Weapons experts and Congress slow warhead program

In the wake of a report that criticizes the Bush administration’s failure to articulate a broad nuclear weapons policy, both Democratic and Republican members of a House Armed Services subcommittee have voted to cut millions of dollars from the proposed fiscal year 2008 budget for the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

The cut of $45 million from the administration’s $119 million RRW request is intended to tell the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to “walk before they run with the modernization of the nuclear weapons stockpile and the weapons complex,” said Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), chair of the strategic forces subcommittee. The cut in funding, if it stands through the full congressional appropriations process, will limit the RRW work to “cost and design” studies (see Physics Today, February 2007, page 24 ).

If advocates of faster RRW development hoped to get support from the Republicans on the subcommittee, they were disappointed. Rep. Terry Everett (AL), the subcommittee’s ranking Republican, said the cut in funding “reflects a strong bipartisan agreement on the Atomic Energy Defense Activities, particularly on the Reliable Replacement Warhead.”

The subcommittee’s action came just after the American Association for the Advancement of Science released its first major issue-oriented report, put together over the past year by a panel that included three former directors of the national weapons laboratories and several national security experts formerly with DOE and the Department of Defense. The report, released 24 April, came about a month after NNSA officials selected an RRW design from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California to replace some of the existing warheads in the US nuclear arsenal (see Physics Today, April 2007, page 33 ).

The AAAS study committee, chaired by Bruce Tarter, a former director of LLNL, made a series of specific recommendations, but the overall theme of the report was that until more is known about the implications and impacts of building the replacement warhead, the program should slow down. “There are just too many unanswered questions, things that we don’t know,” Tarter said.

The RRW is intended to be a safer, cheaper, and more secure replacement for warheads in the current stockpile. RRWs built to the design approved by NNSA would replace the existing W-76 warheads, and later RRWs would eventually replace most types of warheads in the US arsenal.

In reference to the RRW design just approved, the AAAS panel recommended an independent evaluation of any new designs. The panel also said that NNSA should avoid claiming longer-term benefits of the RRW program to the overall nuclear stockpile program “until the analysis and work to justify those conclusions has been carried out.”

The panel also said, “Development of an acceptable plutonium strategy should be the highest priority in planning the future production complex.” Tarter said a central question in the nuclear weapons debate is what to do about the plutonium pits that are the heart of nuclear weapons. Los Alamos National Laboratory currently has the capacity to build a limited number of pits each year that can be used to replace aging pits in existing weapons. But if the RRWs move into the production phase, will Los Alamos need to be expanded, or will a new pit facility be required?

Answering that question depends on the more basic question of the future direction of the US nuclear program, a question that the report notes hasn’t been adequately addressed.

The report also outlined the need for studies that explore the implications of the RRW program on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and other international agreements. “Nuclear weapons are ultimately an instrument of policy and strategy rather than of war fighting,” the report says, “and only with the leadership of the president can there be major changes in that instrument. Only a president and a well-thought-out diplomatic strategy can put this in terms likely to be constructively understood by the international community.”

Tarter noted that the timing of the report is a little awkward for the Bush administration. “It’s unfair to ask this administration to do the major tasks involved when they are distracted [by the war in Iraq] and going out of business. So the question is, How do you get this issue across the boundary into the new administration?”

Thomas D’Agostino, the acting head of NNSA, issued a statement after the report was released saying its recommendations were “consistent with NNSA’s ongoing plans to move forward with RRW.”