Abstract
The former head of Lawrence Livermore gives us a behind-fhe-scenes look af high-sfakes science by commiffee.
In a small room at the february 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in San Francisco, the former head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Bruce Tarter, presented a summary of a long-awaited report, The United States Nuclear Weapons Program: The Role of the Reliable Replacement Warhead. In May 2006, AAAS asked Tarter to chair the Nuclear Weapons Complex Assessment Committee to investigate the role of the reliable replacement warhead (RRW) in the future of the U.S. nuclear program.
With U.S. nuclear weapons aging, many within the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and the weapons laboratories doubt that the Stockpile Stewardship Program established in 1993 will be able to maintain the nation's nuclear deterrent. An alternative approach within Energy, the RRW Program, calls for designing and building weapons that have larger performance margins, enhanced safety and security features, less costly maintenance, and would, in effect, reanimate design and manufacturing abilities.
In short, Tarter's committee was tasked with evaluating a proposal for the most sweeping changes in the nuclear complex in decades. The proposed changes carry with them a nest of policy decisions, each of which has serious long-term repercussions for U.S. relations with allies and adversaries, and for the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide.
One would think Tarter's presentation would have warranted a larger room. It was a modest room, and Tarter is a modest man. The AAAS conference panel included John Harvey, the committee's liaison with NNSA and Gen. James E. Cartwright, the commander of the U.S. Strategic Command. Later Tarter told us, “I had read General Cartwright, but I hadn't heard him speak. I thought he was both interesting and eloquent. It was clear to me that Gen. Cartwright was the rock star that day. John and I were supporting acts.”
This is hardly the case for a man who has had a significant role in the nuclear weapons complex for the last 40 years. Tarter, 67, received his undergraduate degree in physics from MIT and his doctorate from Cornell. He started working at Livermore in 1967, and in his years as director, he led the lab's transition from nuclear weapons development to a wide range of research that has both military and non-military applications. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and AAAS, and has received the Roosevelts Gold Medal Award for Science, the NNSA's Gold Medal, and the Energy Secretary's Gold Award.
The Bulletin talked with Tarter about the AAAS report to find out what it said–and did not say.
We've never done that, so that's, in effect, a brand new protocol. But there are a lot of old ones that need to be dusted off: What is the sequence? How do we go through it? How do we certify?–all those things. We need to decide whether we have the ability to produce nuclear weapons at some point in the long-term future. Can we produce a weapon in which there is at least as high a confidence as in the existing weapons? Will it do whatever a nuclear weapon is supposed to do when it's deployed? That's why the panel said if we wanted to pick on design features, we would focus on performance and margins. That's the hedge against something happening in the long-term stockpile.
Therefore, why not build something that intrinsically has large performance margins and, in addition, is simpler to maintain, and we can easily add other features to it. So the hedge is against the failure of some of the existing legacy systems, and the long-term opportunity to have a stockpile that eventually contains weapons that have intrinsically higher reliability and are intrinsically easier to maintain.
Both the upside and the downside of outside groups, whatever the topic, is that often the outside groups do not have the same level of knowledge, and so you end up educating them, and it's not a real review no matter what it feels like.
On the other hand, suppose you had a group that had some old guys at the lab, retired guys, ones who actually did real design. And then suppose you had some young people from the labs who really hadn't gone into it very much, or were working on different programs. And then suppose you had some people who were from universities and the like, such as the Jasons or other review committees. The old people bring experience, the young people bring fresh eyes, and the outside people bring sort of general questioning, and that panel could raise topics and probe with a different angle.
Why not take the extra step? You may not learn much more, but you educate a lot of people, and you've given yourself yet another check and balance to be sure that it really makes sense.
When we put it back in the stockpile, it may have new electronics. We don't replace a vacuum tube, we put modern electronics in. If the plutonium pits wear out, we're going to be putting new pits in. So even if it resembles the thing we pulled out, it will not be the same thing that went back in. Is that new or not new? And the answer is, by some standard, it's new. I think most people would say it's the same thing. It's just, you know, a little bit different.
But, if I put in a brand new design with no testing history, and it's going to do five new things, it's clear that's new. Where you draw the point between those two extremes of a refurbishment or a Life Extension Program and something with new characteristics, I don't know.
If it's doing the same mission, and it's not effectively the same military specifications, I think you could make a pretty big argument that you can call it new, if you want to. But if it weren't a nuclear weapon, if it were a car, you wouldn't call it a new model. If the ‘74 has a new bumper, is that new? We decided it wasn't worth a huge debate, even though lots of people think it's a central issue.
And then there are requests from the administration for the Jasons to look at a very technical topic and come back with an independent view. And there are groups such as the American Physical Society and AAAS, that often take topics that they think they have the expertise in and can contribute something, and they create such a panel.
This is AAAS's effort. They asked me about forming the committee, and I said sure. And then they asked me to chair. It was more work than I ever thought it would be. I'm not sure there's a need, but I think with any given report there is a role for assessments that try to be balanced, but you can't predict the outcome. You get people who span the spectrum of views and who aren't tied to a particularly vested stake. But if you know anything, you've already got a particular bias. That's always true. And so you try to guard against it. But it's a balancing act.
You could find sentences in the report that either supported a robust RRW Program or said the program should never go forward. You could find all those things if you decided to select sentences at random, because we tried to make observations that were in and of themselves correct without trying to make some sweeping statement. Our saying it could be a prudent hedge, could be a good opportunity, is about as strong an integrated statement as we made, and that was a very close call. In the back of the report, there are two personal comments by Charlie Curtis and John Foster. Charlie Curtis [Charles B. Curtis, President, Nuclear Threat Initiative, Energy Department (retired)] basically said that RRW and Complex 2030 might be a good program, but policy is so important, we need to get it right before we do the program.
Johnny [John S. Foster, Jr., physicist, former director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory] said policy is all well and good, but nuclear weapons are so important, we need to get going on it, and then get the policy right as we go along. Those probably provide the two book ends for the committee and all the rest of us probably fall somewhere in between. That's why we come out with the statement that is basically just about halfway between those two.
Now, if I want a stockpile that requires 30 or 40 pits per year, I can probably make an argument that that could be done with a reasonably plausible expansion of Los Alamos without too much trauma. So that particular decision is so strongly influenced by long-term stockpile size and how much of it is RRWs versus legacy weapons that the panel couldn't possibly decide Complex 2030 without knowing the answer to that question.
The second practical aspect is that all large-scale government programs need an extraordinary degree of de facto buy-in. That doesn't mean enthusiasm or “can't wait to see the answer,” like the Apollo project, but it needs–“hey, that's the right thing to do, let's keep going, what have you got?” And if you don't have very broad consensus in the congressional or political world, you can't make this program work, and that's what the panel said. Those two reasons, I think, on the practical side were why we said you have to know where you're going and know why you're going there. Bipartisan consensus doesn't mean the Republican and Democratic head of the relevant committee. That's a necessary, but not sufficient condition. For example, California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is someone who doesn't even want to think about nuclear weapons, but once she understood that stewardship would allow us to stop nuclear testing, then she was amenable with stewardship as a way to proceed. Republican Sen. Jon Kyi of Arizona wanted a very strong program and as long as we could assure him that we were going to have a very strong program, he was grudgingly willing to accept not testing. I want those two people to buy into whatever long-term program we have, not just the heads of the two committees making the authorization appropriations that year. And then, both Boxer and Kyi can forget about this most of the time and let the program proceed. There is nothing resembling that kind of consensus or conversation that's taken place.
When the final report was finished, I gave a briefing to 50 or 65 congressional staff, and one of the comments I made was that this was a peculiarly awkward time for the recommendations to emerge or for the people running the program–because if you walk your way through a timeline, the NNSA is doing its cost schedule and scope studies on the program. If they do it very efficiently and get very lucky, they might be done by the first of next year. That's too late to go into the 2009 budget request. Even if it makes it, in a crammed-in fashion, the real request or even the broader debate, which the House committee called for, would occur, at best, in the last months of an administration that–under any model of the world–is not flying high.
Any new administration is likely to be about as big a jump as we've had in a long time. This is not Reagan to Bush I. This is, no matter which party prevails, going to be a big jump. Most administrations take a year to reboot. Independent of which point of view you have on all of this stuff, it's an awkward time to have a complicated conversation. That's not our problem but nonetheless, it's a reality that everyone has to cope with. On the other hand, I don't know how to have a long-term, major change without having had at least some facsimile of that debate.
And therefore, the argument goes, if this program is successful, much of the reserve can be eliminated because one wouldn't have to keep it, because one could rebuild quickly. So, you would be able to drop the total number of operational and reserve weapons by some significant factor. Again, the actual numbers are classified, so they're never talked about in great detail.
Any further reductions in the operationally deployed stockpile would then be something which you would negotiate with Russia, which is how we got to the Moscow Treaty in the first place, obviously. Some administration could reduce that number further, and the reserve would remain a small fraction because you had achieved the ability to build back through the changes in the complex required to implement the RRW Program.
Where the argument gets tricky is: What goes first? Do you agree to cut the total down before you start the program, or do you say, when we're done, we'll see if that is a good idea? To our minds, it isn't clear how that conversation would take place between Defense and Energy.
If the program goes forward, it will be up to the next administration to decide whether the discussion of the CTBT ought to be a major item. The stewardship program existed because there was generalized support for a strong nuclear weapons program, but under the caveat that no nuclear testing was needed. And that quid pro quo was what enables stewardship to be basically out of sight, out of mind for most members of Congress while the committees debate the details.
And if a bargain of some sort is necessary for this program to go forward, the CTBT would be one–but I could imagine others. I could imagine a bargain in which a new administration says, look, I will support this program if there was a serious commitment to go to a much smaller stockpile. There are a lot of quid pro quo bargains that might find reasonably good consensus, and the CTBT is only one that might work.
Supplementary Material
Science Based Stockpile Stewardship
Supplementary Material
Treaty Between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Strategic Offensive Reductions