More budgeted for nukes as old ones dismantled

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is expected to announce today that it has dismantled the last of the most powerful nuclear-missile warheads left over from the Cold War.

A Senate subcommittee, meanwhile, has added $10 million to next year's budget to pay for a design competition for the second warhead in a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has increased by 50 percent the rate at which it is dismantling older weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile, which totals some 5,000 weapons.

But Congress and the Bush administration also are pressing ahead with the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program, which will guarantee production in the next decade of fewer but more reliable and secure nuclear warheads and bombs.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that funds the nuclear-weapons complex, said Wednesday that his panel had added $35 million to the fiscal 2007 budget "to accelerate the RRW design activities, including $10 million to initiate a second RRW design competition."

The subcommittee's draft report says the second RRW design is proposed "to ensure that our strategic forces have at least two different certified RRW warheads" in case any one system fails.

The nation's two nuclear-weapons design centers, the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories, already are competing to design the first RRW. The nuclear-security agency is to make a choice late this year.

A second RRW design competition may provide the losing lab with an opportunity to design the other weapon.

The warhead at the center of today's announcement, the W-56, was originally put into operation in 1963 atop the Minuteman I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). It had the explosive power of 1.2 megatons or "roughly 100 times greater" than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, said Thomas Cochran, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and a leading expert on nuclear weapons.

The W-56 was retired in 1991. But it was not until 1999 that the first W-56 began to be dismantled, a slow and precise process because of aging parts and nuclear materials, according to NNSA Deputy Administrator Thomas D'Agostino.

"It takes anywhere from a few weeks to a month for each warhead, if there are no problems," D'Agostino said.

At their peak, there were some 1,000 W-56 warheads. In 1986, when the warhead was more than 20 years old, a partial test found it still to be reliable.

D'Agostino said NNSA plans to emphasize dismantling retired weapons, a process that has provided steady work at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas, where weapons are assembled and taken apart.