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Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good For Decades To Come
pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Jason panel, an independent group of scientists advising the federal government on issues of science and technology, has concluded that the program to refurbish aging nuclear arms is sufficient to guarantee their destructiveness for decades to come, obviating a need for a costly new generation of more reliable warheads, as proposed by former President Bush. Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona and other Republicans have argued that concerns are growing over the reliability of the US's aging nuclear stockpile, and that the possible need for new designs means the nation should retain the right to conduct underground tests of new nuclear weapons. The existing warheads were originally designed for relatively short lifetimes and frequent replacement with better models, but such modernization ended after the US quit testing nuclear arms in 1992. All weapons that remain in the arsenal must now undergo a refurbishment process, known as life extension. The Jason panel found no evidence that the accumulated changes from aging and refurbishment posed any threat to weapon destructiveness, and that the 'lifetimes of today's nuclear warheads could be extended for decades, with no anticipated loss of confidence.' But the panel added that federal indifference could undermine the nuclear refurbishment program (as this report from last May illustrates). Quoting the report (PDF): 'The study team is concerned that this expertise is threatened by lack of program stability, perceived lack of mission importance and degradation of the work environment.'"
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Glad to hear that guys. Way to go. Good work telling everyone that fixing things fixes them.
All the U.S. needs to do is pay the Pakistanis and Iranians for the latest nukes.
Maybe this will solve our Uranium Shortage.
interactive hologram, or it didn't happen.
Many programs which require significant development, and then get shelved into "production" with no push to advance or modernize fall prey to this. NASA maned spaceflight vehicles is a prime example.
If you only need to do research and development once every 25-50 years you end up starting nearly from scratch every time you decide to upgrade. Now, I'm not advocating some kind of special nuclear bomb advancement program. Still, by the time somebody wants to "replace" these, there will be nobody left who actually worked on them tom begin with. Humans are particularly bad at passing this kind of knowledge over extended time gaps.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
can we please stop wasting ALL of our money on the military? what the hell are we gonna do with a nuke anyhow...they are well established as unusable in warfare...all you can do it it is say 'I lost so screw everyone, I'm gonna make a nuclear winter'
So does that mean we can use the saved money to fund feeder reactors that don't have the potential to produce weapons grade material?
Probably a pipe dream for a while still, but at least that's one less lobby pushing against building new-styled reactors.
It's not only possible... it is essential!
This sig is false.
With a bit of luck, 50% of the Russian ICBM-intercepting capabilities won't work either. Problem solved.
Does that mean nukes will now have a new label on them?
"Best if used to initiate Global Armageddon by December 12, 2054"
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Can you imagine what the world was like 100 years ago? Where wars were fought on foot and were mostly civil wars, or simple trade disputes? Where mutually assured destruction and worrying how long your nukes will last were never present.
Or go back even further, like 500 years, where the world was a bold new place worth exploring, and if a war were to be fought, it'd be because you want to rescue the pope, or payback for a political insult, or because you were bored...
Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. The internet is way over-rated.
... is a fucking idiot. Anything he says should be ignored or ridiculed.
Signed, one of his constituents.
Y2K was mostly a result of the radical shift in the nature of software development brought about by the IBM 360 and other computers which included a new feature of backward compatibility. Prior to that time it was safe to assume that programs would only live until they needed to be re-written to run on the next generation of computer. So as a result, we had many programs living well past retirement age. This then lead to a sane design decision from the 1950's getting us into trouble 40 years later.
Now we have a similar situation with Nukes. The Test Ban Treaty radically changed the nuclear weapons development environment, and as a result our nukes are now well past their retirement age. They were meant to be replaced, but haven't been.
It is important to note that in both cases, the eventual cost are still WELL below the development and other costs which were avoided.
One of the stated requirements of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is that nations that sign it that don't already have nukes don't develop them, and nations that do work towards phasing their own out of existence. If we want to restart nuclear weapons testing to work on replacement nukes, then we need to stop pressuring Iran and other nations to not develop their own, because it would be very hypocritical for us to demand other nations stick to the terms of the NPT when we ourselves are blatantly violating it. Alternately, if we are serious about the NPT, then we have no need to be working on the next generation bombs -- we should be instead working on making sure the current generation is the last generation.
There are arguments to be made either way, but make up your minds, people. Don't talk out both sides of your mouths on this one. Let's either start working on new bombs and bless Iran on its quest to make its own, or let's take the NPT seriously and both press Iran on compliance, and comply with it ourselves.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
I say we test a bomb from our stockpile on Congress. It'll confirm that the weapons are ready for use and save us hundreds of billions a year in out of control spending.
Hey we don't need to do further testing so everybody let's sign a deal saying no one would.
Fast forward a few years..
Hey our stockpiles are ageing. You know what guys, we would like to reserve the rights to do nuclear tests.
My wife and I toured the museum of stuff that blows up (Bradbury museum?) at Los Alamos on our honeymoon (the site does say "news for nerds", right?).
One of the displays said that special styrofoam-like stuff that holds reactive parts of some in-stockpile nuclear weapons in place has a service life of 10 years, but the weapons using it are 25 or more years old. Meanwhile, they've lost the recipe to make more foam.
I wonder if they're able to refurbish these nukes (and what happens as the foam ages if not).
Sometimes 20 just isn't enough!!
20 is enough if you can get them into orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
Here's a thought...what if the people that knew the missiles needed to be replaced eventually kept that quiet? What if the entire world believed our nuclear weapons were still good, but we just silently let them degrade and didn't spend any more money or time on nukes?
Glad to hear that guys. Way to go. Good work telling everyone that fixing things fixes them.
The conclusion isn't just that they're fixed. It's that because they are fix-able, that we don't need to pour money down the R&D drain for modern variants, which would just sit on the same shelves these old ones now occupy.
Politician: How many of these nukes do we need to keep in our arsenal?
Engineer: How long do they have to last?
Politician: Forever.
Engineer: All of them.
If we knew we were going to be designing/building a new nuke every 10-15 years, then we could decrease our stockpile to the number we need now (whatever we decide that is) without adding on a huge margin to account for obsolescence.
I think we could restart a nuclear program without restarting an arms race with existing nuclear powers provided it was talked out first in a treaty were we all agreed to keep yields (size of boom made by the bomb) the same and agreed to decrease our stockpile even more. As far as the emerging nuclear powers go, sure this would give them more reason to feel justified about building a bomb (and would happily wave that fact in everyone's faces), but I don't think it would change the rate of their development at all.
Maybe I'm being naive, but detonation never seemed all that central to the value of nuclear weapons. Let's face it, if we're ever in the situation where we decide Armageddon is the best option available, whether or not OUR weapons detonate is a triviality. Nuclear weapons are most effective when they AREN'T being used and everyone wants to keep it that way. So unless there's some a priori outward indication that our weapons definitely won't work, thus inviting an attack... nobody (including our enemies) really wants to find out the messy way. Then again, maybe I'm assuming too much rationality for the men with the launch keys...
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
I still don't get what the US wants with over 10, 000 Nuclear weapons. Surely they could have supplied Iraq with a few so that weapons of mass destruction were actually found!
It just means that should the need present itself to annihilate a patch of land, that we send 3 ICBMS to do the work of one. That way one of them ought to work. We wouldn't want any kind of retaliation if for instance a nuclear missile were discovered in an 'evil' country. We want to make sure it's obliterated.
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July, August, September, October, November - so does this indicate that the study is leading up to a nuclear winter?
Oh, was that my outside voice?
I am for regularly scheduled above ground nuclear testing. All the films are old and grainy. I want HDTV thermonuclear devestation. If possible, I want to camp nearby ( but not too nearby ) and watch it. And before you say: well X amount of people are going to die because of radioactive pollution, remember that those X people would have died from the pollution the observers would have caused doing whatever else they were going to do on vacation. People get run over by cars heading to amusement parks. The rides break. Shit happens - deal with it.
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The catch-22 of post-WWII nuclear warfare is that there is no such thing as launch without retaliation. If we find a rogue nation with a lone nuke or two, we attack with conventional weapons, because the risk incurred by escalation is too great. If a threat is substantial enough to warrant a nuclear attack (as the Soviet Union may have been), they are completely capable of retaliating while our birds are still in the air, what with early detection and all. That's where MAD (mutually assured destruction) comes in. LAUNCHING a nuclear weapon is what causes MAD... by the time of detonation, everyone's fate was sealed several minutes ago.
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
just outsource the warheads to india or china....
that's where all the technical expertise, and all the jobs are.....
Good is such an.... "interesting" term.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
There is 148,940,000 square kilometers of land mass of the earth.
A 1 megaton bomb will have a fireball that extends 1100 meter radius. Assuming this vaporizes the area, it will take 39,200,926 1 Megaton bombs to vaporize the planet.
A 1 megaton bomb will produce a shock wave that will go 10 kilometers in radius. It would take 474,331 1 Megaton bombs to rubble the planet.
The US has about 10,000 as of 2007, and plans to have only 5,000 as of 2012.
As for radiation effects.... http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3748014,00.html
References:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth
http://www.fas.org/blog/ssp/2007/05/estimates_of_us_nuclear_weapon.php
Of course, back in the day, the Peacekeepers had 10 Mk21s each and the Minuteman IIIs had 3 Mk12As each (now with SERV, we only get 1 Mk21 per Minuteman III). So actually, you would need to send 9 missiles for the equivalent of 3 MMIIIs or 30 missiles for the equivalent of 3 Peacekeepers.
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They will be Chinese made. The reason is that China is in active production of warheads. In fact, these are neutrons, so even better.
Who woulda guessed that nukes come with the same Use-By date as Hostess pastries? Now we know that, also just like those Hostess Twinkies, our nukes are good for decades after those dates. That's awesome news for the Apocalypse survivors, who will have dessert AND won't have to bother making their own M.A.D. devices from scratch.
"Good news, everyone! We found nukes from Fry's time and they're as fresh and tasty as the day they were put in the wrappers!"
The problem with nuclear weapons development is boredom. It took a huge establishment to make the things, with way too many smart people. The plants are run down or closed, and the smart people are retired or dead.
It's like NASA. Who goes to work for NASA today? At least NASA launches something once in a while. Imagine going to work for Pantex and spending your whole life on refurb jobs. That's not going to attract the best and the brightest.
Some of the bomb designs are "too clever". The AEC had too many smart people around in the glory days, and some of the designs are more complex than they need to be. The effort to shrink fusion bombs down to MIRV and cruise missile size resulted in some designs that took actual nuclear tests to validate and are hard to check without real tests. That's why everyone is so nervous about keeping the old designs going. Yes, there are simulations, but without tests, they're hard to validate.
How about we test over your house ? Twat.
This is true. However, as you pointed out, our enemies (and our friends) must be confident that our weapons would work, should we need to use them, in order to ensure their continued effectiveness as a deterrent against first-strikes. It is also important to reiterate to the Ahmadinejads of the world that we will retaliate with overwhelming force, including possibly a reciprocal nuclear strike, in response any first-strikes against us or our allies.
I'd imagine that they're more worried about what happens if you need to do a limited nuclear strike. If your nukes have a 50% failure rate you need to launch ten to ensure a 99.9% chance of destroying the target. Launching ten nukes at once is a lot more likely to start WWIII and chances are that several are going to work and you'll release a lot more radiation than you would with a single 99.9% reliable nuke. Plus, littering the ground with duds means an enemy will likely retrieve and reverse engineer one.
Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good For Decades To Come
Well, that's a relief for me! I was getting worried!
The problem with that line of reasoning is that when your main deterrent is a threat, that threat must never waver. If an enemy doubts your ability to carry out a threat, then the threat loses all credibility. Right now no country is willing to chance it, but if those warheads are just left to sit, then... eventually someone will take the gambit.
I dunno, three seemed like a nice number. Ramans always do things in threes.
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Come on what pussy gives a shit about the planet. Detonating a nuke (preferably 'over' ground) would be the show of the decade, start selling tickets now. Even just watching it in HD would be uber.
Just don't burn out your retinas.
Reminds me of when I heard this guy say they had backups at work, until they day they needed them to restore, and they found out the backups were no good. This lets me think sometimes to force a fake disaster or scenario to test the fail overs is good once in a while...
I wonder if we can start a war somewhere....?
So let me get this straight : the DoD wants new nukes because it can't guarantee that all of our bombs will necessarily go off due to aging.
But why does it matter if all our nukes detonate? Is any enemy going to realistically attack us HOPING that all our bombs won't detonate or that the missiles won't work? Even a partial failure of our attack would still cause more mass destruction than in all of human history.
Would you recommend attacking the Russians or the Chinese with a preemptive strike, hoping that their nukes didn't go off when they retaliate? (after all, they have the same problems with aging we do, and possibly lower quality control) I sure wouldn't.
we only have enough nuclear weapons to annihiliate the earth 20 times over.
I really only know about the land-based ICBMs, so with the caveat that this doesn't include our SLBMs (Trident) and strategic bombers ...
Back in the height of the Cold War, we were doing stuff like fielding a fleet of 60+ monster Titan IIs, each with a monster 9MT warhead sitting on the tip, plus a fleet of 800 Minuteman-Is, each with a 1.2MT warhead. Those two fleets combined gave us a total yield of about 1.5 GT. We figure, "Drop a couple somewhere in the general vicinity of Moscow, and they've pretty well done their job." But as we refined our delivery technologies, we started to focus more on (relative) precision. Circa 1970, we built the Minuteman III, which could carry three much smaller Mk12A Reentry Vehicles (with the W-78 warhead at about 300-kT), buch was much more acccurate. So we could go for targeted kills on hardened silos without having to level entire cities. We fielded around 500 MMIIIs, giving us about 1,500 W-78 warheads, meaning at 300-kT each they pack a combined yield of around 450 MT. That's certainly a lot, but consider that the Russians actually detonated the "Tsar Bomba" with a yield of about 50 MT by itself, and it certainly didn't come close to destroying 1/9th of the earth. By the 80s, we also had a fleet of 50 Peacekeepers, each with 10 Mk21 RVs carrying the 300-kT W-87 warhead. The Mk21 was the most accurate RV we'd ever built (basically, you could pretty reliably hit a football field). So that's another 500 warheads, for another 150 MT. But note that even with 10 warheads, the PK still only had about a third of the total yield (about 3 MT) of a Titan II with a single warhead (about 9 MT). The PKs and MMIIIs together took us to about 600 MT total yield, and by this time, we were shutting down the Titans IIs. So that's less than half the yield we had at the peak. It's definitely a lot of fire power, but still not enough to scorch the earth 20 times over (or even once over, really). Then with the START I and II treaties, we started ramping way down. We agreed to decommission the MIRVs (Multiple Independently-Targetable Reentry Vehicles) (shame really---it was pretty neat technology), so we started decommissioning the Peacekeepers and dropping the MMIIIs to just a single warhead. Now, we just happened to have about 500 Mk21 RVs from the 50 PKs, and we just happened to have about 500 MMIII delivery vehicles, so we decided to put the best RV on our remaining launcher, and started the SERV program ca. 2005 to retrofit the Mk21 onto the MMIII launch vehicle.
Now that PK decom is complete, the only silo-launched ICBMs in our fleet are about 450 remaining MMIIIs, each with a single Mk21 RV carrying a single W-87 warhead with about a 300 kT yield. That means our current ICBM fleet has a combined yield of about 135 MT. This is not even 3x the yield of Tsar Bomba, and not even 10 times the yield of the U.S.'s biggest single detonation, the Castle Bravo shot with a yield of about 15 MT. It was big, yes, but again, not even close to destroying 1/10th of the earth.
So long story short, we used to have crazy big nuclear arsenals back in the really tense days of the Cold War. Today, we still have a scary big nuclear arsenal, but it has only about 1/10th the destructive power of our previous arsenal. That arsenal is still capable of making life on earth pretty miserable, but it's not going to level the globe.
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Our federal government is flaky. We vote in Republicans and they promote their agenda and agencies are co-opted to that agenda. Then we vote in Democrats and they completely change how those agencies operate. Simply put, there's no reason to assume that the federal government will do the right thing.
We should refurbish our existing stockpile right away and keep our fingers crossed that some dumbass administration doesn't come along and bugger that stockpile because some 'special interest' wanted to sell the military some whizzy new system.
Best regards.
What if baby elephants attack and we need to stop them from dropping a rock on us?
I drank what? -- Socrates
This is dead on. the post I was about to make.
Any mention of how they are going to continue to make that? Or at least make it safely?
Have you watched Dr. Strangelove? You really need to go do so
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Some comedian - I think it was Ed Byrne - on the UK satirical news quiz "Have I Got News For You" made a good point about nuclear submarines. Probably misquoting slightly it was:
"We need to spend £20bn on a giant metal sausage under the sea in case one day we decide to destroy the world"
I think that put the whole scheme into perspective a bit.
"If we find a rogue nation with a lone nuke or two, we attack with conventional weapons, because the risk incurred by escalation is too great."
Unless they are not rational actors and escalate anyway.
Atmospheric testing thoroughly demonstrated that smallish nuclear wars are a practical, if unfortunate, proposition.
For example. if a "rogue state" does take out a US city or two, we can exterminate them both to defeat them and to make the desolation an example to others. The reason MAD is a credible way to deter rational actors is that it imposes an unacceptable risk of counter-value destruction.
Irrational actors may launch anyway, and the way to deal with irrational actors who act is to wipe them out so they cannot act at all.
BTW, great nations can lose tens of millions of dead, many cities, and still recover as did the Soviet Union. That isn't a desirable experience, but it's been done and proves large nations can sustain immense damage.
If a cultural enemy (the ultimate irrational actor) such as an Islamic state starts a nuclear exchange, the appropriate response would be to kill such an astounding number of their people that they can't plead "Got Mit Uns". Imaginary celestial friends do fall out of favor when they are not perceived to protect their worshippers. Titrated conventional force cannot do that job.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
If we find a rogue nation with a lone nuke or two, we attack with conventional weapons, because the risk incurred by escalation is too great. If a threat is substantial enough to warrant a nuclear attack (as the Soviet Union may have been), they are completely capable of retaliating while our birds are still in the air, what with early detection and all
What makes you think a "rouge nation" (since that's the example you use) would have the capability to detect a missile launch? Such a capability requires a global satellite surveillance network. The only nations that are known to have this type of a system in place are Russia and the United States, though China is also trying to get there.
There are also other ways of delivering nuclear weapons besides our "birds". It's extremely doubtful that we would rely on an ICBM to take out the nuclear program of a rogue state. The warhead(s) would likely be delivered by the B-2. This avoids the possibility of Russia or China mistaking it for an attack on their country and forecloses any possibility of the targeted country knowing they are under attack until the first warhead detonates.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In related news, USAF Gen. Kevin Chilton, head of the US Strategic Command, opined today that the US needs *more* nuclear weapons.
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/11/airforce_chilton_111909w/
BTW, great nations can lose tens of millions of dead, many cities, and still recover as did the Soviet Union.
Actually it might even be easier for a country to recover from a few nuclear bombs than it was for the Soviet Union to recover from WW2. The deaths suffered by the Soviet Union (or France in WW1 for a Western example) were disproportionately incurred by young males. It created a demographic imbalance that took at least a generation to correct. The fallout from this affected everything from the economy to romance.
The loss of a few major urban areas would probably result in as many (or more) causalities but they'd cut across all demographic groups in a much more equal fashion than either of the World Wars.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It is also important to reiterate to the Ahmadinejads of the world that we will retaliate with overwhelming force, including possibly a reciprocal nuclear strike, in response any first-strikes against us or our allies.
"Possibly"? If they hit us with nuclear weapons then we have to respond in kind. We've said as such for the last 50 years. A failure to follow through on that would render MAD a moot point and encourage future bad actors to engage in their own first-strikes.
As Hillary said, we can obliterate them. If they were stupid enough to drop a nuke on us or one of our allies that's exactly what we would have to do.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Armageddon is and always has been somewhat of an overstatement. The classic US/Soviet scenario would have left those two entities as severely depopulated radioactive hellholes with nothing to call a city anymore, but large parts of the world would have gone on relatively unscathed, except of course for considerably higher rates of cancer and birth deformities in addition to the mother of all economic depressions, worse as you live closer to US or the Soviet union.
Advanced civilization would have been set back, but not obliterated. There just isn't enough radioactive material in nukes for that.
Of course, maybe that was your point, in which case: Whoosh! to me.
Everything is easy when you don't understand the problem.
One theory of nuclear weapons that I'm sure you're aware of is mutually assured destruction. The other guy won't attack you with nukes if he knows you'll just do the same and annihilate him. But there's one problem: this requires that nuclear powers have second-strike capabilities. If the first state manages to take out all of the target state's nukes, there is no more second strike capability and thus no mutually assured destruction.
I don't know what the numbers are, but assume your 20x is correct. These weapons need to be spread out so that a first strike does not take them all out. It's great if you have just enough nukes to destroy Russia, but what if Russia hits those nukes? So you need to have nukes in various areas, and---this is the important part---you have to have enough of them in each area to properly respond. This necessarily means redundancy. MAD does not work if you can't have second-strike capability; and you simply have to have more than "enough" in order to assure that your entire arsenal isn't destroyed in one fell swoop.
So far, I haven't seen a single first strike on US. But I have seen dozens of first strikes by US. Using nukes is bad. Period. All further argument is either ignorance or greed or political propaganda (it could also be the result of being a victim of manipulation by political propaganda).
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.