U.S. to Replace, Repair Nuclear Weapons Sites

The United States plans to repair or replace eight nuclear weapons facilities to pave the way for development of a new stockpile of 2,200 deployed warheads, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, Oct. 20).

The new or rehabilitated sites in coming years would be used to develop and manufacture the new weapons and to dismantle their predecessors, according to the multiyear program announced yesterday.

The existing facilities, some dating back to the Manhattan Project that initiated the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the 1940s, are “inefficient, old and expensive” and “not sustainable for the long term,” said Thomas D’Agostino, defense programs chief at the National Nuclear Security Administration.  The sites are largely in California, New Mexico, Texas and Tennessee.

The White House intends to replace 6,000 Cold War-era nuclear warheads with 2,200 Reliable Replacement Warheads that would remain usable for decades, the Post reported.  The “Complex 2030” plan also calls for consolidating plutonium-handing operations at one location that could produce 125 nuclear bomb triggers each year.  Further, it would strip the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California of all highly enriched uranium. 

Lawrence Livermore and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico both developed designs for the new warhead.  The National Nuclear Security Administration is expected to select a design for production in December.

The new design must be based on previous nuclear packages in order to avoid underground nuclear testing to confirm its functionality.

As part of an environmental impact review of the eight sites, public comment will be taken on “Complex 2030” and two other nuclear stockpile plans opposed by the White House.

The “No Action Alternative” plan preserves “the status quo as it exists today and is presently planned,” according to a notice in the Federal Register.  It would maintain existing programs and delay decisions on the arsenal.

The “Reduced Operations and Capability-Based Complex Alternative” calls for production of 50 plutonium triggers each year at the new plutonium facility and for maintaining existing weapons manufacturing technology without upgrading production sites (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Oct. 20).

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