N-weapon use ‘likely within 15 years’

Press, 16 May 1985, Page 19

N-weapon use ‘likely within 15 years’

NZPA-Reuter Washington

A United States physicist who helped build the atomic bombs that devastated Japan says that a nuclear weapon is likely to be used again within 15 years. Dr Bernard Feld, a member of the Los Alamos team that built the first atomic bomb in 1945, told Congress that a proliferation of nuclear-capable nations and the continued development of ever-more sophisticated weapons “makes it hard to maintain the thesis that these are non-usable weapons.” The fact that the world had survived 40 years since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki without another nuclear disaster gave no guarantees for the future, he said.

The indications were that the dangers of nuclear weapons-use were increasing, year by year to the extent that it is was likely that a nuclear weapon will again be used in a conflict before the end of this century, said Dr Feld. Testifying at a hearing marking the fortieth anniversary of the start of the nuclear age, Dr Feld said he believed a direct United States-Soviet nuclear con-

frontation was unlikely.

But he said the time was fast approaching when many other nations and international terrorist groups could produce crude nuclear bombs.

He questioned whether the 1968 nuclear non-prolif-eration treaty could survive its scheduled review later this year. Before the hearing, Dr Feld and other scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project which developed the United States bomb told reporters that the arms race between the United States and Soviet Union had turned out about 100 times worse than their most pessimistic forecasts in 1945.

After time spent reviewing the last four decades, members of the pro-disar-mament Federation of American Scientists and the bulletin of the atomic scientists said the pessimists had foreseen hundreds of nuclear weapons instead of the estimated 50,000 that now exist.

They said in a statement that new offensive weapons and President Reagan’s “star wars” space-based strategic defence plan threatened greater instability.