The Return of the Reliable Replacement Warhead?

Originally published here..

The Hanford Nuclear Site where I used to work. (Click to enlarge. I took this photo in Fall 1993)

As many of you may have noticed, I have a bit of an obsession with nuclear weapons. Maybe it’s a result of growing up during the Cold War, being a teen during the Reagan years, and finally seeing the Cold War end. Maybe it’s a result of working out in the desert on Kirtland Air Force Base in 1991 and watching nuclear weapon convoys. Perhaps it’s because I worked as a radiochemist in Cold War-era laboratories, with nuclear waste from bomb production at the Hanford Site.

Maybe it’s because I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, within several miles of nearly 2,000 nuclear warheads.

In any case, I’ve got my eye on the news to see how President Barack Obama handles the daunting responsibility of basically being in charge of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

You wouldn’t think we’d need any more nuclear weapons, would you? The answer is “no”, but that’s not what the Pentagon is telling Obama.

Let me introduce you to the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

A short history of the Reliable Replacement Warhead

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, who is both the founder of ArmsControlWonk.com as well as Director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation, recently published an article in Arms Control Today regarding the future of the US nuclear arsenal. In it, he provides a very nice summary of the key points in the Reliable Replacement Warhead’s short history:

Despite the high level of confidence in the stockpile today, a pessimist might be concerned about maintaining that confidence indefinitely without the Cold War practice of designing, yield testing, and manufacturing new nuclear weapons designs on a continuous basis. These concerns prompted Congress in 2004 to create the RRW program to “improve the reliability, longevity and certifiability of existing weapons and their components.”

In response to this congressional guidance regarding existing weapons and their components, the NNSA proposed the activities that we now associate with the RRW program: a multiyear effort to introduce a series of new warhead designs into the U.S. stockpile, beginning with the WR1, that would be optimized for high-performance margins, incorporate modern and enhanced security features, and be easier to manufacture, while allowing the NNSA to modernize the nuclear weapons complex.

This conception significantly exceeded the scope and purpose of the original congressional language.[3] In doing so, it introduced unappealing technical and political risks, as well as significant additional costs. Although the stated purpose of the program was to reduce the need for nuclear explosive testing, independent reviews could not assure that the NNSA would be able to certify WR1 without such tests. Furthermore, although administration officials claimed that a more reliable warhead would allow a significant reduction in stockpiled nuclear weapons, the perception that the United States was building a “new” nuclear weapon for the first time since the end of the Cold War overshadowed the administration’s announcement that it would reduce the stockpile to levels not seen since the Eisenhower administration. In response, Congress gave the RRW program a cold reception, culminating in the denial of funding for the program in each of the past two years.

The end result?

The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) as envisioned by the Bush administration is effectively dead. This past fall, for the second year in a row, the Democratic Congress zeroed out funding for the RRW program despite Bush administration claims that extending the life of the current warhead types in the U.S. nuclear stockpile would, at some distant point in the future, lead to a sharp uptick in aging-related defects.

General schematic of a nuclear weapon.(Click to enlarge.*)

Over those four years, a variety of arguments were presented in favor of a new warhead; one of these arguments was that the plutonium “pits” in old warheads were aging, and therefore any given weapon would be “unreliable”. By “reliability”, we generally mean:

To the Departments of Energy and Defense, a warhead is considered unreliable if it risks detonating with an explosive energy slightly different from its design yield even if it still is guaranteed to destroy its target. But any uncertainty in the target “kill probability” stems primarily on the non-nuclear components of the weapon.

The official Energy Department definition of nuclear weapon reliability is “the probability of achieving the specified yield, at the tar get, across the Stockpile-to-Target Sequence of environments, throughout the weapon’s lifetime, assuming proper inputs.”[1]

The “specified yield” is a classified number for each warhead, but it has historically been understood to mean the design yield “with an allowable variation of 10 per cent.” In other words, if there is more than a minimal probability that a 350-kiloton warhead might detonate with a yield less than 315 kilotons or greater than 385 kilotons, that warhead would be considered unreliable even if it was certain to destroy its intended target.

However, the “aging plutonium pits” argument was put to rest not only by the defense science group JASON (summary, unclassified pdf), but by both the Lawrence Livermore National and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

“A world without nuclear weapons”: President Obama’s aspirations versus reality

Throughout his presidential campaign, Barack Obama consistently held the viewpoint that he did not feel the RRW was necessary. In 2007, he stated:

I believe the United States should lead the international effort to deemphasize the role of nuclear weapons around the world. I also believe that our policy towards the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) affects this leadership position. We can maintain a strong nuclear deterrent to protect our security without rushing to produce a new generation of warheads. I do not support a premature decision to produce the RRW.

This statement sums up Obama’s commitment to nonproliferation in general, which was a breath of fresh air after the Bush administration’s push for new warheads.

However, trouble is brewing for Obama on this front. Throughout Robert Gates’ tenure as Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Gates was a vocal proponent of the RRW, and it looks like he never gave up that fight. Defense journalist Elaine Grossman published a bombshell of a scoop last week via the Global Security Newswire:

U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden in early June blocked a Defense Department bid to revive a defunct program aimed at fielding modern nuclear warheads across the strategic arsenal, according to those familiar with the episode (see GSN, June 24).

Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised the idea of reinstating the controversial Reliable Replacement Warhead effort during a secret “Principals’ Committee” meeting convened by the National Security Council, Global Security Newswire has learned.

In pursuing the initiative, Gates appears to have won the backing of some pivotal Cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. One administration-watcher — a critic of the replacement-warhead idea — alleges that several key appointees at the Defense and State departments are now “scheming and maneuvering” to bring the program back to life.

However, Biden has strongly opposed the move, based on the view that pursuing a new U.S. warhead program could undermine Washington’s efforts to discourage nuclear weapons proliferation around the globe.

The issue remains unresolved, according to a wide array of policy officials and experts.

The original agenda of the meeting involved hammering out a negotiating agenda for upcoming arms control talks with Russia (please see my posts on the START negotiations, here and here). However:

During the interagency meeting, Gates reportedly volunteered that a warhead-replacement effort would be vital to maintaining the nuclear arsenal’s viability, particularly after additional arms control reductions are taken.

Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, provided Gates backup at the meeting, according to these sources. Formerly the top combatant commander for strategic nuclear weapons, the Marine Corps general expressed concern that today’s arsenal incorporates vacuum tubes and other outdated technologies that should be replaced, sources told GSN.

Now, the “vacuum tubes” argument is enough to set any number of experts’ teeth on edge; it’s fallacious, and has been soundly debunked multiple times (click here, here and here for examples). It’s basically about as valid an argument as the Onion article from 1998: “Report: Nuclear Arsenal Will Go Bad Unless Used By 2000″.

The Pentagon’s apparent renewed push for some version of the RRW comes at a critical time. Grossman points out that it’s a test of Obama’s commitment to a “world without nuclear weapons”, which he repeated in his speech in Prague this year. She also quotes a spokesman for Gates, who says the Nuclear Posture Review is a “work in progress” and that stockpile modernization has to be part of that review.

Whether “stockpile modernization” will include the RRW is up in the air. The ball is in Obama’s court:

Several experts said Obama himself would likely have to issue a clear directive if his administration is to take a fresh approach to warhead modernization, one that reflects his vision of de-emphasizing the role of nuclear weapons on a path toward eliminating them.

“The president has to have the guts to say no,” said one RRW opponent who asked not to be named. “Almost everyone else is inclined to Clinton-vintage political triangulation.”

This comes full circle to the interview I did last week with nuclear non-proliferation expert Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund, on the Nuclear Posture Review. Cirincione said:

If [the Nuclear Posture Review] done wrong, it sandbags the President. It makes it much more difficult for him to cut weapons and nuclear budgets, much more difficult for him to negotiate and ratify the kinds of treaties that he’s talking about.

So the nuclear bureaucracy – that is, the nuclear laboratories, the defense contractors, the ideologues, and the small section of the military still involved with nuclear weapons understand this, and they are waging a battle to basically tweak the current Cold War structure to make it – to pay lip service to Obama’s agenda without actually changing much of anything.

So we could very easily end up with… “Bush light”: the Bush nuclear policies and posture tweaked just a bit, and given an Obama gloss. If the Pentagon has its way, that’s what’s going to happen.

Cirincione pointed out that this is exactly what happened with the Clinton administration as well.

In other words, if Obama wants his vision of Global Zero to at least start toward that goal, he has to step in, right now, and make it happen.

Otherwise, he’s selling himself — and all of us — short.

*Image credit: Nature.