WASHINGTON, July 15: The United States and France have embarked on research which could result in new fusion weapons, violating the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and creating proliferation dangers even greater than existing ones, according to a report released here today."Pure fusion weapons have long been a dream for nuclear weapons designers. Present-day thermonuclear weapons need plutonium or highly enriched uranium to set off the hydrogen-bomb part," institute for energy and environmental research (IEER) president and main author of the report Arjun Makhijani said in his report."But pure fusion weapons would not need either of these fissile materials. They would produce little fallout. They could be made very small or very huge," he added.Currently, the acquisition of highly enriched uranium or plutonium is the main obstacle to proliferation. By contrast, deuterium and tritium, the forms of hydrogen used in fusion research and weapons, are less difficult to make, the report said.Besidesmaking verification more difficult, fusion weapons would likely lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use because of their potentially smaller size and lack of fallout, said the report."Major advances in substituting the fission trigger by non-nuclear components need to be made before the scientific feasibility of pure fusion weapons can be established," said co-author of the report Hisham Zerriffi."Until now the hurdles have been too huge to overcome. But experiments are now being conducted and devices are now under construction that may achieve explosive thermonuclear ignition without fissile materials," he said.The current and planned US, French and Russian laboratory nuclear testing programmes include the national ignition facility under construction at the Lawrence Livermore national laboratory in California and a similar facility near Bordeaux in France, called laser mega joule (LMJ).They are both designed to use powerful lasers to achieve thermonuclear explosions in the laboratory.Besides these, there are US-Russian experiments at the Los Alamos national laboratory near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the "wire-array-z-pinch" at the Sandia national laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These machines, Zerriffi said, are complimentary.The report recommends that questionable research and construction be stopped and that at the next meeting to review the CTBT likely in September 1999, an official interpretation be given of which activities are banned.Most fusion research, including all non-explosive magnetic fusion research for energy generation and laser fusion experiments in machines that cnanot achieve ignition, would be permitted under the CTBT and could continue unaffected by the bans proposed in the report.
