US President Bill Clinton, making the announcement about six weeks ago, said the supercomputer will cost about $100 million to build and be ready by the end of 1998.
The machine will be built by IBM, in significant collaboration with the US government. The computer, capable of carrying out 1 trillion calculations per second, will be stationed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, one of the three main government nuclear weapon laboratories.
With sophisticated programming, the computer will be able to predict the effects of ageing and corrosion, Mark Bregman, general manager of IBM's RS/6000 server division, was quoted as saying in the Sunday Times, London.
Government scientists will be able to carry out test detonations and monitor the results. With a test ban in place, this will be the most effective means of ensuring that weapons are being properly maintained, he added.
Strategic analysts in Delhi, who were at the forefront of the non-official campaign to block the CTBT at the disarmament conference in Geneva because it would significantly affect national security, said they felt vindicated.
India's position at Geneva was to try and place international arms control deliberations in a disarmament context, pointing out that the US was at the forefront of attempts to refine nuclear weapons through computer simulation even as it sought to bring about a CTBT. Experts point out that US plans to conduct a sub-critical nuclear test in mid-June had still not taken place.
The test was supposed to take place just before the Geneva Conference resumed its session, but now it is not expected before the end of the UN General Assembly session in October.
Close cooperation between the US computer industry and the government is on the anvil. Lawrence Livermore is co-coordinating a $1 billion campaign for a US department of energy project to build even more sophisticated machines, also to be built by IBM, and capable of 10 trillion calculations per second by the year 2004.
US department of energy spokesman Jon Ventura told the London newspaper that according to an Authorisation Bill before the US Congress at the moment, sharing American nuclear weapons stewardship technology with any country, except Britain and France, was prohibited.
Other countries, he added, will have to build their own supercomputers if they wanted access to similar information.
