Last week Defense News published an editorial entitled “Build New Nukes,” which, naturally, argued that the U.S. needs to design and build new nuclear weapons in order to maintain its nuclear deterrent.  The editorial (sorry for not posting a link; it’s subscription only) made a number of objectionable claims, including:

-“Yet while other members of the nuclear club continue to field newer weapons, America’s arsenal remains stagnant.”

-“The trouble is, these sophisticated weapons lose reliability and predictability as time passes-a worrisome fact given their enormous destructive power.”

-“And since making nuclear weapons is an exacting science without civil parallel, if you’re not making them you’re losing the skills needed to make them.  The U.S. Navy discovered this a decade ago, when it set out to refurbish the W76 warheads that top its submarines’ Trident ballistic missiles. Very quickly, engineers realized they’d forgotten key skills to make a critical component, skills that took time and money to relearn.”

-“But failing to develop new U.S. weapons may actually hinder counterproliferation aims. If the countries under America’s nuclear umbrella question its reliability, they make seek nuclear arms of their own.”

To it’s credit, the editors ran a letter to the editor in response by yours truly in this week’s edition.  Coupled with Daryl’s excellent piece, “Transform U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy,” the views of the arms control and nonproliferation community are well represented in this week’s Defense News.  Below is the text of my letter:

U.S. Nuke Safety

In the editorial in the Aug. 17 issue, “Build New Nukes,” the Editors argue that the U.S. must design and build new nuclear weapons in order to maintain the reliability and credibility of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  However, the evidence marshaled in support of this contention does not do the heavy lifting the Editors think it does.

First, since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has successfully maintained the reliability and credibility of its existing nuclear arsenal through a variety of programs under the rubric of “stockpile stewardship” and “life extension.”  No other nuclear power believes that the U.S. is allowing its nuclear deterrent to remain stagnant, and for good reason: the U.S. nuclear stockpile of over 5,000 weapons and its supporting infrastructure remain the most sophisticated and modern on the planet.  

Due to stockpile stewardship, we know far more about our nuclear warheads now than we ever have. Thanks to this knowledge, our confidence in the current arsenal is high and likely to increase over time.  

Second, a recent GAO report on the W76 life extension program concluded that while maintaining and refurbishing U.S. nuclear weapons is a difficult task, the delays in this particular program had as much if not more to do with poor planning and mismanagement than with a lack of technical expertise.

Finally, nearly all U.S. allies protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella, including Japan, are also advocates for more robust U.S. leadership on nonproliferation and disarmament.  The most important factor in an ally’s confidence in the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella is its confidence in the strength of its political relationship with the United States.  

If political relations fray, then the credibility of the U.S. nuclear umbrella will be perceived to be weak, no matter how many new nuclear weapons the United States possesses.

Kingston Reif
Deputy director of nuclear non-proliferation
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Washington

Some interesting developments out of Iran on the nuclear front.  Via the New York Times Michael Slackman:

While much attention has been focused on Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to try to pack his cabinet with loyalists, his choice of a well-respected physicist, Ali Akbar Salehi, as a vice president and the head of Iran’s nuclear agency has been greeted in the diplomatic and scientific community as signaling a possibly less dogmatic, more pragmatic nuclear policy.

Two other recent developments have added to that perception. The first, according to diplomats and scientists, is recent indications that Iran may be prepared to be more cooperative with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The second was Mr. Ahmadinejad’s decision to retain the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, and not to move a more conservative ally into that position.

Slackman of course notes that “experts” aren’t quite sure what to make of these moves.  A calculated softening?  Another pledge that Iran will later renounce?  A product of the disarray that still grips the Iranian political system in the wake of the election?  PONI thinks it could be a reaction to the (non?)story surrounding whether the IAEA has hidden information about the military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program, and subsequent demands from the U.S., UK, and others that whatever information has been hidden be included in the next IAEA report on Iran.

Rather than venture a guess based on speculation, this Wisconsin native is headed to the Brewers-Nats game.  Go Brewers!

In July, the CTC Sentinel published an analysis stating that over the past two years, several Pakistani nuclear weapons sites have come under attack. Shaun Gregory, the author of the report and an expert on Pakistani security, pointed to three instances where Pakistani sites were targeted by militants:

…an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites.

Pakistan’s problem emanates in part from the location of its nuclear facilities. Worried about their vulnerability to an Indian invasion or strike, Pakistan placed many of its complexes around Islamabad and in the northwestern portion of the country. With the rise in militant extremism, many of these facilities now find themselves in or near areas populated by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda…

Pakistani nuclear establishment insiders with extremist or monetary interests might collaborate with an outside group to access a nuclear facility or smuggle out materials. This is a real danger considering that the founding fathers of Pakistan’s nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan and Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, both conspired to sell nuclear technology for profit.

Gregory emphasized that Pakistan possesses an extensive system of safeguards to protect its nuclear arsenal. He also noted that the militants were not necessarily targeting the facilities for their nuclear assets. As one U.S. intelligence official told the NY Times:

These are large facilities. It’s not clear that the attackers knew what these bases might have contained. In addition, the mode of attack was curious. If they were after something specific, or were truly seeking entry, you’d think they might use a different tactic, one that’s been employed elsewhere — such as a bomb followed by a small-arms assault. Simply touching off an explosive outside the gate of a base — with no follow-up — doesn’t get you inside.

In a recent ACT article and in Senate testimony, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, also voiced concerns about Pakistan’s nukes. In addition to the danger posed by insider collusion and rising instability, Mowatt-Larssen warned of the rapid expansion of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Pakistan doubled parts of its nuclear weapons complex in recent years. This drive to expand could have adverse effects on security because, as Mowatt-Larssen put it, “[m]ore of everything means more vulnerabilities, more places for something to go wrong.”

By Travis Sharp and Kingston Reif

Yesterday GSN’s Elaine Grossman had a huge scoop on the ongoing debate within the Obama administration about what is required to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear deterrent.  According to Grossman’s sources, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, with the support of Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff James Cartwright and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, tried to revive the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program at a National Security Council Principals’ Meeting in early June.  Vice President Joe Biden was the only voice of opposition, arguing that designing and building new warheads would undermine the ambitious nonproliferation agenda laid out by the President in Prague.

As Grossman notes, this is hardly “the final word on the warhead-replacement matter.”  The issue is clearly being hotly debated in the context of the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).  According to one senior Defense Department official consulted by Grossman, “It’s not clear where we’re going to go [on the warhead issue]….We need an effective stockpile [but] we haven’t got a consensus within the administration on what that means. And so I can’t say that, forever, this ‘replacement’ idea is verboten.”

The article is long, but a must read.  Below are some of our reactions.

History shows that once a strategic or political need for a defense program is established, the effort becomes extremely difficult to terminate.

Though they may be scaled back or transferred to “technology demonstrator” status, defense programs rarely die.

Take, for another example, the ongoing saga of a new U.S. spy satellite. The original effort, known as Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), was cancelled in 2005 after hemorrhaging $4 billion on what the Times labeled “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.” After several years operating the legacy production line in the wake of FIA’s collapse, Robert Gates and Dennis Blair announced this spring that work would soon begin on the Next Generation Electro-Optical System, which amounts to “a recovery plan from the FIA collapse.”

The technical and fiscal risks inherent in this approach are legion; nonetheless, once the rationale exists for a program – as it does (legitimately or not) for the RRW and the new spy satellite – the momentum carrying the program forward becomes self-sustaining. Even dormant periods with no activity or funding can be bridged successfully.

Vacuum Tubes!?  Seriously!?

That’s the G-rated version of our initial reaction upon reading Grossman’s account of the Principal’s meeting.  In supporting Gates’ position, Gen. Cartwright apparently cited vacuum tubes as a reason why the RRW is necessary.  As Jeffrey and Kingston have detailed on more than one occasion, vacuum tubes have no place in the modernization debate (vacuum tubes are not used in the physics package of a single nuclear weapon design; they’re currently used in only three modifications of one type of nuclear weapon – the B61; they can be replaced without nuclear testing; they continue to function reliably; etc.).

Even John Harvey, the former head of NNSA’s policy planning staff, thinks the vacuum tube argument is crazy.  At the same breakfast discussion on Capitol Hill cited by Grossman where Harvey threw his support behind the “spectrum of options” approach to modernizing the stockpile, he stated that there are many different ways we could address vacuum tubes, but in any case he didn’t have a problem with them. In fact, he said there are some circumstances where they’re preferable to newer semiconductor devices!

Domestic political factors (and vacuum tubes) are dominating what should be a technical debate about how best to maintain the stockpile.

Clinton argued that the RRW might be necessary for “domestic political reasons,” particularly to win support for a START follow-on treaty and the CTBT.  Yet such a judgment is premature since the text of the START follow-on treaty does not yet exist and many Senators have not given any thought to the CTBT since the last vote in 1999.  

It’s all on the President

As an anonymous RRW opponent cited by Grossman put it, “The president has to have the guts to say no…Almost everyone else is inclined to Clinton-vintage political triangulation.”  Those who have read Janne Nolan’s An Elusive Consensus, part of which tells the story of the failed 1993-94 NPR, know that the failure of the President to intervene in support of his agenda will result in an NPR that does not reflect that agenda.