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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Not atypical

[Overzeetop]

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.

Re:Not atypical

[jpmorgan]

Yes, as unpolitically correct as it may be, an active nuclear weapons program might be necessary. Complete disarmament is all well and good, and a slow loss of weapons and skills to age could be one way to accomplish that. But complete disarmament isn't worthwhile without permanent disarmament also, and I don't see how that's possible. The knowledge and technology exists, and as the general level of technology in this world increases it will only become easier to build nuclear weapons. Without permanent disarmament (which would be impossible without some form of world government), you have to accept one of these possibilities:
1. A hostile power is nuclear armed and you are not.
2. You are now racing a hostile power to rearm yourself... except they have a headstart, since you only found out they've been building weapons after their program has progressed considerably. And that in turn gives them an incentive to use their weapons before you finish yours...
3. Abandon disarmament and proactively maintain a deterrence force.

Look, the technology to build nuclear weapons is never going to go away. Until we find a technology to neuter these devices without playing deterrence/MAD games, then a continued nuclear weapons program is essential. Otherwise we are locked in a cycle of decay, and panicked rebuilding. I'd rather things be as boring as possible, even if that means the occasional underground bang.

"Guarantee their Destructiveness"

[natehoy]

Does that mean nukes will now have a new label on them?

"Best if used to initiate Global Armageddon by December 12, 2054"

Re:honestty

[Pentium100]

Well, having a nuke can tell others "don't send your nukes my way or I'll respond in kind, and we will both lose". It also deters conventional war because you wouldn't want to go to war with an enemy who has nukes and may use them if the war goes badly.

Not having nukes can invite an attack from an enemy who does have them ("I'll drop my nuke on you, and what you'll do about it?"), also conventional war becomes more possible.

Re:God forbid

[WAG24601G]

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...

Re:What about the Foam?

[georgewilliamherbert]

"Fogbank", widely presumed to be a heavy-metal doped aerogel material.

We can manufacture it again. There was a gap - we couldn't for a while, but it's back in production.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FOGBANK

Re:What if nobody knew?

[TheCarp]

> I call this phenomenon "Tom Clancy Syndrome", it's a state of believing that the US military is not
> only better in every way than everyone else anywhere, but that this doesn't give rational people any
> reason to seriously reconsider their half-baked world domination plans.

ROTFL! I think you just hit the nail on the head!

There is a real tendency for people to look back at history for patterns and, lo and behold, if you look hard enough for a pattern, and are willing to ignore enough facts, then, you sure can find patterns.

I think the reality is that people hate war. The world over, nobody really likes getting into wars. Oh, there may be some gung ho kids, or guys who don't know much esle. There are excitement junkies etc. However, in the end, nobody really likes the result. The sacrifice, the bloodshed etc.

Sure, we can be talked into liking it. We can like it in context. Who didn't love that we fought WWII and liberated europe? Who didn't want to see Bin Ladens head on a pike after 9/11? Who can't understand fighting off an invading force?

But there is a difference between being willing to do something, and wanting it to happen.

The trend, that I see, is actually very anti-war. War seems like it was much more popular when it was out of the way. When it took days for the real effects of a battle to get out. When stories of bravery were all that were heard.

The faster information moves.... the less people seem to like war. Nothing eroded support for the Viet-Nam conflict like pictures and stories coming right home from the front lines. Stories of collective punishments, stories of rapes and murders, villages burned, families massacred. This is war, this has always been war. No matter how good we get (and we are much better than ever before by any standard), war is ALWAYS a travesty.

I dare say the internet is the pacifier. The faster information moves, the less freedom troops have to loot, pilliage, and generally act atrociously. The more we see, the less we support. The more apparent the hell, the less apt we are to create it.

I think we should be doing as much as possible to make SURE that EVERY country ends up with their forces as hamstrung by public opinion and internet fueled information leaks as our own is. When any member of the public, in any country can tune in and watch the carnage from any conflict in the world, in real time as heads explode and body parts fly... I predict that the closer to that point we get, the less desire for conflict we will see.

That is, until someone starts buying ad space on soldiers uniforms and they start just fighting for the ad dollars....

er... actually... lets not give them any ideas.

A brief history of nuclear war...

[Zordak]

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.