilian government.
The so-called "peace dividend" predicted by former President Bush has come
in modest drabs to the Cold War's high-technology infrastructure under
Clinton.
The 10 military bases, laboratories and production facilities in the Scripps
Howard study had a total civilian work force of 27,627 full- and part-time
employees in
1992. They still maintained 25,191 workers in 1997.
But taxpayers received little benefit from these cuts because many of the
jobs that remained are among the highest paid in the federal government. The
study found
that the total payroll at these 10 facilities grew during this five-year
period from $994.5 million to $1.14 billion, or a 15 per-cent rise.
Only one facility, the White Sands Missile Testing Range in New Mexico,
experienced a modest decline in civilian payroll costs.
Total employment at Cheyenne Mountain rose by 12 civilian jobs during this
period, increasing from 6,646 workers in 1992 to 6,658 as of Sept. 30 last
year. This
small increase makes the vast underground complex one of the few U.S.
military bases to increase in size during the 1990s.
"I'm not surprised by that. Some people have the idea that Cheyenne Mountain
is an anachronistic, Cold War structure," said Maj. Mike Birmingham, an Army
spokesman for the Colorado base.
"But we still have the air sovereignty mission for Canada and the United
States and all of the other missions we originally started with. All that
has happened is that
we have added more missions." Birmingham said the base still watches for the
launch of any high-altitude missile system anywhere in the world, and
monitored Iran's
launch of an intermediate-range ballistic weapon last month.
"Missile warning is as much a worry today as it ever was - not the thought
of 10,000 missiles coming all at once, but the thought of a rogue nation
launching one or
two," he said.
The center also tracks more than 8,500 objects in earth orbit to warn manned
space flights of possible collision threats, and assists the Justice
Department and U.S.
Customs in illegal drug interdiction programs by trying to track aircraft
suspected of carrying narcotics.
In addition, Cheyenne Mountain operates military communication and
navigation satellites that have become vital to Western armies.
"Space support basically allowed U.S. forces to perform that famous 'left
hook' operation (during the Persian Gulf War). The Iraqis assumed no one
could navigate
that well in the desert," Birmingham said.
Pike said he has no criticisms for the continuing work of the Colorado
facility, or its expensive upgrade. The missions of Cheyenne Mountain are
necessary, he said,
but less certain are the justifications for dozens of other Cold War
facilities still in full operation.
The Scripps Howard manpower study found that the huge Department of Energy
research facilities Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Argonne
National
Laboratory near Chicago, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern
California and New Mexico's Los Alamos - have survived despite White House
downsizing policies.
These facilities were privatized decades ago and are operation centers for
commercial research contractors.
Even so, Department of Energy employees who remain to monitor the work
performed at the labs have suffered only modest reductions in force,
dropping from
1,961 federal workers in 1992 to 1,615 employees last year.
The overall employment at these laboratories is much, much larger. Only 77
workers at Los Alamos, N.M., are directly employed by the Department of
Energy. But
the vast lab facility managed by the University of California employs about
10,000 non-government workers.
The overall contract work at these facilities grew as the labs conducted
increasingly diverse research into basic physics with applications for
industry and other
nondefense government agen-cies.
But their original mission of designing nuclear warheads apparently also has
not suffered despite international agreements like the Comprehensive Test
Ban Treaty.
"The labs have been growing quite a bit. The Cold War is over, but we are
spending more money on this stuff now than ever," said Jeff Moag, a
researcher for the
Washington-based National Security News Service.
"Because of the test ban treaty, these labs have to ensure the reliability
of the nuclear arsenal without ever exploding a warhead, so they must model
nuclear
explosions on computer. That takes thousands and thousands of brilliant
minds."
The arms race with Russia is, officially, over. But the construction,
assembly and development facilities that built the warheads and test the
delivery systems continue
with slightly reduced staffs.
Total employment declined by 8 percent at the Savannah River Site in South
Carolina, which produces bomb-grade uranium; the Pantex plant in Texas,
which
assembles warheads; the Redstone Arsenal complex in Alabama, which produced
Cold War missile systems and continues to design weapons for the U.S. Army;
and the several secured facilities scattered across the Nellis Air Force
Bombing range in southern Nevada, home of the Nevada Test Site.
These four groups of facilities employed 14,182 civilian workers in 1992 and
13,045 as of last year.
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