Troy Wade, a Reagan-era assistant secretary of energy for defense programs and a fixture for decades at what is now called the Nevada National Security Site, died Jan. 16 at his home in Nevada, according to local media and the site. He was 87.
Scott Wade, Troy’s son, confirmed his father’s death to the local Las Vegas Review-Journal, which did not report a cause of death.
According to an obituary prepared by the Nevada National Security Site, dated Jan. 19 and provided to the Exchange Monitor this week, Wade joined what would become the Nevada Test Site in 1958 as a mining supervisor after earlier dropping out of the University of Colorado to mine uranium.
At the test site, Wade, who never finished his engineering degree, held a series of jobs, working as a high explosives technician for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a nuclear safety officer for the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Operations Office among others, according to the site.
In 1981, Wade joined the Ronald Reagan administration as principal deputy assistant secretary of energy for defense programs in Washington, helping to supervise the agency’s nuclear-weapons organization, which in those days did not so strictly differentiate between weapons production and environmental cleanup associated with it.
After his first stint in Washington, Wade became the director of the Idaho National Laboratory before returning to D.C. in 1987 for a promotion to assistant secretary of energy for defense programs. He left DOE in 1990 and during his retirement helped found the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, among other things.
During his time in Washington, Wade advocated for both the continued production of reliable nuclear weapons and materials and a better-organized, better-funded approach to dealing with the staggering environmental consequences of nuclear-weapon manufacturing.
In March 1988, Wade, then the point man in Washington for the civilian nuclear weapons complex, returned to Idaho to stump for the Special Isotope Separation project — in vain, it turned out.
“It is imperative that this nation not leave a legacy of old facilities upon which our successors and our children must rely for their security,” Wade said during a public meeting in Boise that day, part of a required environmental review for the project.
In 1991, not long after Wade left the DOE, the George H.W. Bush administration canceled the Special Isotope Separation project, which would have turned fuel-grade plutonium into weapons-grade plutonium: something proponents such as Wade said was a sensible hedge in an era where defense reactors were either shut down or candidates for retirement.
Wade also defended DOE’s efforts to clean up after the Cold War arms race, strategically targeting influential senators in a winter letter-writing campaign from DOE headquarters and later repeating his message for the record in a January 1989 hearing of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.
At the hearing, Wade told the chair, Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), that “little recognition has been given to the environmental accomplishments of this past decade,” and that while DOE had not “moved rapidly enough, I believe we’re on the right track now.”
Even many years after he retired from DOE, Wade remained a spokesman of sorts for the weapons program, appearing at the behest of a U.S. Senator to brief lawmakers, including a future President, about the ramifications of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate debated hotly but never ratified.
In October 1999, testifying alongside witnesses including Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Wade told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — and its ranking member, then-Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) — that stowing nukes away and hoping they would work later if needed was like demanding near-total reliability from a local ambulance that nobody was allowed to fire up unless someone needed a ride to the hospital.
“A patently absurd premise,” Wade said at the hearing, held seven years after the last full-up explosive test at Nevada and right at the height of the national debate over the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty the Clinton administration was pushing at the time.
A career cold warrior who said he had personally witnessed “the awesome force of an atmospheric nuclear test,” Wade opposed the test-ban treaty, calling it “dangerous.”
Wade also spoke in lukewarm terms about the stockpile stewardship program, the shape of which had largely come into focus by 1999.
To the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Wade said he supported stockpile stewardship at least as a means to one end, saying it was good for developing lots of supercomputing power at nuclear weapons labs but no substitute for explosive testing.
Stockpile stewardship was fine for a weapon whose design and construction would never change but a “crap shoot” for any other device, Wade told the committee.
