By George Lobsenz
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), seeking to resurrect its new warhead plan in the face of a skeptical Democratic-controlled Congress, is suggesting that development of the “reliable replacement warhead” would make it less likely that it would have to resume underground nuclear testing than if it continues piecemeal refurbishment of the nation’s existing Cold War-era warheads.
That was the new pitch made last week for the so-called RRW by the head of the semi-autonomous Energy Department nuclear weapons agency in testimony to a House panel that also revealed that NNSA was beginning efforts this year to increase plutonium pit production capacity at Los Alamos National Laboratory to 30 to 50 pits per year by 2012-2014, up from the current 10 per year.
Congress last year halted funding for continued RRW design studies, saying the Bush administration had failed to provide a detailed strategic justification for developing a new warhead. Lawmakers ordered the administration to deliver a report this year explaining its overall nuclear weapons strategy and how the RRW would help meet the nation’s future national security needs.
In his Feb. 27 remarks on the new warhead before the House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee, Thomas D’Agostino, head of NNSA, said his agency would soon deliver the requested report justifying the RRW. And he said Congress needed to provide new funding for the RRW design to answer questions about the feasibility of the new warhead–and concerns that an unproven weapon would be hard to certify without a return to underground testing, which the United States stopped in the early 1990s as a nonproliferation measure.
But in a striking new argument clearly aimed at countering those perceptions, D’Agostino said NNSA’s nuclear weapons laboratories believe that continuing to refurbish older warheads would make a return to nuclear testing more likely than development of the RRW.
He said that while the performance of existing warheads has been verified through past underground testing, growing questions about their reliability are being raised as more of their aging components are replaced.
“Our laboratory directors are concerned that our current path–successive refurbishments of existing warheads developed during the Cold War–may pose unacceptable risks to maintaining high confidence in warhead performance over the long term absent nuclear testing,” D’Agostino said in his written testimony to the subcommittee.
While monitoring shows the existing stockpile remains reliable, “concerns arise as we move further and further away from designs certified with underground nuclear testing, resulting from inevitable accumulations of small changes from a continuous process of aging and refurbishment of aging components.”
At the same time, D’Agostino said NNSA experts were more confident about their ability to certify the reliability of the RRW using the new computer-based methods developed in the agency’s “stockpile stewardship” program to monitor and evaluate old warheads. He also noted the RRW would be based on warhead designs that had been verified through past testing. Further, he said that, unlike the old Cold War warheads, the RRW could be designed to be certified without additional testing.
In sum, he said: “Our experts’ best technical judgment today is that it will be less likely that we would need nuclear testing to maintain the safety, security and reliability into the future of the nuclear stockpile if we pursue a reliable replacement path employing all the tools of the stockpile stewardship program…than if we continue to rely on today’s legacy warheads.”
D’Agostino said he gave Congress classified information in December substantiating those claims, and that NNSA was seeking $10 million from Congress in fiscal 2009 to refine the RRW’s design so it could answer certification and feasibility questions about the new warhead. NNSA also is seeking $20 million for “advanced certification” research on aging warheads and the RRW.
The agency has struggled to persuade lawmakers that the RRW can be certified as reliable without underground testing–particularly after a panel of independent nuclear weapons experts known as the JASONs last year issued a report saying there were gaps in NNSA’s certification analyses for the RRW.
The RRW also was set back by another JASONs report that said plutonium pits in Cold War-era warheads were not deteriorating as fast as NNSA has suggested in the past, meaning they would not need replacement for decades to assure continued.
NNSA says the RRW is needed to provide a more reliable, secure and safer nuclear deterrent than can be achieved by continuing to monitor and refurbish Cold War-era warheads, which the agency says are increasingly vulnerable to breakdown. NNSA says the RRW will be less prone to failure, can be built out of materials that are less toxic than those used in existing warheads and can incorporate new security devices that will better protect against diversion threats by terrorists or other unauthorized or accidental detonations.
However, key Democratic and Republican lawmakers say that in addition to questions about the RRW’s reliability and cost, development of a new warhead would be provocative and undermine the credibility of U.S. nonproliferation efforts.
NNSA officials have strenuously argued that the RRW would help nonproliferation because its reliability benefits would enable the United States to reduce the size of its nuclear arsenal even further than current plans.