News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue

News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue
Published on Arms Control Association (https://www.armscontrol.org)
News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue
Arms Control Today
Tom Z. Collina and Daniel Horner
As the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) moves toward completion in the coming months, the
Obama administration is grappling with a major question about the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the
stated need to maintain the arsenal for the foreseeable future, can the United States reliably
maintain existing warhead designs, or will the country eventually need new ones?
Public statements by senior officials from the departments of Defense and State appear to be at
odds on this point, and officials from other parts of the government apparently have weighed in as
well.
The debate reveals what some observers see as a tension born from President Barack Obama’s
Prague speech in April, where he called for “a world without nuclear weapons” while also saying, “As
long as these weapons exist, the United States will maintain a safe, secure and effective arsenal to
deter any adversary.”
Inside the Obama administration, this debate is not about nuclear testing; the administration
strongly supports the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and opposes additional tests. Nor is it
about developing weapons with new military capabilities.
At issue is how long nuclear warheads “last.” During the Cold War, nuclear warheads were
continually replaced with new, more-lethal types, developed with the help of more than 1,000
nuclear tests. The United States has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992. Since then, no new
warhead types have been introduced into the arsenal. As a result, existing designs are getting older.
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said repeatedly that the United States probably needs to
replace at least some existing weapons with new designs. He told the Air Force Association Sept. 16
that the United States should “continue to make investments, and I think larger investments, in
modernizing [its] nuclear infrastructure.” That would include programs to extend the life of nuclear
warheads “and in one or two cases probably new designs that will be safer and more reliable,” he
said.
He added, “We have no desire for new capabilities. That’s a red herring. This is about modernizing
and keeping safe a capability that everyone acknowledges we will have to have for some
considerable period into the future before achieving some of the objectives of significant arms
reduction and eventually no nuclear weapons at all.”
According to knowledgeable sources, the NPR has not reached a conclusion about the need for new
warhead designs. Gates supported a similar effort in the Bush administration called the Reliable
Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, which was canceled by Congress.
A top Department of State official has publicly opposed the idea of any program that would pursue
new designs, even if they would not provide new capabilities. In an Oct. 21 interview with Arms
Control Today (see page 6), Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen
Tauscher declined to comment specifically on whether the NPR would include a new version of the
RRW program. She said she does not “consider RRW to be anything other than something from the
past.” Noting that she chaired the House subcommittee that had oversight of the program and that
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News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue
Published on Arms Control Association (https://www.armscontrol.org)
she led the effort to kill it, she said, “When I kill something, it stays dead.”
In comments to The Cable in September, she said, “I think there are a lot people that still hope for
the return of [the] RRW [program], and they are going to be sadly disappointed.”
A former congressional staffer who followed the RRW issue closely said Oct. 27 that there was “an
apparent disconnect” between the public comments of Gates and Tauscher.
Eric Edelman, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy under Gates, said in a separate
Oct. 27 interview that his impression is that Gates “is not wedded to something called RRW” but
does strongly support modernization of the U.S. stockpile.
Noting that he no longer has day-to-day contact with Gates, Edelman, now a distinguished fellow at
the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he believes that Gates views such an
effort as necessary if the Obama administration is to get Senate approval for a new strategic arms
control agreement and the CTBT.
Edelman, who held senior positions in the State and Defense Departments, said his sense was that
the administration “has not come to closure yet” on this issue. However, it is not “bad” to have
differing views within the administration, he said. “Those disagreements get ironed out because, at
the end of the day, it’s the president’s decision,” he said.
Tauscher’s position reportedly has some backing in the White House. At a high-level meeting in June,
Vice President Joe Biden opposed the idea of a resurrected RRW program on the grounds that the
perception that the United States was upgrading its nuclear warheads could undermine the
administration’s credibility on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation, according to an Aug. 18
report by Global Security Newswire.
The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which, along with the
Defense Department, is responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal, is also pushing for the
ability to design new warheads, as is the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM).
RRW Redux?
Some are seeking to achieve certain goals of the earlier RRW program by folding the basic
idea—that new-design warheads will be needed in the future—into the definition of “stockpile
management.” The fiscal year 2010 defense authorization bill states that the top objectives of the
Stockpile Management Program are “to increase the reliability, safety, and security of the nuclear
weapons stockpile of the United States” and “to further reduce the likelihood of the resumption of
underground nuclear weapons testing.” Some see new warhead designs as serving both of these
goals.
The idea of certifying new warhead designs for the arsenal without the help of nuclear tests now
seems feasible, thanks to new diagnostic tools in the Stockpile Stewardship Program that have led to
greater understanding of the basic physics of nuclear weapons. STRATCOM and the NNSA are now
making the case that new, untested weapons designs would be more reliable than well-tested, older
designs.
“Confidence in [the] reliability of [the] aging stockpile is decreasing,” say STRATCOM viewgraphs,
and STRATCOM wants the option to “replace” existing warheads with new designs. The STRATCOM
viewgraphs, originally obtained by The Washington Times and published in September, describe a
“range of options to manage the stockpile” into the future, from least intrusive to most, as follows:
Refurbish: Rebuild the warhead nuclear components as close to the original as possible.
Reuse: Mix and match the best nuclear components of different warheads; may have to
remanufacture parts.
Replace: Manufacture new nuclear components similar to those previously nuclear tested.
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News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue
Published on Arms Control Association (https://www.armscontrol.org)
The last option is STRATCOM’s new version of the RRW program. STRATCOM is evaluating a new
design option for a common warhead to replace the W78 (Minuteman ICBM) and W88 (Trident
submarine-launched ballistic missile) warheads for the post-2020 time frame.
NNSA viewgraphs released in September by Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a local group that tracks Los
Alamos National Laboratory, include a similar list of the three options, stating that “[r]eplacement is
essential for a viable modernized stockpile with increased flexibility and diversity.”
This RRW-style approach to stockpile maintenance is controversial in part because it would involve
the design of new warheads whose performance would not be confirmed with nuclear
tests—something that has never been done in the age of modern U.S. weapons. RRW critics are
concerned that new, untested designs may turn out to be less reliable than current designs,
eventually leading to calls for renewed nuclear testing.
Warhead Lifetimes
Because nuclear warheads are no longer being replaced with new designs, as they were during the
Cold War, the average age of the nuclear arsenal is increasing beyond previous experience.
That is not a major concern for the non-nuclear parts of warheads, which can be replaced under the
Life Extension Program (LEP) and fully tested without nuclear explosions. But nuclear parts of
warheads—primaries (plutonium pits) and secondaries (lithium-deuteride components)—cannot be
explosively tested.
RRW skeptics counter that the aging of the arsenal is not a near-term problem because recent
studies show that the pits can last a very long time.
The NNSA had estimated as recently as April 2006 that the pits would last roughly 45-60 years. In
November 2006, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories concluded that
plutonium pits in current nuclear weapons have a shelf life of 85 years to perhaps 100 years or more.
That conclusion was endorsed by the JASON group of senior defense consultants and by the NNSA.
“These studies show that the degradation of plutonium in our nuclear weapons will not affect
warhead reliability for decades,” then-NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks said in a November 2006
press release. “It is now clear that although plutonium aging contributes, other factors control the
overall life expectancy of nuclear weapons systems,” he said. Given the arsenal’s current age, the
newer estimates indicate that it will be more than 50 years before any plutonium parts in the 2009
stockpile start facing significant aging issues.
For now, it appears that independent weapons scientists have more confidence in existing, welltested designs than new, untested ones. In an April 2008 paper, Sidney Drell, a JASON member and
former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and Marvin Adams of Texas A&M
University found that “[w]e still have far to go before answering whether new designs can be created
that incorporate all the desired attributes, can be fielded without [underground tests], and provide
confidence as high as or higher than we have currently in the legacy weapons.”
A new JASON report on the LEP has been completed, and an unclassified summary has been
prepared but not yet released by the NNSA, according to an administration official.
Congress in October included $223 million for the LEP in the fiscal year 2010 energy and water
development appropriations act. All of the money is to go to refurbishment, but not replacement, of
the W76 warhead, which is used on Trident submarines. The act also provides $32.5 million to study
refurbishing non-nuclear parts of the B61 bomb. Seeking to avoid any appearance of designing new
nuclear weapons, the law’s language states that no funding was requested to study refurbishment of
the nuclear parts of the B61 and that any funds to be used for that purpose require prior
congressional approval.
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News Analysis: Officials Air Views on Key Stockpile Issue
Published on Arms Control Association (https://www.armscontrol.org)
Posted: November 5, 2009
Source URL: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2009_11/NewsAnalysis
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