Journal North:  Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment

          Front Page  north

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

3 Labs Rip Nuclear Program

By John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer
    The United States' current approach to maintaining its nuclear arsenal "looks increasingly unsustainable," according to an internal report by senior officials at the nation's three nuclear weapons labs.
    The nuclear weapons program's future costs exceed the available budget, and the effort to maintain aging warheads is forcing the nation to retain a larger nuclear arsenal than would otherwise be needed, the report concludes.
    Completed last month, the report's findings mirror in some respects those of a key House of Representatives subcommittee.
    The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee issued a report last month calling for a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as part of its proposed 2006 Department of Energy budget.
    The two reports set the stage for today's unveiling of the Senate's version of the DOE budget, written by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.
    The outcome of the debate is critical to New Mexico, which is home to Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, two of the three U.S. nuclear weapons design laboratories. The federal government will spend an estimated $2.9 billion this year for nuclear weapons work in New Mexico, more than in any other state.
    The House and lab reports both argue that it is no longer feasible to maintain the existing Cold War nuclear arsenal by nursing along old weapons, refurbishing aging parts when necessary.
    The labs' report, written by a quartet of senior nuclear weapons scientists and endorsed by the weapons program chiefs of the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, argues that continuing to maintain weapons is possible "only at significantly increasing cost."
    The program, dubbed "Stockpile Stewardship" when it was established a decade ago, "merely preserve(s) nuclear weapons with out-dated technology and a ponderous and expensive enterprise required to support old technology," the labs' report concludes.
    Because of resulting uncertainties about long-term weapons reliability, "the United States must retain a relatively large number of reserve weapons to ensure against contingencies," the lab scientists from Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories wrote— spares in case problems crop up in some of the primary stockpile weapons.
    Official stockpile numbers are classified, but the independent Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental and arms control group, estimates there are 5,300 nuclear weapons in the active U.S. stockpile and another 5,000 being held in reserve.
    The House subcommittee, led by Rep. David Hobson, R-Ohio, raised similar arguments last month, concluding that the nuclear weapons labs need to design a new "Reliable Replacement Warhead" that is easier to care for in the long run.
    Hobson's 2006 budget report calls for the new warhead to be "designed for ease of manufacturing, maintenance, dismantlement and certification without nuclear testing."
    To do that, Hobson's spending plan would:
   

Reduce spending on refurbishment of current U.S. weapons;
   

Increase spending on design efforts for the new Reliable Replacement Warhead;
   

Reduce spending on preparations for possible future underground nuclear test blasts at the federal government's Nevada Test Site;
   

Cut spending on nuclear weapons supercomputers, arguing that they have not lived up to their promise as a way of conducting virtual nuclear tests to maintain existing weapons;
   

Eliminate funding for a new factory to build plutonium nuclear weapon cores; and
   

Delay money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos until the weapons designers have a clearer picture of what the newly designed warhead requires.
    Greg Mello, an arms control activist at the Albuquerque-based Los Alamos Study Group, called Hobson's vision of a new nuclear weapons program "sweeping."
    Aides to Domenici declined comment, saying they preferred to wait until they released their own proposed version of the 2006 nuclear weapons budget.