Todd Jacobson
NS&D Monitor
4/17/2015
With a significant focus in the National Nuclear Security Administration on modernizing the nation’s nuclear stockpile, lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee this week urged the agency to maintain a balance between production activities and maintaining scientific capabilities. Speaking at an April 15 budget hearing, Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said production and modernization should be the top priority at the labs, but she questioned whether there was enough focus on maintaining a broad portfolio. “There’s concern that investment in the laboratories is really too limited right now to be able to support any kind of balanced portfolio,” Fischer said, later adding that aside from production and modernization, “You also have to meet necessary scientific capabilities. We need to look at infrastructure. We have to look at attracting creative minds that are able to not just refurbish the weapons that we have, but have an understanding of how to create those weapons as well. If we’re going to, I think, continue to be prepared in the future.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the chairman of the subcommittee, noted that a January Strategic Command report also raised questions about the funding emphasis on life extension programs. The report, he said, said there might not be enough funding for science to “prepare to respond to future uncertainties” and there is “concern about losing ‘full design and production capability.’ ” He added: “What can you do to ensure our labs maintain a responsive design capability to address future uncertainties?”
NNSA: Striking a Balance Key
NNSA Administrator Frank Klotz acknowledged that striking and maintaining a balance was a concern for the agency, especially with an aging workforce, but he said the “leading-edge” physics, chemistry, material science and computing science conducted at the labs helps maintain the level of science. “The skill that they develop in terms of working with the existing systems and keeping them up to date provides the basic necessary requirements they would have to have for any future contingencies that would arise,” Klotz said.
Klotz emphasized that even though the NNSA is not designing new weapons, a lot can still be done by designers. “The labs are not developing new nuclear explosive packages, but they’re absolutely changing things within those packages,” he said. “And they’re doing it with the best simulation that’s ever existed, a factor of a million increased since the end of underground testing.”
‘We’re Challenging the Labs’
NNSA weapons program chief Don Cook said current work on the W80-4 warhead—which will replace the warhead on the air-launched cruise missile—helps exercise a lot of the experimental and computing capabilities that have been put in place under the Stockpile Stewardship Program over the last decade. “In a modern way of looking at the alternatives we have, we’re really challenging the labs to use their best codes, their best people, and get into some experimental data instead of guessing about what the results are with regard to a materials model, the behavior of materials, for example,” Cook said.
He also said work on the interoperable warhead is helping to challenge warhead designers. He said the agency was “looking at all the concepts and the ways that we could run the interoperable weapons for the Air Force and the Navy. While that effort is delayed, we’ve got some time to really go through in a more formal way, challenging the people to look at some things that would otherwise be considered out of the box and too risky.”
