Race is on for next generation of nuclear weapons

In the Cold War arms race, scientists rushed to build thousands of warheads to counter the Soviet Union. Today, those scientists are racing once again, but this time to rebuild an aging nuclear stockpile.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.

Since the 1950s, the two labs have fiercely competed in the bomb trade with technologies as different as Microsoft and Apple.

The new weapon, under development for about a year, is intended to ensure the long-term reliability of the nation's inventory of bombs. Program backers say that with greater confidence in the quality of its weapons, the nation could draw down its stockpile, estimated at about 6,000 warheads.

Scientists also intend for the new weapons to be less vulnerable to accidental detonation and to be so secure that any stolen or lost weapon would be unusable.

By law, the new weapons would pack the same explosive power as existing warheads and be suitable only for the same kinds of military targets as the weapons they replace. As a result, unlike past proposals for new atomic weapons, the current project has bipartisan support in Congress.

But some veterans of nuclear-arms development are strongly opposed, arguing that building new weapons could trigger another arms race with Russia and China, as well as undermine arguments to stop nuclear developments in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. And, the critics say, it would eventually increase pressure to resume underground nuclear testing, which the U.S. halted 15 years ago.

High morale

Inside the labs, however, emotions and enthusiasm for the new designs are running high.

"I have had people working nights and weekends," said Joseph Martz, the head of the Los Alamos design team. "I have to tell them to go home. I can't keep them out of the office. This is a chance to exercise skills that we have not had a chance to use for 20 years."

A thousand miles away at Livermore, Bruce Goodwin, associate director for nuclear weapons, describes a similar picture: The lab is running supercomputer simulations around the clock, and teams of scientific experts working on all phases of the project "are extremely excited."

Building the new bomb, known as the reliable replacement warhead, or RRW, was approved by Congress in 2005 as part of a defense-spending bill. The design work is being supervised by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the Energy Department.

The laboratories submitted detailed design proposals at the end of March that run more than a thousand pages each to the Nuclear Weapons Council, the secretive federal panel that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons. A winner will be declared later this year.

If the program is implemented, it would require an expensive remobilization of the nation's nuclear-weapons complex, creating a capacity to turn out bombs at the rate of three or more a week.

Cranking up

Proponents of the project foresee a time when nuclear deterrence will increasingly rest on the capacity of the U.S. to build new bombs, rather than on maintaining a massive stockpile.

The proposal comes as Russia and the United States have agreed to further reduce nuclear stockpiles. The Moscow Treaty signed in 2002 by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin calls for the two countries to each cut inventories to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by 2012.

Without the reliable replacement warhead, U.S. scientists say, the nation will end up with old and potentially unreliable bombs within the next 15 years, allowing future adversaries to challenge U.S. supremacy and erode the nation's so-called "strategic deterrent."

The new bomb "is one way of ensuring that our capability is second to none," said Paul Hommert, a physicist who heads X Division, the Los Alamos unit that built the first atomic bomb during World War II. "Not only today, but in 2025."

But critics say the program could plant the seeds of a new arms race.

The existing stockpile will be safe and reliable for decades to come, according to defense experts and nuclear scientists who have long supported strategic weapons. Rather than making the nation safer, the program will squander resources, broadcast the message that arms control is dead and even undermine the reliability of U.S. weapons, they say.

The new bomb would have to be built and deployed without testing. The U.S. last conducted an underground test in Nevada in 1991 and has since imposed a moratorium on new testing.

But without a single test, doubts about the new bomb's reliability will eventually grow, said Sydney Drell, former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator and a longtime adviser to the Energy Department.

"If anybody thinks we are going to be designing new warheads and not doing testing, I don't know what they are smoking," Drell said. "I don't know of a general, an admiral, a president or anybody in responsibility who would take an untested new weapon that is different from the ones in our stockpile and rely on it without resuming testing."

If the U.S. breaks the international moratorium on testing, then Russia, China, India and Pakistan, if not Great Britain and France, would also conduct tests, said Phillip Coyle, former assistant secretary of defense and former deputy director of Livermore. All of those countries would gain more information from testing than would the U.S., which has invested heavily in research as a substitute for testing.

Richard Garwin, the physicist who helped design the first H-bomb in 1952 and remains a leading authority on nuclear weapons, opposes the new bomb and is worried it will lead to new testing. "We don't need it," he said. "No science will be able to keep these political doubts away."

Linton Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration, disagrees, saying warheads based on modern technology and advanced electronics will be clearly more reliable.

"We are more likely to face a problem if we stick with the existing stockpile," Brooks said. "It is easy to overstate the degree to which the current stockpile [has been] tested," he adds.

The stockpile includes thousands of weapons held in reserve as a hedge in case a defect is discovered. Each year, some of those weapons are disassembled and cut apart for inspection. The U.S. could significantly reduce the reserve if it had greater confidence in the reliability of its warheads, Brooks said.

The driving force for developing the new weapon has come from the scientific community and members of Congress. Although the Defense Department did not initiate the program, it has won wide support within the military as well as the Bush administration.

Democrats who are closely involved in nuclear-weapons issues, including Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif.; Rep. John M. Spratt, D-S.C.; and Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., have also given the program support, according to their spokesmen.

Tauscher and the other lawmakers say they endorse the effort if it is accompanied by a reduction in the total number of U.S. nuclear weapons and if no testing is involved — precisely the policy set up by Rep. Dave Hobson, R-Ohio, who has been a primary proponent of the program in Congress.

Past misfires

In the past, a wide range of proposals for new bombs fizzled politically, including the neutron bomb, the bunker-busting "mini-nuke" and the "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator." Each of those weapons was envisioned for specific military missions, triggering fears that they might be used preemptively rather than to deter an attack.

The reliable replacement warhead has dodged such opposition, largely because it is not intended for a new military mission.

Actual production would require approval by Congress and construction of new manufacturing facilities — all of which is at least several years off.

Meanwhile, the Los Alamos and Livermore labs are revving up their culture of one-upmanship.

Brooks, the federal nuclear-weapons chief, gives no hint about whose bomb he favors, saying only that both "are very good designs, very responsive to what we are trying to do."

Since the end of the Cold War, the labs' top priority has been to maintain existing weapons. The labs predict that the plutonium components in existing weapons have a life of 45 to 60 years, meaning that in the next 15 years some will begin to deteriorate and replacements will be needed.

Christopher Paine, a program critic and nuclear-weapons specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, contends the labs have everything to gain from these kinds of assessments — generating funds for a new program even though older weapons remain in perfect condition.

But the labs say their programs are subject to oversight by government agencies and independent boards.

While the labs say they're still working on cost estimates, they believe the reliable replacement warhead will save money over time. They aren't providing any details.

On average, the U.S. has spent an estimated $6 million per warhead since World War II, according to Steven Schwartz, author of Atomic Audit, the authoritative history of strategic weapons' costs. Based on that, replacing all of the nation's 6,000 nuclear weapons could cost $36 billion.

So far a fraction of the ultimate cost of the program has been spent — Congress approved funding of $25 million this fiscal year.

A portion of the cost involves engineering designed to make the bombs more secure. In charge of that is Sandia National Laboratories, whose directors have vowed to make sure terrorists could never use a stolen or lost weapon.

"We are setting the goal of absolute control — that you always know where the weapon is and what state it is in and that you have absolute control over its state," said Joan B. Woodard, executive vice president at Sandia. "People will say you can break the bank achieving that goal, but it is the right goal to set."