Average age of U.S.
nuclear weapons will soon exceed their 15-year or so planned shelf
lifeThe development and testing of nuclear weapons has proven to be the most significant research and development project in the history of the U.S. Launched 54 years ago by the greatest assemblage of scientific and engineering talent ever gathered for one purpose, it was successful in attaining its two initial goals. One was to keep the Allies ahead of any effort by the scientifically sophisticated Germans to develop such weapons. This was achieved by default: The Germans did not try. The other goal, achieved by astounding organization and technical brilliance, was to produce a weapon that would help hasten the end of the bloodiest war ever.
By boosting the destructive power of military ordnance a thousandfold in one bound, and by another thousandfold a few years later, the nuclear weapons development programs of the U.S. and other nations have had profound impacts on the relations among nations, the basic concepts of what constitutes national security, the role of science in society, and the entire history of the post-World War II era.
But the era of weapons development and testing may be coming to an end. Today, the likelihood of a treaty banning nuclear explosions worldwide is closer than it has ever been. The Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the United Nations' (UN) negotiating arm, for the past two-and-a-half years has engaged representatives of 38 nations in development of a draft of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that would halt all nuclear explosions. The negotiators' goal is to have the draft ready for consideration by the 51st General Assembly of the UN when it convenes in September. They have found wide agreement on principles. But there is still much detail to be hammered out.
The recent progress in Geneva is a reflection of the fact that nuclear weapons development and testing is grinding to a halt anyway. After more than 1,000 nuclear weapons tests and the production of well over 70,000 nuclear warheads of about 50 different types over the past half-century, the U.S. stopped all new weapons development in 1992 when it conducted its last weapons test. And its deployed nuclear arsenal has shrunk from a peak of about 13,000 strategic warheads to about 7,000 today, with a commitment to further reduce that number to about 3,500. Reductions in the number of tactical warheads have been much greater.
The Soviet nuclear weapons program has followed a similar general profile. In all, the Soviets conducted more than 700 nuclear test explosions. Today, Russia is making stockpile cuts parallel to those of the U.S. under bilateral arms control agreements. The last nuclear test in the former Soviet Union was six years ago. France and the U.K. have also stopped testing. France completed its final test series at its testing site in Mururoa, near Tahiti, in January and shut down the site for good. The U.K. had no choice but to stop. Since 1962, it has done all its testing at the U.S.'s test site in Nevada.
The U.S., Russia, France, and the U.K. have all expressed firm support for a ban on all testing. China, the other declared nuclear weapons power, says it too favors a ban on weapons testing, but it is holding out for treaty provisions to allow nuclear explosions for peaceful purposes, such as very large scale earth excavations. The U.S. discontinued such tests in 1973, the Soviets in 1988.
In the U.S., advocates for a comprehensive test ban claim it is the best way to prevent the development of increasingly sophisticated nuclear weapons systems and the proliferation of nuclear weapons among ever more nations. Opponents reason that such a treaty will have little or no effect on the spread of nuclear weapons and that as long as the U.S.'s nuclear arsenal remains the cornerstone of defense policy, it is unwise to give up the right to test it.
In light of the intense and very public controversy that the idea of a total weapons testing ban has traditionally aroused in the U.S., the evolution over the past four years of the current consensus to actively support such a ban has been relatively sudden and less contentious. Decisions by President George Bush late in his Administration started the ball rolling for the change. The Clinton Administration has kept it moving.
The issue of whether a ban on nuclear weapons testing is a good thing or a bad thing for the U.S. has always had very large scientific components. However, nuclear weapons have been the cornerstone of U.S. national security policy for the past 50 years, and they will remain so in the near future. Hence, questions concerning them - however technical in nature - will never be left to technicians to answer. Such questions will always be answered at the highest policy-making levels.
New role for weapons laboratories
Whether there is a test ban treaty or not, current U.S. policy of no more weapons development and no more nuclear
testing is bringing profound changes to the Department of
Energy (DOE) and its three weapons laboratories - Los
Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, both in New Mexico, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Since their inception, these laboratories have been devoted to underpinning U.S. national security by developing and maintaining an irresistibly powerful and reliable nuclear arsenal capable of deterring use of nuclear or conventional forces against this country or its allies. It is the U.S.'s way of saying, "Don't even think about it."
The labs' contribution was to design, build, and test new and upgraded weapons to replace earlier ones. Today, the weapons labs face a very different task. The labs' new charge is to ensure the continued security, reliability, and safety of stockpiled warheads as they age well beyond their intended shelf lives. And this must be accomplished without testing the nuclear components of the weapons.
Stockpile maintenance without testing is a task that weapons designers have never relished. They successfully fended it off for 40 years, arguing it shouldn't even be tried - not only could it not be done, but it wouldn't be in the U.S.'s best interests to do so. And they did all they could to ensure that the few constraints that were placed on nuclear testing didn't hamper their ability to design, test, certify, and produce new weapons systems.
Now the posture of the labs is that the nuclear arsenal can probably be maintained without nuclear testing as long as they can do it their way and they are adequately funded. They are committed to making their best possible effort to do so. It will involve an extensive and quite expensive ongoing program to reshape DOE's entire weapons operation. Monitoring the stockpile will require an upgrade of the labs' already stringent quality control methods and nonnuclear testing procedures. The effort will also involve some esoteric instrumentation and research to develop a deeper understanding of the scientific fundamentals of nuclear explosions. According to weapons makers, this will help them predict and head off problems that might develop in an aging stockpile of weapons.
DOE is now in the throes of deploying such an effort. It is dubbed the Stockpile Stewardship & Management Program. Annual funding of $3.7 billion is up somewhat from what DOE spent on its weapons activities in recent years. From the nuclear weapons community's point of view, this program has its advantages. It clarifies and defines the future role of the weapons labs and ensures the continued viability of all three of them, something that had been in some doubt in this era of government downsizing. The program also promises the labs substantial - and seemingly secure - funding.
A short history of weapons testing
A verifiable ban on nuclear weapons testing has been an avowed goal of every
U.S. Administration since the 1950s. However, the level of enthusiasm for
it has varied greatly.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was an advocate. He was instrumental in a U.S.-Soviet testing moratorium that began in November 1958 and lasted almost three years. And he proposed and was making progress toward a permanent ban until the U-2 spy plane incident soured U.S.-Soviet relations in 1960.
The Soviets resumed their testing in September 1961 with a series of high-yield atmospheric blasts at their test site on Novaya Zemlya, an island off Russia's arctic coast. The U.S.'s immediate response was a series of 10 relatively small underground tests at the Nevada Test Site 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas. This was followed in 1962 with a record 96 U.S. tests, many in the atmosphere.
Average age of U.S.
nuclear weapons will soon exceed their 15-year or so planned shelf
lifeAll this Soviet and U.S. activity, especially the tests in the atmosphere, revived worldwide public concern over the environmental and health impacts of nuclear explosions. This concern had been simmering since fallout from a 1954 U.S. test in the Pacific showered a Japanese trawler, making its 23 crew members ill with radiation sickness and probably killing one of them. Linus Pauling earned his second Nobel Prize - this time for peace, his first was for chemistry - for his leading role in calling for a test ban.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy stated that the U.S. would not test in the atmosphere again, as long as nobody else did, and proposed a testing ban to President Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union. Within a few months, a test ban treaty was signed by the U.S., the U.K., and the Soviet Union in Moscow. However, it was not a comprehensive ban. Dubbed the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT), it barred nuclear weapons explosions in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. However, because of the parties' unwillingness to agree on the number of on-site inspections that would be allowed, LTBT did not ban testing underground.
At the time, Nobel Laureate chemist Glenn T. Seaborg was head of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the agency then responsible for the U.S.'s nuclear weapons program. He served in that role from 1961 to 1971. Seaborg regrets to this day that the mistrust between the superpowers prevented compromise on the inspection issue and attainment of a complete ban in 1963. "It would have prevented some of the most threatening and destabilizing weapons developments that came later," he says. Seaborg maintains that Kennedy and Khrushchev would have actively pursued a complete ban and possibly achieved one. But within a year, Kennedy was dead and Khrushchev was out of office.
In a recent interview with C&EN, Seaborg said that although LTBT was a great achievement, "it didn't put much of a cap on the arms race. Both sides learned how to make their critical tests underground. Both sides could still develop just about anything they wanted." Seaborg agrees in retrospect that the public saw LTBT much more as the solution to an environmental problem than as a start to restraining the nuclear arms race.
The only other curbs on weapons testing to date came more than 10 years later. Again, they had essentially no impact on weapons development. In 1974, President Richard M. Nixon and President Leonid Brezhnev signed the Threshold Test Ban Treaty (TTBT). It capped the size of underground weapons tests at the equivalent of 150,000 tons (150 kilotons) of TNT. For comparison, "Fat Man," the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, had a yield of 22 kilotons. In 1976, President Gerald Ford and President Brezhnev signed a treaty putting parallel restraints on peaceful nuclear explosions. That treaty was referred to as PNET.
President Jimmy Carter was not interested in having the 150-kiloton threshold ratified. Instead, he opened talks with the Soviets aimed at a comprehensive ban. Negotiators made considerable progress, even on the sensitive on-site inspection issue. But in the end, Carter backed off, at least partly because of resistance from the weapons laboratory directors and fear that a ratification fight over a comprehensive test ban would detract from other arms control initiatives.
A total test ban was not given high priority during President Ronald Reagan's eight years in office. He broke off negotiations on it. In 1983, Reagan launched an effort to develop a defense against ballistic missiles, the Strategic Defense Initiative. One proposal was to explore basing it on space-based X-ray lasers fired by nuclear explosives, a system that would have involved much nuclear testing.
However, under pressure from a Congress that was getting restless over the lack of any effort to restrain testing and was threatening to cut off funding for tests, the Reagan Administration in 1987 initiated a long-term, three-part program with the Soviets. First was to be a series of joint tests at U.S. and Soviet testing sites to ascertain if the 150-kiloton limit could be monitored with confidence, thus opening up the threshold treaties to ratification. This was to be followed by exploration of possible further testing constraints and finally by consideration of a total test ban. The Senate finally ratified TTBT and PNET in 1990.
Recent developments
If anything, President Bush was initially even less favorably inclined toward a total test ban than had been his predecessor. He didn't repudiate the Reagan plan, but he stated the U.S. was not interested in considering any further
testing constraints until it had gained considerable experience with the newly ratified threshold treaties. However,
Bush did call a halt to U.S. nuclear weapons development
and ordered the withdrawal of many deployed nuclear
weapons systems.
In September 1992, Bush signed the energy and water development appropriation bill for 1993 that funded, among other things, the Department of Energy. The bill included an amendment introduced by Sens. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), James Exon (D-Neb.), and George Mitchell (D-Maine) that extended the halt in U.S. testing until July 1993 and called on the U.S. to work toward achieving a comprehensive test ban by September 1996. The bill also allowed up to 15 tests, including up to three for the British, in the interim. The 12 U.S. tests had to be concerned with the reliability or safety of existing weapons, not with development of new ones. In addition, the tests had to be meaningful. This meant that if any warhead problems were uncovered, they had to be fixed.
When Bill Clinton - who in his presidential campaign asserted he favored a test ban - came into office, the weapons laboratories were planning the 12 U.S. tests allowed under the funding legislation. Clinton's secretary of energy, Hazel R. O'Leary, was not experienced in nuclear weapons matters. So she invited the directors of the laboratories and their weapons program heads to come to Washington, D.C., to brief her on why the planned tests were needed and why continued nuclear testing was essential to maintaining the reliability and safety of the stockpile. After a two-day meeting, to which she also invited some outside experts, she remained unconvinced of the need for further testing.
Among the invited experts were Frank von Hippel, who later served in Clinton's Office of Science & Technology Policy, and Ray E. Kidder. Von Hippel, a physicist who has long been involved in nuclear weapons issues, is professor of public policy and international affairs at Princeton University. Kidder is a veteran (now retired) physicist from Lawrence Livermore. In 1987, he prepared, at the request of the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, an independent report on the need for explosive testing of nuclear weapons in the stockpile. He found that a high degree of confidence in the stockpile was justified, even in the absence of such tests.
Kidder says O'Leary's stand against further testing helped the weapons laboratories accept that the ball game really was over for explosive nuclear testing and that they had better adjust to it by getting behind a program to look after the stockpile without testing. Von Hippel adds that the laboratories "did not fight hard for their 12 tests" and essentially went along with O'Leary's decision that their future lay in developing an adequately funded nonnuclear custodial program for the stockpile.
O'Leary's antitesting stance in 1993 precipitated a two-year debate within the Administration. On one side with O'Leary were John D. Holum, head of the Arms Control & Disarmament Agency (ACDA), and John H. Gibbons, assistant to the president for science and technology. On the other side were the Department of Defense and other agencies concerned directly with national security. They were understandably nervous about the long-term viability of a nuclear stockpile that could never be tested. And they explored ways to delay or mitigate the full impact of a total testing ban.
According to von Hippel, O'Leary's ability to carry the weapons labs with her was key to subsequent developments. In earlier times, the labs had always been uncompromising on the need for testing and willing to take their case directly to the Defense Department, Congress, or even, on at least one occasion, the president.
In successive steps, the proposed test program was reduced and postponed. It was dropped altogether in January 1995, when Clinton extended the U.S. testing moratorium indefinitely.
A major internal dispute revolved around the question of whether CTBT should be a low-threshold treaty that set the limit at yields of 1 kiloton or lower. This issue was resolved unambiguously for the U.S. on Aug. 11, when Clinton announced that his Administration would seek to negotiate a "true zero" test ban that disallowed even so-called hydronuclear tests that produce explosive force equivalent to a few pounds of TNT.
Negotiating the test ban treaty
ACDA head Holum says the recommendation to Clinton to seek a true zero test
ban was a consensus of the government agencies involved. He says it was
based on several factors, including the stewardship program and an
influential 1995 report from the Jason Committee - an independent group of
senior nongovernment scientists that has been advising the government on
security issues for many years.
The Jason report stated that stockpiled warheads can be adequately maintained with a well-organized stewardship program in the absence of nuclear testing. But those doing the monitoring must be content to remanufacture them, when necessary, as closely as possible to original specifications and to exert extreme caution about trying to improve them. The report concludes that very low yield nuclear experiments would do little worthwhile to increase confidence in the stockpile.
Holum points out that the negotiators in Geneva "still have a lot of work to do." But he is confident that by the time they finish their work on June 28, the negotiators will have produced a treaty draft that can go forward for consideration by the UN General Assembly in September.
As to the value of a total test ban to the U.S., he points out that in light of all the tests the U.S. has already conducted, "any small increment of additional knowledge we might gain from more tests is dramatically outweighed by the value of preventing others from testing."
However, Holum stresses, one of the greatest remaining dangers to obtaining a satisfactory treaty is "the extent to which other nations underestimate U.S. willingness to walk away if its bottom lines are not satisfied." This remark is apparently in response to a position taken by India in the Geneva negotiations that CTBT must firmly commit the U.S. and other nuclear powers to a specific timetable for total nuclear disarmament. Holum believes good progress is being made on nuclear arms control on a step-by-step basis by other means and that formally linking it to CTBT might jeopardize Senate ratification.
Holum says the U.S. has made concessions in the CTBT negotiations. He points to the acceptance of the true zero definition, which involved giving up hydronuclear tests, and the dropping of a U.S. proposal for an easy-out clause. That proposal was based on the expected life spans of current weapons. "These were tough decisions," he says. "The bottom lines for the U.S. include its ability to use its own technical means to detect possible clandestine tests and satisfactory provisions for timely and effective on-site inspection of suspicious activities."
The ACDA director acknowledges there is worldwide interest in further progress in nuclear disarmament. But he is sure this should not be linked to CTBT. He also has doubts that negotiations to that end should be done through the Conference on Disarmament. In Holum's view, "It would be very hard for representatives of 38 countries - and possibly as many as 60 if the group is expanded - to negotiate over the nuclear weapons of just five nations."
It is this division of the world into nations with nuclear weapons and those without that is formalized in the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). It has has been in force since 1970. Today, more than 150 nations are parties to NPT.
Under this treaty, the five original nuclear powers can keep their nuclear weapons. The other parties to the treaty, by definition, don't have such weapons. And they won't try to obtain them. In other words, NPT strives to prevent so-called horizontal nuclear proliferation to nations beyond the original five. This issue has taken on greater importance with the end of the Cold War and recent moves by Iraq, Pakistan, and North Korea toward acquiring nuclear weapons. But NPT does nothing to stem so-called vertical proliferation - it puts no constraints on the five existing nuclear arsenals.
International pressure for a test ban dates back 33 years to the preamble to LTBT. This commits the U.S., the Soviet Union, and the U.K. to seeking "the discontinuance of all test explosions of nuclear weapons for all time" and to "continue negotiations to this end."
A further sign of the growing impatience of the nonnuclear countries is the signing this year of treaties that make Africa and the South Pacific nuclear-free zones. Latin America was declared such a zone in 1967.
Pierce S. Corden, who heads the ACDA group backstopping and instructing U.S. negotiators in Geneva, says, "With a little luck and a lot of willingness in a number of capitals to bite bullets, we should have treaty text by the last week of June." In his opinion, there are no compelling arguments to renew testing. "On the contrary," he maintains, "the compelling argument for international stability and security is in the direction of putting together additional constraints on everybody's nuclear program. The price we pay is the constraints on our own program."
According to Corden, the treaty will definitely call for a true zero ban on both weapons-related and peaceful nuclear explosions, despite China's position. He explains there is already wide agreement on the monitoring system of seismic instruments and other sensors that will be put into place globally. However, details of how data from this system will be monitored and acted upon and of how on-site inspections will be conducted still need to be resolved.
Another tricky issue, Corden acknowledges, is the terms under which the treaty will go into force. This usually just involves ratification by a specified number of countries. However, for CTBT, the five nuclear powers likely will have to be included in that number. This will give veto power to China, which has said it will continue with weapons tests until a ban goes into effect.
Corden says experience with the Chemical Weapons Convention, which should come up for Senate ratification very soon, has been very helpful in developing the organization and mechanisms that will be needed to run CTBT. However, there are differences. For instance, for the test ban there is no equivalent of a chemical industry that is subject to inspection.
The labs and the stewardship program
As a DOE pamphlet on the Stockpile Stewardship & Management Program puts it: "A new approach to ensuring confidence in the U.S. stockpile is needed. This new approach
must rely on scientific understanding and expert judgment,
not on nuclear testing and the development of new weapons,
to predict, identify, and correct problems affecting the safety
and reliability of the stockpile." It adds, "Meeting this challenge will be neither inexpensive nor without risk."
Such risk is addressed in the safeguards President Clinton established to define the conditions under which the U.S. would enter CTBT. For instance, the directors of the weapons labs are to certify confidence in the stockpiled weapons every year. If the secretaries of energy and of defense, as advised by the directors of the weapons laboratories, ever lose confidence in a critical weapons type, the president, in consultation with Congress, could consider invoking the supreme national interest clause of CTBT and withdrawing.
In addition to their stewardship activities, the weapons laboratories are to remain poised to develop weapons again, if called upon. They are charged with "preservation of the core intellectual and technical competencies of the U.S. in nuclear weapons." The Nevada Test Site is to be kept open and capable of conducting underground nuclear tests.
The weapons laboratories have always had responsibility for the reliability and safety of the weapons they design. They have never relied directly on nuclear explosive tests to meet it. Nuclear tests are far too expensive to have ever been used in a statistical sense by taking random samples of weapon types from the stockpile and exploding them.
However, until 1992, the labs had the option of testing whenever they needed to check for reliability or safety. An example would be after they had detected a possible problem with a stockpiled warhead and had to modify it.
In addition, the experience gained from testing new warheads has given weapons makers great confidence in their designs. Data from that testing have enabled them to build and confirm computer models of nuclear events. This accumulated knowledge from testing has been essential to weapons makers' judgments on the reliability of weapons already in the stockpile.
The major component of this judgment, however, has been information garnered from the stockpile evaluation program. This has been in place for 35 years and uses a statistical approach. It has evaluated the reliability of the nonnuclear components of 13,800 out of 70,000 weapons. In recent times, about 11 weapons of each type have been evaluated every year. One is totally dismantled, the other 10 are returned to the stockpile.
Siegfried S. Hecker, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says although baby-sitting a stockpile of weapons "may seem like very dull work, it is really fascinating, challenging, and sobering." As he explains, nuclear warheads contain organic materials and explosives that change with age. They also contain plutonium, a very active metal that corrodes and, because it is radioactive, has constantly changing nuclear and chemical structures. And in the future, warheads will have to be kept for decades beyond the 15- or 20-year lifetime assumed when they were designed. The oldest weapons in today's arsenal are already more than 20 years old. The average is 13 years, as high as it has ever been. And with no new weapons in the pipeline, that average will grow by one year every year.
The halt in weapons development and testing by President Bush in September 1992 "was a turning point for the labs," Hecker explains. "Some weapons designers hoped then that the testing pause was only temporary and planned some very useful things to do with the permitted 12 tests. But with the halt, it was clear we had to switch to a science-based paradigm."
From the point of view of the weapons labs, according to Hecker, the decisions to seek a total test ban, stop testing indefinitely, and build a science-based approach to stockpile maintenance have had some positive aspects. "It raised the visibility of nuclear weapons again in Washington by acknowledging them as still being the cornerstone of defense. The stewardship program reinforces the fact that nuclear weapons are still important in this country. That means a lot to our people, and [it] had a very positive effect on the way they think about working here."
Hecker says it was difficult to convince DOE's military customers that the national labs can take care of the stockpile without nuclear testing. "They have a show-me attitude. It is our challenge to make sure that the right things are being done today so that 20 years from now, when the test history has faded and experienced personnel go away, we will still have a system that will let the president have confidence in the stockpile."
George H. Miller, long-time head of Lawrence Livermore's weapons program, says: "From a technical point of view, the best way to maintain a stockpile is nuclear testing. But the government has decided - no testing. So our job is to put the highest priority on being able to look back 10 years from now and say we didn't reach the point [when] we had to tell the president he had to go test."
The stewardship program has two overlapping aspects. One is a maintenance and quality control challenge. It involves an upgraded stockpile evaluation program and a policy of timely parts replacement and remanufacture. The other involves a quest for a much better understanding of the fundamentals of nuclear explosions. This is a scientific challenge.
As several weapons designers explain, the labs' rationale for taking up the scientific challenge is that although they are excellent at designing new nuclear weapons, there are large gaps in knowledge of the incredibly complex events that take place within the billionths of a second it takes for a nuclear device to explode. As long as the labs could confirm their designs with a nuclear test, this lack of detailed knowledge wasn't critical. Now, when they can't test, they believe it is, especially since they have to tackle the extra task of understanding the effects of aging on the weapons.
A key aspect of this scientific effort will be an orders-of-magnitude increase in the labs' computer capabilities. This is being handled largely by Sandia, and it involves outside contractors. Such an enormous increase is needed because the labs plan to greatly improve their ability to study and model the nuclear explosion sequence. In lay terms, they want to go from the equivalent of two-dimensional X-rays to three-dimensional movies.
A component of the basic science program is the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility at Los Alamos, on which construction is again under way after a delay due to environmental concerns. Scientists working there will be able to develop much more detail of the primary fission stage that ignites a thermonuclear blast.
Another major new facility is the National Ignition Facility. It will very likely be at Lawrence Livermore, but the final decision on its location will be made in the fall. It will be, in essence, a set of huge lasers that will provide much greater insight into the secondary stage of a nuclear explosion.
The balance within the stewardship program is raising some questions. Is the basic science part a bit excessive? Will it tempt the national labs to "improve" the weapons in the stockpile - rather than just maintain and remanufacture them - thus raising reliability issues? Is it really needed, as the labs claim, to attract and retain high-caliber personnel?
Richard L. Garwin is one who has such questions. He worked on the development of the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s. He has been a member of Jason for decades and was involved in the committee's influential 1995 report. In 1978, he coauthored a letter to President Carter with Norris E. Bradbury, director of Los Alamos from 1945 until 1970, and J. Carson Marks, former head of Los Alamos' Theoretical Division. The letter made the same point then that Jason did in 1995 - that the reliability of nuclear weapons can be ensured without nuclear testing, as long as nobody changes them.
"There has always been a problem of overconfidence in making changes in weapons simply because they seem desirable," Garwin says. He argues that "the whole idea of having challenging work for designers in order to retain competent people misses the point entirely. What you really need right now are people who will maintain the stockpile, be alert, and have good sense - not people who have wild ideas about new things. "
Victor H. Reis, DOE's assistant secretary for defense programs, and to a large extent initiator of the stewardship program, sees things differently. He says there is some analogy between the stewardship program and wind tunnels. "If you do some wind tunnel stuff, you can cut down on the flight testing. But if you ever can't do flight testing, you need a very, very good wind tunnel."
Lawrence Livermore's Miller is more direct, if less poetic, in support of the fundamental science component of the stewardship program. He stresses that the "basic science and simulation facilities are designed to allow the labs to get the experimental data that will confirm that replacement parts and remanufactured weapons will function as intended."
The final steps
The last step for CTBT will be ratification by the U.S. Senate. If that
doesn't happen, the treaty won't happen. The prognosis looks good for
ratification at this time. Support for treaty negotiations during the past
four years has been relatively noncontentious and bipartisan.
A still active senior weapons official points out to C&EN that those who have always opposed a testing ban "are still out there. They haven't gone away. They just aren't in positions of influence any more." But he also points out it only takes a small group - 34 senators - to stop CTBT.
Before advocates of CTBT start counting their chickens, there are four things to remember. First, the negotiators in Geneva still have a great deal to get done by the end of next month. Second, a satisfactory draft must be ready for signature by this fall. Third, CTBT will ban all nuclear explosions of any size throughout the world. Fourth, ratification of the threshold test ban, which just limits underground explosions to 150 kilotons, took 16 years.
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