Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
7/31/2015
The U.S. focus on extending the service life of the nation’s existing nuclear arsenal could threaten critical warhead design and development capabilities, John Harvey, former principal deputy assistant to the secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, said on Tuesday. “In order to maintain critical capabilities, nuclear designers and engineers must routinely exercise them on challenging warhead design and development activities. Over the past decade and more, such opportunities have been very few and very far between,” Harvey said at a Peter Huessy breakfast.
“With constrained budgets and with a nuclear enterprise that is stretched with existing life-extension programs and infrastructure recapitalization, innovative approaches will be needed to achieve benefits without the high costs typical of full-scale engineering development,” Harvey said. “Absent this effort, and possibly within a decade, there are serious risks that the nuclear enterprise will not be able to provide a timely response to adverse contingencies.” Harvey recommended that weapons scientists and their military counterparts in the Departments of Energy and Defense conduct not only the Phase 1 and 2 warhead concept and feasibility studies, but also “parts of Phase 3 engineering development and Phase 4 production and engineering, associated with building and integrating actual hardware.” He said this would also bring together the DOE and DOD “in the integration of the warhead with the delivery system” and for performance assessments.
Harvey highlighted the Ohio-class submarine replacement program as the U.S. Navy’s highest priority. He also acknowledged progress in U.S. nuclear modernization efforts, including the B61 strategic bomb life-extension program that “is proceeding on course towards initial production in 2020,” and the “W76-1 [submarine-launched ballistic missile] re-entry system life-extension program,” which is “on track for completion in 2019.” However, existing life-extension programs do not “present sufficiently complex design and development challenges to fully exercise skills” among nuclear weapons designers and engineers, Harvey said.
Harvey gave the B61-12 bomb refurbishment as an example of a program that “offers a significant challenge to the [Sandia National Laboratories] teams working to develop non-nuclear warhead components such as a warhead electrical system, but not to the design and engineering teams at [Los Alamos National Laboratory].” He said the Los Alamos team is responsible “not to design and develop, but to assess whether components of the original warhead have aged or . . . are otherwise in need of repair.”
Harvey also noted that in the past the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has not executed “stockpile life-extension programs and infrastructure modernization on time and within cost projections,” adding that “multiple panels and commissions” have recommended reforms including “[bringing] the NNSA back into [the Department of Energy]” to encourage efficiency within the nuclear enterprise. In response to a question posed by NS&D Monitor, Harvey said the relationship between federal officials and laboratory personnel could be improved through “reduced micromanagement from [NNSA] headquarters.” He said headquarters must “decide what needs to be done,” provide funding and ensure the accountability of the contractors managing the programs, but that “we’ve gone a little bit away from that.” Harvey was referring to the DOE Albuquerque Operations Office that oversaw nuclear enterprise activities throughout the Cold War period. At that time, the operations office had “folks who really understood the nuclear weapons program,” he said, “but we’ve lost that, partly as a result of the end of the Cold War and the fact that we weren’t producing anything for a good 10 to 15 years.”
In a statement to NS&D Monitor, NNSA spokeswoman Shelley Laver said “[life-extension programs] alone cannot meet NNSA’s needs for a highly skilled and capable workforce” and the necessary skills “must be maintained through and exercised by, innovative scientific tools and advanced experimental techniques in order to improve overall stockpile assessment and sustainment capabilities.” Laver noted that some life-extension programs “are more complex than others,” such as “the upcoming ballistic weapons [life-extension programs] that will be interoperable in both Air Force and Navy weapon systems.” These programs, as well as “ongoing experimental work,” will help maintain critical skills, she said. Laver added that “ultimately, balancing the program among the need to manage the stockpile and conduct life extensions and maintaining the skilled workforce, especially in a constrained fiscal environment, is a challenge and requires difficult choices and tradeoffs. We are confident we are making choices that both maintain the deterrent and the critical skills required to sustain it.”
