WASHINGTON - The Bush administration announced its intention yesterday to modernize and sharply reduce the size of the nation's aging nuclear weapons program by closing or abandoning 600 buildings at facilities across the country and gradually reducing the associated workforce by at least 7,200.
The plan, which requires congressional approval, would substantially shrink operations at some of the most storied sites for bomb-building during the Cold War, including a Tennessee plant that enriched uranium for thousands of nuclear arms over the past half-century and a California laboratory where the hydrogen bomb was refined.
But it would also leave key parts of the US nuclear weapons program intact, including research centers where scientists study the effects of nuclear blasts, monitor how existing warheads are faring, and examine potential designs for warheads. Nearly 30,000 people would still be employed in nuclear arms work.
"Today's nuclear weapons complex needs to move from the outdated, Cold War complex into one that is smaller, safer, and less expensive," Thomas D’Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the weapons program, told reporters yesterday.
The reductions are an outgrowth of Energy Department studies that began in the mid-1990s. At first, 12 weapons-related sites were reduced to eight. After the administration signed a nuclear reduction treaty with Moscow in 2003, officials began looking at how to resize the production complex.
Post-2001 worries about terrorism provided a further impetus to consolidate activities and shrink the acreage of key sites, so the Energy Department could better defend them.
D'Agostino also announced that President Bush has approved a 15 percent cut in active US nuclear weapons by 2012.
Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists called that "a bookkeeping event," because the number of warheads deployed will not be much reduced.
