The United States Nuclear Weapons Program; The Role of the Reliable Replacement Warhead

[3], 34, [1] pages. Endnotes. The American Association for the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) Nuclear Weapons Complex Assessment Committee developed the report, and APS served as an adviser to the AAAS committee while the report was being crafted. Many of the panel members are members of APS. The report concluded that the RRW could have some benefits, but there is too much uncertainty about the program, including the lack of a long-term plan for the role of nuclear weapons and a determination of future stockpile needs. "There needs to be a clear statement of U.S. nuclear policy and doctrine in the post-Cold War, post-9/11 world," said Benn Tannenbaum, project director for the Center for Science Technology and Security at AAAS. That concern was also echoed by House and Senate committees. After the report was released, the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations and Senate Armed Services committees voted to reduce funding for the RRW and placed constraints on how those funds could be spent. The House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee eliminated fiscal year 2008 funding for the RRW, citing some of the points expressed in the AAAS report. To follow up on the RRW issue, the House Armed Services Committee has asked APS and AAAS to examine the role of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War era more generally. The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was a proposed new American nuclear warhead design and bomb family that was intended to be simple, reliable and to provide a long-lasting, low-maintenance future nuclear force for the United States. Initiated by the United States Congress in 2004, it became a centerpiece of the plans of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to remake the nuclear weapons complex. In 2008, Congress denied funding for the program, and in 2009 the Obama administration called for work on the program to cease. The concept underlying the RRW program is that the US weapons laboratories can design new nuclear weapons that are highly reliable and easy and safe to manufacture, monitor, and test. If that proves to be possible, designers could adapt a common set of core design components to various use requirements, such as different sized missile warheads, different nuclear bomb types, etc. NNSA officials believe the program is needed to maintain nuclear weapons expertise in order to rapidly adapt, repair, or modify existing weapons or develop new weapons as requirements evolve. They see the ability to adapt to changing military needs rather than maintain additional forces for unexpected contingencies as a key program driver. However, Congress has rejected the notion that the RRW is needed to meet new military requirements. In providing funds for 2006, the Appropriations Committee specified, "any weapons design under the RRW program must stay within the military requirements of the existing deployed stockpile and any new weapon design must stay within the design parameters validated by past nuclear tests". In an April 15, 2006, article by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post, Linton F. Brooks, administrator of the US National Nuclear Safety Administration, the US nuclear weapon design agency within the United States Department of Energy, announced that two competing designs for the Reliable Replacement Warhead were being finalized by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that a selection of one of those designs would be made by November 2006, to allow the RRW development program to be included in the Fiscal 2008 US government budget. The article confirmed prior descriptions of the RRW, describing the weapons in the following terms: The next-generation warheads will be larger and more stable than the existing ones but slightly less powerful, according to government officials. They might contain "use controls" that would enable the military to disable the weapons by remote control if they are stolen by terrorists. Based on prior weapons programs, t.…