Task Force Urges U.S. to Adopt New Nuclear Weapons “Family”

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States should immediately begin efforts to produce a new “family” of nuclear weapons to replace the current U.S. arsenal, according to an Energy Department-commissioned task force report released Wednesday (see GSN, July 1).

Two major aims, it says, are to develop safer, more reliable nuclear warheads than the existing Cold War-designed models, and to revamp the U.S. nuclear weapons complex to make it more “robust” and “responsive” — meaning to improve the U.S. ability to more quickly produce new or upgraded nuclear weapons.

The task force has in mind beginning design work on the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, which was created by Congress last year, having been proposed by a key subcommittee chairman, Representative Dave Hobson (R-Ohio).

“To develop the sustainable stockpile of the future, the Task Force recommends the immediate initiation of the modernization of the stockpile through the design of the RRW. This should lead to a family of modern nuclear weapons,” the report says.

The report also recommends building a new, centralized nuclear weapons production facility for producing and dismantling all nuclear weapons.

The department’s National Nuclear Security Administration should begin “immediately … site selection processes for building a modern set of production facilities with 21st century cutting-edge nuclear component production, manufacturing, and assembly technologies, all at one location,” it says.

The report’s plan would also eliminate some redundancies between the three nuclear weapons laboratories: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“This represents a sort of fantasy vision of the nuclear weapons complex. … This idea of a replacement, consolidated nuclear weapons production complex has been around for about 20 years,” said Natural Resources Defense Council analyst Christopher Paine.

Paine and another critic did praise the report for problems it identifies with the current nuclear weapons complex, such as redundancies at the labs.

Still, he argued that the report’s recommendations could have negative consequences for nonproliferation. 

“I wonder what kind of bubble these people live in that they think they can propose a brand new nuclear weapons production complex costing billions, dedicated to nuclear weapons and components production, while they are telling Iran that Iran can’t have an enrichment facility for peaceful purposes,” he said.

No money for task force’s recommendations exists in bills currently before Congress. Funding only to study that Reliable Replacement Warhead concept is included in several major bills moving through Congress. Hobson said he would seek to add legislation “to begin this transition” during a closed House-Senate conference over the fiscal 2006 Energy and Water Appropriations bill.

The plan involves reducing resources at the national laboratories, and Hobson might run into trouble with his Senate counterpart, Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who after reviewing the report said in a statement yesterday, “While there is always room for improvement, I believe our labs are doing good work and I do not think we should rush into any quick fixes.”

Domenici has included report language attached to the Senate-passed version of the Energy Department funding bill that would prohibit using funds in the bill to implement the recommendations.

The six-member Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force, which advises the energy secretary, said its recommendations would save money in the long run. It gives no cost estimate however.

Hobson, who requested the underlying review during a hearing last year, praised it in a statement yesterday.

“The task force concludes that the current stockpile and supporting weapons complex is neither technically credible nor financially sustainable. I agree 100 percent,” he said.

“We need fewer, more modern weapons that can be certified without underground nuclear testing and will be cheaper to produce, easier to maintain, and safer to dismantle. To support the transition to that new stockpile, we will need a more modern, capable, and efficient design and production complex,” he said.

The Bush administration favors the plan and has advocated its general aims. National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks in congressional testimony in April said the then-forthcoming task force report would detail what he called the administration’s “emerging vision” for remaking the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal and complex.  

Brooks described the nuclear arsenal the administration would like “if we were starting to build the stockpile from scratch today (see GSN, April 5).

The task force’s report says it responds to a need expressed by the Bush administration in its 2001 Nuclear Posture Review to be able by 2012 to design and produce new nuclear weapons types more quickly, either to provide new capabilities or to address deficiencies in existing weapons.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, the report says, has directed the complex be able to resolve a stockpile concern in 12 months, modify a weapon to meet a new requirement in 18 months, develop a new weapon for a new requirement in three years, achieve full production in four years, and be ready to test in 18 months.

The report says the nation’s three nuclear weapons design laboratories already have state-of-the-art design and testing capabilities and that the nuclear weapons staffing level at the design laboratories “are comparable if not greater than that attained at the design laboratories during the peak period of activity in the mid-1980s.”

It also says, though, that the complex is rapidly losing nuclear design experts with live testing experience — the United States has maintained a moratorium on testing since the early 1990s — and that nuclear weapons production equipment is outdated.

A more responsive infrastructure, the report adds, would enable the military to keep smaller numbers of nuclear weapons in the arsenal.

Nongovernmental critics say the plan reflects a Bush administration ambition to avoid deep reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons and to increase their usefulness. That strategy, they say, would undermine international nonproliferation efforts.

“The authors of this report are just imagining things if they think that this proposal is going to fly around the world, is going to make everybody feel more secure because old obsolete weapons are going to be dismantled so that new weapons can be built to attack countries,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

The report says in order to “to demonstrate that the U.S. is committed to arms reduction,” the existing Pantex nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly site should proceed with “aggressive dismantlement of the Cold War stockpile, while the [nuclear weapons] complex begins replacing the Cold War stockpile with the sustainable stockpile of the future.”

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