U.S. Lawmakers Stress Baby Steps for New Nuclear Warhead

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The ranking Democratic and Republican on the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee suggested yesterday it would be best to move slowly on a plan to design a new nuclear warhead (see GSN, March 19).

The Bush administration has asked for $88 million in the coming fiscal year to fund a cost study and additional engineering work for the controversial Reliable Replacement Warhead (see GSN, Feb. 6).  Some lawmakers, though, are closely examining the program.

At a subcommittee hearing earlier this month, Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) called for a public dialogue on the role of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and stressed that she still had a number of questions about the Bush administration plan (see GSN, March 9).

There is no need to rush forward with the program, Tauscher said during a hearing yesterday.

“I think that I’m favoring a walk before you run approach to RRW,” she said (see GSN, March 5).

While expressing support for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, ranking panel Republican Terry Everett (Ala.) agreed with Tauscher.

“I think your comment about moving slowly is probably the right one,” he said.

Citing a recent study from researchers at the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories that indicated the operational life of the plutonium triggers in nuclear weapons could extend more than 100 years, Tauscher asked if it would be possible to incorporate the “pits” from dismantled or disused weapons into the RRW design (see GSN, Nov, 30, 2006).

Incorporating existing plutonium pits into the new design could eliminate the need for a pit-production facility included in the administration’s “Complex 2030” plan for the U.S. nuclear infrastructure.  Building a new facility could be expensive and politically controversial, Tauscher said, “which I think is a concern that many of us have.”

A plan in this fiscal year calls for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to produce up to 10 pits per year.  The Energy Department has said it would like to have the capacity to produce more than 120 pits annually.

Speaking before the subcommittee yesterday, acting National Nuclear Security Administration chief Tom D’Agostino said that very few of the pits produced up through the 1980s had the safeguards that weapons designers now want to incorporate into next-generation warheads.  “The pit is the heart of the matter when it comes to intrinsic surety,” he said, adding that he could not elaborate at an open hearing on classified details of the safeguards.

As the military moves first to replace warheads on submarine-launched missiles, “pit reuse would very difficult if not impossible to incorporate,” D’Agostino said.

Reuse is possible in cases in which pits do have the necessary safeguards.  That is something Energy Department and military officials plan to study in 2007 and 2008, D’Agostino said.

That small number of “more modern” pits could be examined for possible use in “future Reliable Replacement Warhead concepts.”  Such a pit could be incorporated into a gravity bomb, but a not a warhead on a missile, D’Agostino said.

Weight is a central concern when building a missile warhead, but not in a bomb dropped from a plane.  The new design is slated to include insensitive high explosives, which are heavier than the explosives currently used in the first warhead to be replaced.

D’Agostino acknowledged Tauscher’s concerns on building a new pit-production facility.  “My goal would be to make sure this nation doesn’t develop a capability it doesn’t need,” he said.  “We don’t want to build a white elephant.”

The aim of the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, as described by administration officials, is to create a next-generation nuclear device that would be impossible to detonate if stolen by terrorists and would be easier to maintain without testing than the weapons currently in the arsenal.

Freed from the constraints of the Cold War that pushed U.S. weapons designers to make warheads ever more powerful while keeping them light — all the better to pack as many as possible on the tip of a missile — a more robust weapon is now possible, officials argue.

Jay Davis, a nuclear physicist and former director of the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, has likened it to replacing a Formula 1 race car with the reliability of a Ford pickup truck.

With broader margins of error, the concern that the periodic maintenance of the high-strung warheads of decades past would require a return to underground testing to ensure their viability will be eliminated, officials contend.

Others have expressed concerns that any new weapon would have to be tested before entering the stockpile, concerns administration officials have tried to allay by saying that if the program does require a return to nuclear testing it would not move forward.

The National Nuclear Security Administration earlier this month chose a preliminary design from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for further development (see GSN, March 2).

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