Welcome to the final post in my series on the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) pro­gram and the future of U.S. nuclear stock­pile stew­ard­ship. In this post, I’ll review where RRW stands today, and touch briefly on some of the polit­i­cal dimen­sions of the debate over the pro­gram.
There’s a lot of mate­r­ial on this pro­gram from the gov­ern­ment, from out­side experts and from pol­icy advo­cates of all ori­en­ta­tions that I won’t be able to cover, so to those inter­ested in read­ing more, I rec­om­mend check­ing out CDI’s guide to gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments on RRW, as well as arti­cles on the pro­gram at the Arms Control Association web­site and over at Arms Control Wonk.
In May 2005, the two nuclear design labs, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, began an 18-​​month RRW Feasibility Study, as man­dated in the fis­cal year 2006 Defense Authorization Act. The study con­sisted of a design com­pe­ti­tion between the two labs (both with help from Sandia) to pro­duce plans for the first RRW war­head, a replace­ment for the W76 submarine-​​launched bal­lis­tic mis­sile war­head.
The pre­lim­i­nary designs were com­pleted and sub­mit­ted in March, and under­went peer review in the labs in May. Currently, the teams are back at the draw­ing boards, incor­po­rat­ing sug­ges­tions from the peer reviews and from the Project Officers Group, the rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the nuclear stockpile’s Department of Defense “cus­tomers.” By November, NNSA is expected to pick a win­ning design.
As reported in Defense Tech last week, how­ever, RRW is well on its way to expand­ing beyond a sin­gle war­head design. It has been clear for some time that one RRW design would not be enough to replace all nine war­head mod­els cur­rently in the stock­pile. Still, many RRW observers were dis­ap­pointed and con­cerned to hear that the Senate is plan­ning to com­mis­sion a design com­pe­ti­tion for the next RRW war­head and to allo­cate $62 mil­lion for RRW in 2007 more than dou­ble the depart­ments $27 mil­lion request, and the pro­grams $25 mil­lion bud­get for 2006 before the first fea­si­bil­ity study is even com­pleted.
The argu­ments in favor of RRW have mostly been described in pre­vi­ous posts: redesign­ing the stock­pile to increase per­for­mance mar­gins would, if pos­si­ble, help put to rest con­cerns about the effect of mod­i­fied man­u­fac­tur­ing prac­tices on war­head per­for­mance, and would pro­vide work for the nuclear weapons com­plex.
The argu­ments against RRW, mean­while, take issue with both the pro­grams desir­abil­ity and its fea­si­bil­ity.
The first argu­ment against the pro­gram is that, accord­ing to the pro­grams oppo­nents, there is no need to change the cur­rent war­head designs. In the exam­ple of the pit reman­u­fac­tur­ing debate dis­cussed in my last post, this means that the pro­grams oppo­nents believe that the new pits have been proven con­clu­sively to be as reli­able as the old pits, and can be incor­po­rated into exist­ing war­heads.
(Dr. Jeanloz, by the way, is on the record as an RRW “skep­tic,” rather than an out­right critic, but sev­eral other experts have offered views sim­i­lar to his as argu­ments against RRW.)
The sec­ond main argu­ment against RRW is that a sig­nif­i­cantly mod­i­fied war­head design which has not been tested can­not pos­si­bly be as reli­able as a tested design. Critics who advance this argu­ment point out that inde­pen­dent assess­ments pre­dat­ing RRW by gov­ern­ment advi­sory bod­ies such as the JASONs found that “entirely new designs for the nuclear sub­sys­tem… would be expected to require nuclear-​​explosion (under­ground) test­ing before being accepted for the endur­ing stock­pile.“
This assess­ment con­tra­dicts the NNSAs assess­ment that the RRW designs will “be cer­ti­fi­able and pro­ducible with­out nuclear test­ing” even though the plans call for “redesign­ing” the war­heads’ nuclear sub­sys­tems. Nuclear test­ing is almost uni­ver­sally regarded as a very bad thing the Bush Administration is for­mally com­mit­ted to con­tin­u­ing the cur­rent test­ing mora­to­rium, in no small part due to con­cern that a U.S. test would inevitably lead to Chinese and Russian tests.
Critics who cite this con­cern point out that even if the nuclear weapons com­plex ever brought itself to cer­tify a war­head design which had never been tested, U.S. Strategic Command, as the stockpile’s “cus­tomer,” would be unlikely to accept such an unproven prod­uct.
It is worth not­ing, by the way, that there are cer­tain mod­est mod­i­fi­ca­tions which can increase war­heads’ per­for­mance mar­gins to a cer­tain extent with­out adding uncer­tainty these changes are not con­tro­ver­sial, and are being con­sid­ered out­side of RRW.
Finally, crit­ics point out that the program’s sup­posed con­tri­bu­tions to the goal of “stock­pile trans­for­ma­tion” are not con­sis­tent with each other.
On the one hand, RRW is sup­posed to lead to long-​​term cost-​​savings by pro­duc­ing a stock­pile which can be main­tained with­out a com­plex stock­pile stew­ard­ship effort. On the other hand, RRW is also sup­posed to “con­tin­u­ously exer­cise” the nuclear weapons com­plex and “enable” the tran­si­tion to a “respon­sive infra­struc­ture.“
The two goals are clearly incom­pat­i­ble a good-​​for-​​a-​​century war­head design which met Congress’ goal of reduc­ing the cost and com­plex­ity of stock­pile main­te­nance would not meet NNSA’s goal (and Congress’ sec­ondary goal) of keep­ing the pro­duc­tion com­plex “exer­cised” for a pos­si­ble future arms race. (Ryan jokes that to some peo­ple, RRW seems to stand for “Reliably Recurring Work.”)
As the Congressional Research Service points out, “RRW is a new pro­gram with no spe­cific, tan­gi­ble prod­uct yet defined. In decid­ing how to pro­ceed on RRW, Congress has a num­ber of options avail­able to it.” It is pos­si­ble that a ver­sion of the pro­gram will emerge which can sat­isfy the con­cerns of all sides of those who worry that the cur­rent stock­pile stew­ard­ship par­a­digm will lead to a dan­ger­ous accu­mu­la­tion of minor changes, and of those who worry that a sig­nif­i­cant over­haul of war­head designs will destroy, rather than for­tify, con­fi­dence in the stock­pile. Until such a ver­sion emerges, though, we can expect to see both con­fu­sion and con­tro­versy con­tinue to rage.
– Haninah Levine

In my last post, I dis­cussed the ori­gins of the Reliable Replacement Warhead pro­gram (RRW). In this post, I’ll look at one exam­ple of a change which is being made in the man­u­fac­tur­ing of an essen­tial nuclear com­po­nent, and at what this change means for the debate over RRW.
The com­po­nent in ques­tion here is the “pit,” the sphere of plu­to­nium which sits at the heart of a ther­monu­clear warhead’s pri­mary stage.
During the Cold War, pits were made at the Rocky Flats site in Colorado. After Rocky Flats was shut down in 1989, the United States was left with­out the abil­ity to make new pits for its stock­pile.
In 1996, under the lead­er­ship of then-​​director of Los Alamos Siegfried Hecker, the Department of Energy started work­ing on a new pit man­u­fac­tur­ing line at Los Alamos Technical Area 55 (TA-​​55). A decade later, replace­ment pits are finally start­ing to roll off the line at TA-​​55. But a debate has bro­ken out over whether or not those pits are func­tion­ally the same as those made at Rocky Flats. As a result, the new pits are still wait­ing to receive their cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for stock­pile use.
At the heart of the debate lies pre­cisely the sort of improved man­u­fac­tur­ing tech­nique which I men­tioned in the last post. At Rocky Flats, plu­to­nium was shaped into pits by stamp­ing, fold­ing and weld­ing, in whats known as a wrought process. Unfortunately, the wrought process is very infrastructure-​​intensive, mak­ing it good for an industrial-​​scale facil­ity like Rocky Flats, but less so for a smaller facil­ity like TA-​​55. The wrought process also cre­ates lots of dan­ger­ous plu­to­nium saw­dust and shav­ings, and leaves behind a prod­uct with an uneven micro­scopic tex­ture.
So under Dr. Heckers enthu­si­as­tic lead­er­ship, TA-​​55 devel­oped a new tech­nique for mak­ing pits. The new pits are made using a cast process that is, molten plu­to­nium (alloyed with some other met­als for sta­bil­ity) is poured into pit-​​shaped molds. The cast process, if done prop­erly, pro­duces a much more uni­form prod­uct, with less com­plex equip­ment and less haz­ard.
Fast for­ward ten years.

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In my last post, I talked about the ori­gins of the Stockpile Stewardship and briefly described the three activ­i­ties which make up stock­pile stew­ard­ship: stock­pile sci­ence, stock­pile sur­veil­lance and war­head life exten­sion. In this post, Id like to dis­cuss the chal­lenge of life exten­sion in greater detail, and show how this chal­lenge has moti­vated the debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead pro­gram (RRW).
The goal of the life exten­sion pro­grams (LEP) is to add any­where from 20 to 30 years onto the (nom­i­nal) design life­times of the var­i­ous war­head mod­els in the stock­pile (of course, “there is no such thing as a ‘design life’”…). The W87 ICBM war­head became the first war­head to com­plete its LEP in 2004. The B61 bomb war­head and the W76 SLBM war­head the first war­head slated for replace­ment under RRW are cur­rently under­go­ing LEPs, while the W80 cruise-​​missile war­heads LEP was recently can­celed by the Nuclear Weapons Council in order to free up funds for RRW.
A life exten­sion pro­gram is a sort of 50,000-mile tune-​​up for a nuclear war­head: limited-​​lifetime com­po­nents such as bat­ter­ies and neu­tron gen­er­a­tors are replaced, along with any other parts “cables, elas­tomers, valves, pads, foam sup­ports, teleme­tries, and mis­cel­la­neous parts” which may have degraded. Most of these replace­ments take place out­side the war­heads nuclear explo­sives pack­age, how­ever.
While these tasks sound mun­dane, man­u­fac­tur­ing the replace­ment com­po­nents is no mean task. Manufacturing lines still exist for some com­po­nents, but in other cases, lines have been dis­man­tled, sup­pli­ers have can­celed prod­uct lines or gone out of busi­ness, and health, safety and envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions have grown stricter.
In these cases, a dilemma arises: should the nuclear pro­duc­tion com­plex go to extreme lengths to recre­ate the processes needed to reman­u­fac­ture these com­po­nents exactly accord­ing to the orig­i­nal spec­i­fi­ca­tions? Or should they look for ways to make replace­ment parts that will work just as well, if not bet­ter? Since the part has to be replaced any­way, why not make main­te­nance eas­ier for future gen­er­a­tions already?
For com­po­nents out­side the war­heads’ nuclear explo­sives pack­age, mod­i­fy­ing the man­u­fac­tur­ing specs is an attrac­tive option, since each new com­po­nent can be tested exhaus­tively with­out under­ground nuclear test­ing.
If too many of these minor changes pile up, though, a sort of “Grandfathers axe” effect may kick in: if enough com­po­nents have been mod­i­fied and replaced, is the war­head design still the same one that was once tested? For this rea­son, the guid­ing phi­los­o­phy has been “change-​​control dis­ci­pline”: make the fewest num­ber of changes pos­si­ble, and only after prov­ing exhaus­tively that the changes will not affect war­head char­ac­ter­is­tics.
For nuclear com­po­nents, the prob­lem is more seri­ous. While there are ways to inves­ti­gate how a nuclear com­po­nent will behave when det­o­nated com­puter sim­u­la­tions which model the com­po­nent, dynamic and quasi-​​static exper­i­ments which mea­sure its rel­e­vant phys­i­cal prop­er­ties, sub-​​critical exper­i­ments which assess its behav­ior under con­di­tions sim­i­lar to actual det­o­na­tion none of these meth­ods has the same doubt-​​erasing effect as an under­ground nuclear test.
Any mod­i­fi­ca­tion to proven designs for nuclear com­po­nents is there­fore bound to cause anx­i­ety as long as under­ground nuclear test­ing is for­bid­den.
Conceptually, this is where the Reliable Replacement Warhead pro­gram (RRW) enters the picture.

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If you’ve been fol­low­ing the debate over the Reliable Replacement Warhead pro­gram (RRW) and if you haven’t, you should be there’s a good chance that you’re con­fused over how this pro­gram is sup­posed to go about rev­o­lu­tion­iz­ing the U.S. nuclear weapons stock­pile. Is RRW a “pro­gram to improve the reli­a­bil­ity [and] longevity… of exist­ing weapons and their com­po­nents”? Or is it an “enabler” for a long-​​term goal of build­ing “new (or replace­ment) war­heads”?
If you’re con­fused, you’re not alone. Even the Congressional Research Service dryly observed that “many find RRW to be con­fus­ing because it is a new pro­gram and descrip­tions of it have changed.” (The CRS study linked here, by the way, is an absolute must-​​read for any­one who’s inter­ested in these issues.)
Just last week, Stephen I. Schwartz wrote here on Defense Tech that even as con­tro­versy still swirls over the first RRW war­head pro­gram, the labs are devel­op­ing plans for as many as three other RRW war­heads and that the end-​​result of RRW will be not a fixed, long-​​lived war­head design, but rather “steady-​​state pro­duc­tion of war­heads for deploy­ment.“
In order to under­stand what RRW is, and what it might evolve into, its impor­tant to take a step back and look at where the U.S. stock­pile is today, and how it got there. Over the next few days, Im going to do my best to sum­ma­rize the his­tory of stock­pile stew­ard­ship in the U.S. and the debates which led to the cre­ation of RRW (which I wrote about in greater detail here). Then we can get to the meat of what RRW is all about.
Below the jump the Cold War ends, and Stockpile Stewardship is (re)born.

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