Testers And Protesters

By Michael Riley/Mercury, Nevada

As a senior drilling inspector at the Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site, Rufus Moore usually pays scant attention to the antinuclear protesters who often appear at the perimeter of the top-secret patch of desert 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The 1,350-sq.-mi. site in the Nellis Range has absorbed hundreds of underground blasts as the U.S. has fine-tuned its nuclear arsenal. For Moore, 54, a cigar-chomping veteran of hundreds of such tests, nuclear deterrence and superpower peace depend on the results. "The minute we stop testing, we're in trouble," he says. "I'm not just saying this because it's my livelihood. Something is being learned every time there's a test."

Last Thursday, however, Moore had to thread his car through the largest demonstration ever held at the test site. Nearly 2,000 people rode buses and cars into the desert to protest the first U.S. nuclear explosion of the year $ and the 25th since the Soviet Union unilaterally declared a moratorium on nuclear testing in August 1985. Nye County authorities arrested 438 people, including Astronomer Carl Sagan, Antiwar Activist Daniel Ellsberg, Actor Martin Sheen and Singer Kris Kristofferson, for trespassing on Department of Energy property. Said Sagan of the testing program: "We've built a kind of doomsday machine, which threatens certain global civilizations and possibly even the human species."

The demonstration came too late. To foil the activists, the nuclear test, code-named Hazebrook, was set off Tuesday, two days ahead of schedule. The subsequent protest was not confined to Nevada. On Capitol Hill, the House Democratic caucus proposed that Congress cut off funds for further U.S. nuclear tests as long as the Soviet Union adheres to its testing moratorium. The House Democrats called on President Reagan to negotiate with the Soviets to achieve a "reciprocal, simultaneous and verifiable" test ban. The Soviets, meanwhile, announced they would soon resume testing in response to the U.S. action.

The Administration claims that continued testing enhances deterrence by ensuring the safety and reliability of the nearly 13,000 warheads in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Opponents contend that the tests fuel the arms race by leading to new weapons, particularly for the space-based Strategic Defense Initiative.

The controversy over SDI intensified last week. At a White House meeting, President Reagan and his top advisers came close to adopting a Pentagon- sponsored position on SDI testing that the Soviets as well as many congressional and allied leaders insist would be a violation of the 1972 treaty limiting antiballistic missiles (ABMS). The combination of resumed testing and what would amount to a scrapping of the ABM treaty could touch off more protests against Administration policy, both at home and abroad.

Moore, who has worked at the Nevada Test Site since 1961, views the protesters as "sincere in their feeling, but they don't understand the big picture." When he drives from his home in nearby Pahrump to the heavily guarded site, Moore enters a domain pockmarked with gaping craters, a lunar- like legacy of blasts thousands of feet underground. Many of Moore's 5,500 colleagues labor in cavernous horizontal tunnels that are bored into the granite mesas. To the worker, the test site represents not a nuclear underworld but a well-paid job. "You get used to it, feels like home," says Don Maxwell, 44, an underground surveyor. "Nice and warm in the winter, cool in the summer."

Maxwell spends eight hours a day in P Tunnel, a shaft resembling a semifinished subway excavation 1,300 feet below Rainier Mesa. A narrow-gauge electric locomotive takes workers into the tunnel, which ends in a rocky cul- de-sac 1 1/2 miles away. Bare light bulbs dangle overhead, and the brilliant flare of a welder's torch flickers on the rock walls. Labyrinthine cables coil along the floor, and the tunnel reverberates with a sometimes deafening din, punctuated by shouts and horn blasts. In an eerily normal scene near ground zero, a surveyor chats on a Touch-Tone wall phone. The atmosphere is that of an underground lab rather than a staging ground for Armageddon.

A future test in P Tunnel will send a blast of radiation through a vacuum- tight steel casing to simulate a nuclear explosion 300 miles deep in space. Parts of the tunnel will collapse, and tons of irradiated rock will hurtle through the pipe, but the explosion should remain contained, thanks to seven giant doors. The last barrier, a mile distant, is a gas-sealed door made to withstand temperatures of 500 degrees F and pressures of 500 lbs. per sq. in.

For decades Pahrump (pop. 6,000) has relied on the test site to provide steady work. Salaries average $41,000, enough to pay for new homes, sports cars and vacation trips. To residents, the nuclear age has brought the good life; antinuke talk of "economic reconversion" is considered a euphemism for unemployment in Nye County. In the Nevada desert, the protesters are a source of resentment and frustration to the workers. Yet testers and protesters alike profess the same goal: safety in a nuclear age. Says Moore: "Anyone seeing the shots as I have, and the awesome power they have, must realize a person would have to be crazy to ever pull that trigger." Both sides must hope he is right.