U.S. Conducts 1st Subcritical Nuclear Test Under Obama

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The United States conducted a subcritical nuclear test Sept. 15 in a Nevada underground test site, marking the first such experiment since President Barack Obama took office in January 2009, the U.S. Energy Department said Tuesday.

The experiment, which did not entail a chain reaction that would create a nuclear explosion, was the 24th subcritical test the country has conducted since 1997, and the first one since August 2006 under the administration of President George W. Bush.

Anti-nuke groups have blasted subcritical tests for going against the spirit of the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty on nuclear arms. Washington has not ratified it and says it does not prohibit nuclear experiments that do not accompany nuclear explosions.

The United States suspended underground nuclear explosion tests in 1992.

The National Nuclear Security Administration under the Energy Department defended the latest test as necessary to obtain data to maintain the reliability of the U.S nuclear arsenal and ensure its safety from the standpoint of safe storage.

The test, dubbed Bacchus, was conducted at a vault some 300 meters below the earth's surface by scientists from the New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory, known for coordinating the wartime Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapon, the NNSA said.

The scientists bombarded plutonium with conventional explosives to see how the substance reacted without hiking the quantity of the substance to critical mass, the point at which a self-sustaining nuclear chain fission reaction occurs, and the test was a success, it said.

Bacchus is the first of three planned subcritical tests, with the remaining two to take place in the first and second quarters of the U.S. fiscal year from October 2010 through September 2011.

Washington has argued that subcritical tests are not banned under the CTBT on the grounds that they do not create a nuclear explosion.

The Obama administration has adopted a policy of maintaining its nuclear arsenal as long as nuclear weapons exist in the world while calling for nuclear disarmament. Obama proposed ''a world without nuclear weapons'' in his speech in Prague in 2009.