Why do we need thousands of nuclear warheads — what are we accomplishing with them? Why do we need to ramp up production so that we have a pool of nuclear engineers capable of redesigning these weapons in 18 months and producing those new weapons in four years? This is like stashing 1000 shotguns in every room of your house and working round the clock on how to make new shotguns. Why? It took two nuclear weapons (some would say one was sufficient) to end World War II in the Pacific. It won’t take 2 to destroy Iran. What do the other 6,000 get us? mjh
U.S. Prepares to Overhaul Arsenal of Nuclear Warheads By Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
By the end of the year, the government plans to select the design of a new generation of nuclear warheads that would be more dependable and possibly able to be disarmed in the event they fell into terrorist hands, according to the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The new warheads would be based on nuclear technology that has already been tested, which means they could be produced more than a decade from now to gradually replace at lower numbers the existing U.S. stockpile of about 6,000 warheads without additional underground testing …
The new warheads envisioned as part of the [Reliable Replacement Warhead Program] are expected to be larger and heavier than those now deployed and in reserve, which originated from the Cold War years ….
The competition between Los Alamos and Livermore replicates what happened beginning in the 1950s as each laboratory developed different nuclear warheads for the Air Force, the Navy and the Army. “The process is providing a unique opportunity to train the next generation of nuclear weapons designers and engineers,” D’Agostino said last week.
During the Cold War years, from the 1960s through the 1980s, the U.S. nuclear weapons complex constantly designed, developed, produced and tested different warheads depending on military needs, D’Agostino said. Beginning in the 1990s, as the Cold War ended and a test ban pact between the United States and the Soviet Union was reached, a decision was made to halt U.S. development of new warheads and, instead, to shift to supervising the already enormous stockpile, to make sure that those deployed were still reliable and to begin dismantling those that were no longer needed.
The notion at that time, during the administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, was that the stockpile would go through a life-extension process every 20 to 30 years. The current Bush administration’s Nuclear Posture Review changed that. Instead of just extending the life of older warheads with new but similar parts, the aim now is to make totally new components that are more robust, easier to manufacture, safer and more secure, while at the same time not requiring new underground testing.
By constantly upgrading the parts, D’Agostino said, a second goal will be accomplished. By 2030, he said, the “weapons design community that was revitalized by the RRW program will be able to adapt an existing weapon within 18 months, and design, develop and begin production of a new design within four years of a decision to enter engineering development.”
mjh’s blog — Safety does not erode
Richard Garwin, a physicist who helped design the first U.S. H-bomb, said during his UNM talk: “The Reliable Replacement Warhead is the rage this year” …
Garwin said there was also no reason to think aging weapons posed greater risks of accidental detonation.
“There’s no question of safety,” he said. “Safety does not erode.”
