LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — In secret laboratory vaults in New Mexico and California, the nation's top weapons scientists are busy chronicling the detailed scientific and engineering know-how of America's nuclear bombs--a historic record akin to weapons manuscripts left from the Middle Ages.
The archive, known as the Knowledge Preservation Project, was launched out of growing concern that nuclear weapons skills accumulated during five decades of the Cold War are quickly atrophying.
The black art of nuclear weaponry--handed down from scientist to scientist since World War II--would be lost to history without the archive, leaving the nation unable to maintain in 10 or 20 years its powerful stockpile of nuclear weapons or to restart nuclear arms production, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory say.
"We don't want to push the erase button on our memory and go back to where we were 50 years ago," said John D. Immele, director of nuclear weapons technology at Los Alamos. "You have to have the intellectual capability to respond to future developments. This lets our adversaries know that we still know what to do."
The archive is part of a $40-billion federal program during the next decade to maintain the reliability and safety of the 6,000 to 7,000 nuclear weapons that will form the Defense Department's permanent stockpile.
Ultimately, the archive will include a top-secret computer web linking U.S. weapons laboratories, providing a cornerstone for scientific research crucial to maintaining nuclear forces.
But many arms control advocates are aghast at the project, saying much of the knowledge is better forgotten. The preservation of nuclear skills can only serve to create paranoia that would reignite the arms race in the distant future, they say.
The bitter disagreement over the project reflects a much larger ideological fracture: While arms control advocates think the world is moving toward eliminating nuclear weapons, the Pentagon and the Energy Department are creating a scientific infrastructure that will underpin a permanent nuclear force.
Scope Unprecedented
Working inside a low-slung, concrete-block room monitored by motion detectors and wired with secure communications lines, the archivists at Los Alamos are collecting blueprints, drawings, technical reports, manufacturing records and test data, attempting to record how and why the bombs were built as they were.
