U.S. to Speed Nuclear Warhead Dismantlement

The United States plans to significantly increase the pace of efforts to dismantle obsolete nuclear warheads beginning next year, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, May 1).

There are believed to be between 4,000 and 6,000 retired nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal, of which sources say fewer than 100 have been dismantled annually in the last few years.  Lawmakers have been pushing the White House to move faster.

The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to “increase by 50 percent the number of nuclear warheads it dismantles next year,” Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said last week.

“Dismantlements are a key element of our strategy to ensure that stockpile and infrastructure transformation is not misperceived by other nations as ‘restarting the arms race,’” Sell said at a House hearing. Disassembly is “very important for the arms control reasons and for our own credibility,” so “we must dismantle at a much greater rate than we have in the last few years.”

The move toward increase nuclear warhead disassembly “will be evident” in the budget submitted to Congress in 2007, said NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes.

Dismantlement has been slowed while the Pantex facility in Texas focused its efforts on refurbishing warheads that remain operational, the Post reported.

“There is not much dismantlement going on,” said Representative David Hobson (R-Ohio). “They only turned to dismantling when the production lines working on life-extension programs ran into trouble.”

The Defense and Energy departments should move to dismantle retired warheads and take some warheads off operational status rather than have them go through expensive refurbishment, Hobson said.

He argued that $700 million designated for the W-80 warhead life-extension program could instead be used for developing the Reliable Replacement Warhead (see GSN, April 27).

“The Defense Department never wants to get rid of anything,” Hobson said,
”but they ought to take out the whole W-80 system.”

Assistant Defense Secretary Dale Klein said last week at the hearing that, “We’re reluctant to give up a lot of the nuclear weapons in the stockpile unless we see the capability to manufacture new ones” (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, May 4).

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