Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

The Folly of New Nukes

by Travis Sharp [contact information]

April 11, 2007

The U.S. Department of Energy announced last month that it was moving forward with developing the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), which is slated to replace the W76 warhead now deployed on Trident submarine launched ballistic missiles. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, selected the RRW design developed by Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories over a more technically-advanced version prepared at Los Alamos.

The question is, why on earth is the Department of Energy pursuing America’s first new nuclear design in two decades when its central justification for doing so—that the fissile material inside the existing weapons is degrading rapidly—was just declared illegitimate by the preeminent nuclear advisory body in the U.S.?

In November 2006, a study conducted by American weapons laboratories and reviewed by JASON, an independent government advisory body of nuclear scientists originally founded by members of the Manhattan Project, revealed that plutonium “pits,” the cores that trigger nuclear weapons, remain stable for at least 90 years, twice the earlier estimate of 45 years and three times the age of the oldest weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

In other words, it will be at least 60 years until U.S. warheads become truly unreliable. But this isn’t stopping Bush administration officials from claiming that new nuclear weapons are necessary in order to have, in the words of acting NNSA administrator Thomas D’Agostino, “long-term confidence in the future stockpile.”

These government agencies fail to understand that building a new generation of nuclear weapons, which for them is a bureaucratic resources-grab, will have long-term negative impacts on U.S. and global security.

While pro-nuclear bureaucrats claim that new nuclear weapons will not require actual nuclear testing because of ongoing improvements in computer simulation technology, nuclear experts disagree. “I can’t believe that an admiral or a general or a future president, who is putting the U.S. survival at stake, would accept an untested weapon if it didn’t have a test base,” said Sidney Drell, a physicist and longtime adviser to the U.S. government and nuclear weapons labs. Physicist and nuclear weapons expert Robert Nelson echoed this sentiment: “The United States has never deployed a new nuclear warhead without conducting a nuclear explosive test.”

If the U.S. did restart nuclear testing, something it hasn’t done since September 1992, other countries might follow suit and enhance their nuclear capabilities, possibly leading to a renewed 21st century arms race.

For example, a U.S. test might cause China to feel that its rising superpower status was being threatened and it was losing its ability to reliably deter the U.S. in a confrontation over Taiwan. Since it is only a few short development phases away from acquiring a mobile Multiple Independently-Targeted Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) capability, a renewed nuclear testing environment—initiated by an American test of an RRW design—could provide China with a pretext to build on its successful January 2007 test of an anti-satellite weapon.

The tide is turning against pro-nuclear national security policy. In January 2007, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn penned a momentous op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that working towards a world free of nuclear weapons was “consistent with America’s moral heritage.” On February 27, former Secretary of State James Baker said he “absolutely” agreed with the sentiment of these defense establishment luminaries. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has endorsed their appeal for disarmament.

The Bush administration should ditch its proposal for new nuclear weapons and join the growing consensus of both conservative and liberal foreign policy thinkers who consider building massive nuclear weapons stockpiles a reversion to Cold War paranoia. It is time to move beyond the nuclear-imposed balance of terror and deal with the real security challenges of the 21st century, challenges like non-state terrorist actors and failed states that require international cooperation and can’t be overcome if the U.S. alienates allies by defiantly sitting atop a brand new pile of RRW warheads.