Questions Persist on Reliable Replacement Warhead

U.S. lawmakers in recent hearings have continued to question plans for next-generation nuclear warheads and expressed concerns that the weapons could spark a revived arms race, the Washington Post reported yesterday (see GSN, April 22).

A declassified accounting of the size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile is needed as “the first step for an honest dialogue on nuclear weapons,” said Representative David Hobson (R-Ohio), who first proposed what would become the Reliable Replacement Warhead program.  The count of all weapons — deployed, inactive and reserve — has been estimated at more than 6,000.

“I suspect our potential adversaries know the number of U.S. nuclear warheads with much better precision than do the members of Congress,” Hobson said recently at a hearing.  “I think I know the number, but I can’t talk about it.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have “not been forthcoming” with their take on plans to replace aging nuclear warheads with designs that the administration argues would be safer and easier to maintain, said Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.).

“You must answer critics who have argued that the RRW will lead to an arms race,” said Domenici, who backs the effort, at a hearing last week.  He said he sent letters to the two officials and national security adviser Stephen Hadley “urging them to take a more active role in supporting the RRW program.”

The initiative is moving ahead “although the administration has not announced any effort to begin a policy process to reassess our nuclear weapons policy and the future nuclear stockpile required to support that policy,” said Representative Peter Visclosky (D-Ind.), who heads the House Appropriations subcommittee that designates nuclear complex funding.

The Defense Science Board last year noted the lack of articulation on an extended nuclear policy from senior administration officials, Visclosky said.

The “valid” arguments for the program are that it would help ensure that U.S. weapons designers maintain their capabilities and produce a weapon that “cannot be detonated by a terror group, even if they were able to get their hands on it,” former defense secretary William Perry said at a hearing last month.

However, he added that the program would “substantially undermine our ability to lead the international community in the fight against proliferation, which we are already in danger of losing.”  There is no need to rush into the program, Perry said, as existing nuclear weapons could be maintained for up to a century (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 22).

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