U.S. to Meld Two Designs for New Nuclear Warhead

Following a review of two competing designs for a new U.S. nuclear warhead, the Bush administration is expected this week to announce no winner, but rather to call for a third design that incorporates the best features of the two proposals, the New York Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 26, 2006).

Two major U.S. nuclear warhead laboratories submitted their designs last year for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a weapon intended to replace existing U.S. strategic warheads.  The Bush administration has sought a new warhead that would be more robust and more resistant to accidental or unauthorized use (see GSN, Dec. 5, 2006).

U.S. officials have argued that more reliable weapons will ease the way for the major reductions to the stockpile by giving U.S. commanders and allies greater confidence that the remaining weapons will work as planned.

“We will not ‘un-invent’ nuclear weapons, and we will not walk away from the world,” said Gen. James Cartwright, head of the U.S. Strategic Command.  “Right now, it is not the nation’s position that zero is the answer to the size of our inventory.”

“So, if you are going to have these weapons, they should be safe, they should be able to be secured, and they should be reliable if used,” he added.

The decision to create a hybrid design could slow the warhead’s development and production and enhances the possibility that the United States could resume nuclear testing to confirm the design.

Energy Department spokesman Bryan Wilkes told the Times that no warhead design would be accepted if it required explosive nuclear tests, but senior administration officials have not made similar commitments, the Times reported.

The two submitted designs represented very different approaches, according to the Times.

A team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California based its design on a warhead that was tested in the 1980s before the U.S. testing moratorium began in 1991.

The design group from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico opted for a more innovative design that included features of many earlier warheads, according to the Times.

The decision to combine these two efforts was seen by some experts as a way to protect the laboratories and their work forces.

“It’s spreading the wealth,” said former Livermore weapons designer Ray Kidder.  Federal officials “tend to do that fairly rigorously so as to keep the labs alive.  To foreclose the possibility of closure, they try to divide the workload.”

Cartwright said it was important to sustain U.S. personnel who are experts in nuclear weapons.

“We are starting to get to the point where the people who actually have experience designing a weapon are reaching a point at which they will start to leave the industry,” he said.  “And are we able to attract the minds that we will need to sustain this activity?”

Critics of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program have argued that pursuing a new warhead undermines U.S. policy as Washington copes with nonproliferation crises in North Korea and Iran.

In addition, they have argued that U.S. weapons are already sufficiently reliable, pointing to a recent scientific study finding that the plutonium cores of U.S. weapons can be expected to remain functional for up to 100 years (see GSN, Nov. 30, 2006).

“This research eliminates a major rationale” for the new warhead, said nuclear weapons specialist Lisbeth Gronlund of the Union of Concerned Scientists (New York Times, Jan. 7).

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