FEATURE ARTICLE

May 2005

Nuclear Programs Receive Money for Upgrades

By Joe Pappalardo

The Energy Department is allocating more money for monitoring and improving the nation’s aging supply of nuclear weapons and concurrently is laying a foundation for the construction of new warheads.

Two paramount issues face the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). First, the agency must keep the nuclear arsenal safe and reliable, and, second, it must draft a plan to keep the weapons operational for future decades.

This requires opening new facilities to create more critical parts, developing technology for monitoring the current stockpile and working out a blueprint for the creating of replacement warheads.

“We are gaining a more complete understanding of the stockpile every year,” Linton Brooks, NNSA administrator, told a House Armed Services Committee panel. “This is made possible by using … cutting-edge scientific and engineering tools, as well as extensive laboratory and flight tests.”

The United States’ nuclear stockpile is drawing down to levels stipulated in the Treaty of Moscow—between 1,700 and 2,200 operationally deployed strategic warheads. The stockpile of warheads will also be reduced, according to a 2004 report to Congress. The government’s new posture is set to be in place by 2012.

While NNSA’s 2006 budget request for weapons activities has only risen less than 1 percent from 2005, some specific areas may receive greater attention. Work directly related to the stockpile has risen 11 percent to $1.4 billion, money that has been dedicated to life extension programs of existing weapons.

The funding increase would modernize three other systems—B61, W76 and W80 nuclear weapons. These projects are to be competed between 2006 and 2009, Brooks said. A rehabilitation program for the W87 “Peacekeeper” was finished in September. Scientists modernize these weapons using hydrodynamic tests, laser studies, flight test diagnostics and complex modeling and simulation in place of actual explosive testing. In the early 1990’s the United States instituted a moratorium on such tests.

Ironically, the modeling and simulation work being done to support this effort has decreased nearly 5 percent from 2005’s allocated funding. The most recent request for advanced simulations and computing is $660.8 million. Much of this work will build on existing programs—tweaking the physics and radiological material models to reflect new research and better match the systems next in line for rehabilitation, such as the W76 “Poseidon,” a 100-kiloton warhead deployed in submarines.

Other aspects of the stockpile rehabilitation program have been trimmed.

These proposed cuts are aimed at mitigating the cost increases of other programs, including some that permit the United States to build new warheads.

A pit is the fissile core of a warhead, the nuclear trigger that explodes to spark a larger thermonuclear explosion. All pits currently in the U.S. nuclear stockpile were made at the Rocky Flats Plant, near Denver, which opened in 1952. Since operations there ceased in 1989, the Energy Department has been unable to make complete nuclear warheads.

NNSA last year announced a five-part plan to restore pit-production capability. A small facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., has been created to fabricate pits, initially for the W88 warheads used on Trident II missiles, and develop procedures to certify them.

Officials also announced their intention to draft a plan for a “modern pit facility” with a higher capacity, in hopes it would be operational in 2021—an estimated $2 billion to $5 billion project. NNSA has asked for $248.8 million in the 2006 budget for its overall pit effort, including $7.7 million that would be devoted specifically to the design of the modern pit facility, Brooks said.

One key piece of data being studied at the labs is the rate at which pits deteriorate. The estimated lifetime of the current pits are between 45 to 60 years, and if studies show that the pits need to be replaced on the low end of that scale, the production rate could surge to keep the required number of warheads operational. Any political fight over the weapons could also change the production schedule, Brooks said.

Another effort to design a new warhead, which was quietly funded in 2005, will likely receive another boost. The Reliable Replacement Warhead received $9 million this year, and NNSA is asking for a 4 percent increase in 2006. Arms control critics complained that the effort would lead to testing of the new weapon, but in his testimony Brooks disagreed.

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