Questions raised about certification of new nuclear warhead design
The Bush administrattion wants to replace cold war-era nuclear warheads with a newly designed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW); trouble is, a 1992 U.S.-Russia treaty imposed a moratorium on all nuclear tests, so the new design cannot be tested
The Bush administration is planing to replace the U.S. cold war-era stockpile of nuclear weapons with a new, safer nuclear arsenal. Trouble is, the plan, controversial from the start, is now drawing fresh criticism as an independent panel of scientists has concluded that “substantial work remains” before the next generation of warheads is fit for certification. In a report released on 1 October, the JASON defense advisory group, which consults regularly for the government on technical and defense issues, said there was insufficient peer review of the design for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). The RRW is to be built without compromising a 1992 U.S. moratorium on all nuclear tests. The report also calls for an extensive battery of non-nuclear subcritical tests to make sure that the new warhead will work as required. Geoff Brumfiel writes in Nature (sub. req.) that panel member Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas in Austin, said that the design’s “approach is valid,” but “in lieu of new underground tests, we feel that peer review should have a bigger role” in the certification process. At present, the internal peer-review process of the three involved labs looks only at aspects of the design, not the entire system, he says.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency responsible for maintaining the U.S. nuclear stockpile, says that the RRW would be more dependable than the current generation of cold war weapons, and would contain new safeguards which would prevent its use if it fell into the hands of terrorists. The JASON report should be regarded as but the latest setback for the program already under close congressional scrutiny. This week the NNSA also reported that its dismantlement of deployed warheads had accelerated by 146 percent during the 2007 fiscal year — three times greater than it had anticipated. Under the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty with Russia, the United States is committed to reducing its warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2012.
