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U.S. Scientists Redesigning Nuclear Weapons
The U.S. Congress approved funding in November to begin designing more reliable, longer lasting nuclear warheads, the New York Times reported today (see GSN, Feb. 4). The $9 million Reliable Replacement Warhead program could allow for cuts in the arsenal and lower maintenance costs, officials said. Warhead designers at Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories are expected to produce complete designs in the next 5 to 10 years. The approximately 10,000 nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal had a life expectancy of about 15 years when they were built, officials said; the average age of a U.S. warhead is now about 20 years. “Our labs have been thinking about this problem off and on for 20 years,” said John Harvey, director of policy planning at the National Nuclear Security Administration. “The goal is to see if we can make smarter, cheaper and more easily manufactured designs that we can readily certify as safe and reliable for the indefinite future — and do so without nuclear testing.” Representative Dave Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, said Thursday the program could allow for significant reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, according to the Times. “A more robust replacement warhead, from a reliability standpoint will provide a hedge that is currently provided by retaining thousands of unnecessary warheads,” he said. Arms control advocates however, said the program was unnecessary and potentially dangerous. “The existing stockpile is safe and reliable by all standards,” said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association. “So to design a new warhead that is even more robust is a redundant activity that could be a pretext for designing a weapon that has a new military mission.” New warhead designs might have to undergo underground testing for reliability, ending the long-standing U.S. moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and potentially spurring other nations to conduct their own tests, critics argue. It is too early to assess the program’s potential pros and cons, said Robert Norris, a nuclear expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These are big decisions,” Norris said. “They could backfire and come back to haunt us” (William Broad, New York Times, Feb. 7).
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