THE HYBRID OBJECTS. Last August, Hainah Levine wrote a four- part series about the Reliable Replacement Warhead program at Defense Tech. Long story short, there was supposed to be a competition between two labs for potential production of a new weapon, but in a move typical of the defense industry's peculiar approach to capitalism, both labs won and the new design will be a hybrid of both. According to the Times, any new warheads will replace, not augment, the existing stockpile. Some of the arguments made by proponents of developing new weapons are plausible, while others are nonsense. Well-preserved nuclear weapons don't really deteriorate significantly in conventional time horizons, and the parts that do can be replaced. Concerns that we don't know anything about the reliability of rebuilt warheads sound specious to me, ignoring both the technical skill of the engineers and the realities of nuclear deterrence. Given enough weapons (and we have more than enough weapons), an enemy doesn't need to believe that 100%, or 90%, or even 50% of the warheads will work. At any plausible level, unreliability simply doesn't threaten the U.S. deterrent. The idea that the new weapons would be harder for terrorists to utilize is utterly fantastic, both because the chances of terrorists acquiring a U.S. nuke (as opposed to one from another source) are remote, and because the safeguards on current weapons make it remarkably unlikely that anybody could use one without authorization. So what's going on? I think it's fair to say that STRATCOM Commander General James Cartwright's argument that this is an effort to decrease stockpiles by increasing reliability is nonsense, given the realities of deterrence. The U.S. has more than enough warheads, and their reliability is not in plausible question. I suspect that ideological motivations are important, as the backers of building new nukes hold the Non-Proliferation Treaty in as much regard as any other international agreement. They don't believe that the U.S. should be constrained by international agreements, period, and this includes the moratorium on testing. Since the hybrid model represents a fairly complex (although testable in pieces) mechanism, some are already arguing that new nuclear tests wil be necessary. It should go without saying that new tests would undermine the moratorium, and prove disastrous in new and interesting ways for America's place in the world. RRW also provides an opportunity to work on "bunker busting" nuclear weapons under the guise of replacing old weapons. Finally, there are straightforward bureaucratic reasons; the military organizations want new weapons because that's what military orgs want, the labs want to build weapons because they want to survive, the Pentagon has to balance all sorts of concerns and budgetary priorities, and so forth. In any case, it all sounds like a terrible idea to me. The Non-Proliferation Treaty is a remarkably important document, and one of the most important tools available for reducing the potential for nuclear terrorism and accidents. Keeping it together, especially when the Treaty is under stress, should be a prime objective.
--Robert Farley
