Written by I grew up in Livermore California…a city whose population in the 1960’s and 70’s seemed an “odd couple” pairing of cattle ranchers and nuclear physicist’s families.
My father and my wife’s father were nuclear phsicists at “the Lab” as we locals referred to The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and our dad’s and their colleagues helped our nation win the Cold War. It was sometimes controversial work, as no one knew where the arms race and the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) would ultimately take us. Scares like the Cuban missile crisis kept us grade school kids practicing duck-and-cover drills.
When my dad retired in 1993, like the rest of us he was very glad the arms race was over, and disarmament had truly begun. (My dad died at age 65 from thyroid cancer that the government believes may have been related to his witnessing nuclear testing in Nevada.)
My wife’s father, six years yonger than my dad, spent the next decade doing the important work of technically assisting nuclear disarmament negotiations, and seeking funding to help Russia dismantle its weapons.
But now some are saying a new Cold War is beginning. Today, the New York Times reports that the Bush administration is seeking to build new nuclear weapons for the first time in twenty years.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” Albert Einstein
Why would we build new nuclear weapons, after so much work to reduce the nuclear threat? The weapons we already have are powerful enough to destroy the planet many times over.
Personally, I don’t think we should spend one penny designing new ones.
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By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 3, 2007
The Bush administration announced yesterday the winner of a competition to design the nation’s first new nuclear weapon in nearly two decades and immediately set out to reassure Russia and China that the weapon, if built, would pose no new threat to either nation.
If President Bush decides to authorize production and Congress agrees, the research could lead to a long, expensive process to replace all American nuclear warheads in the next few decades with new designs.
The first to be replaced with the new Reliable Replacement Weapon would be the W-76, a warhead for missiles deployed on submarines.
Officials said the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California would design the replacement warhead based on previously tested components, allowing the administration to argue that no new underground tests would be necessary before deploying the new weapon.
Officials said, however, the Livermore design might eventually draw on technical contributions from a more novel approach on the drawing boards at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, Livermore’s longtime rival.
The surprise choice of a single laboratory reversed a tentative decision, reported in January, to combine elements of the Livermore and Los Alamos designs. In a behind-the-scenes debate over the last two months, nuclear experts inside and outside the government faulted the hybrid approach as unusual and technically risky, with some calling it a “Frankenbomb.”
Administration officials said the Livermore design had won primarily because its main elements were detonated beneath the Nevada desert decades ago, making it a better candidate under the nuclear test ban treaty, which the United States has signed but not ratified.
Thomas P. D’Agostino, acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration at the Energy Department, told reporters that the Livermore design was “the most conservative approach.”
Administration officials said the hybrid had been rejected after senior members of the Navy, which will manage the W-76 replacement, worried that members of Congress would perceive it as more likely to require explosive testing.
The announcement of the research path had been expected in early January but was delayed, officials said, because of last-minute Navy concerns over control of financing and dividing the scientific labor.
The potentially expensive initiative faces an uncertain future and has generated much criticism from skeptics who argue that a new design for the nuclear arsenal is unneeded and is a potential stimulus to a global nuclear arms race.
“This is a solution in search of a problem,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a group in Washington. “There is an urgent need to reduce these weapons, not expand them. This will keep the Chinese, the Russians and others on guard to improve their own stockpiles.”
Among lawmakers who declared their opposition was Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California.
“What worries me,” Mrs. Feinstein said, “is that the minute you begin to put more sophisticated warheads on the existing fleet, you are essentially creating a new nuclear weapon. And it’s just a matter of time before other nations do the same thing.”
Critics had ridiculed the hybrid approach as a compromise dictated by the politics of survival for the nuclear laboratories, rather than technical merit. In an unusual move, even senior arms designers spoke out publicly against what they called serious risks of merging differing designs from different laboratories.
“A hybrid design by inexperienced personnel, managed by committee, is not the best approach,” John Pedicini, technical head of the design team at Los Alamos, said last month in a public blog entry.
Mr. Pedicini conceded that the Livermore design had features “that are an advance over ours, and if we get the assignment, I would incorporate them in our design.”
“If this is what is meant by hybrid,” he said, “then the outcome would be good.”
The goal is to replace the arsenal of aging warheads with a generation meant to be sturdier, more reliable, safer from accidental detonation and more secure from theft.
The replacements will have the same explosive yields and other military characteristics of the current weapons, officials said, a point that senior administration officials have made to Russia in arguing that the new weapons do not represent an expansion of the American arsenal.
Mrs. Feinstein cited a report in December saying plutonium pits have a lifespan of at least 85 years, leading critics to question whether the new weapons are necessary.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting.
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