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Leading U.S. Scientist Criticizes Warhead Effort By Greg Webb “There’s no dissension among us,” said Sidney Drell, a longtime nuclear weapons expert now with the Hoover Institution, speaking of a group of two Republican and two Democratic senior statesmen he informally advises. The group has authored two calls over the past 14 months for eliminating global nuclear arsenals (see GSN, Jan. 15). However, the two Republicans, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, last year indicated support for a Bush administration plan to pursue a new nuclear warhead, a move that some experts said undermined their call for global nuclear elimination. The Reliable Replacement Warhead would enable the United States to have greater confidence in its nuclear weapons without testing them explosively, administration officials argued, but the U.S. Congress defeated the effort by removing funding for the project late last year. The two Democrats, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn, have opposed the new warhead, a position Nunn reaffirmed today, complaining of the Bush administration’s refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and opposition to other nuclear nonproliferation measures. “In this world atmosphere, in this climate, for us to build a new warhead now would be a real setback to all of our nonproliferation efforts, so I am opposed to it,” he told a conference devoted to discussing the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons. “At this moment I think it would be a mistake for Before forming his position on the question last year, Kissinger asked for guidance from Shultz and Drell, who both penned a letter to Kissinger offering limited support for the new warhead. “Our view is that research work on new RRW designs should certainly go ahead. Such work would make possible the decision to implement the construction phase of this program were that to be desired at some future time,” they wrote. “The design work itself is relatively small in cost and need not be viewed in any way as an eventual commitment to go ahead.” Despite the qualified statement, their remarks raised the hackles of RRW opponents who argued that Shultz and Kissinger were contradicting their call for eventual nuclear disarmament. Drell said today that media outlets had overblown the meaning of the letter. “The newspapers played up the letter,” he told Global Security Newswire today, saying that he supports research into ways to improve confidence in the stockpile but does not endorse making new warheads. His interest in researching the weapon was only to study whether there are better techniques to improve confidence in the “As a scientist, not as a political person, do I think one should not do research on what is the best way to continue certifying our stockpile without testing? No,” he said. “If there’s anything I don’t want, it’s to get caught with this effort in a political meat grinder. That was not what we were saying.” Drell criticized the Bush administration’s earlier efforts to pursue bunker-busting nuclear warheads and low-yield nuclear weapons designed to target biological weapon sites. “If the world were pure and totally honest, and you had no record of this administration trying to make bunker busters and whatnot, and you say, ‘Can I go have a better way in my stockpile life extension program of answering the question?’” he asked. Drell said he would certainly support finding that better way. Instead, Drell said, the administration bungled the RRW initiative by suggesting it was intended to meet goals larger than confidence-building techniques for the nuclear arsenal. “It should never have been called a Reliable Replacement Warhead program. It was a mistake, and it showed malice on some people’s part … because some people did want new weapons,” he said. “That was stupidity, that was the worst thing they did, and they admit it.” “Putting it in the train after the bunker buster and calling it the Reliable Replacement Warhead, they set it up for a politically charged, intellectually deficient type of discussion,” he added. “RRW is dead. It’s dead. Congress killed it.”
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