In November/December the United States should choose a design for the Reliable Replacement Warhead Programme. There are two designs under review, from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One of these will be chosen to replace the current stockpile of warheads. The design chosen shall be certifiable in the absence of testing so will be based on existing physics packages.

Walter Pincus, as usual, has a very good article on the Reliable Replacement Warhead Programme, in
The Washington Post.

”…The United States took another step yesterday toward building a new stockpile of up to 2,200 deployed nuclear weapons that would last well into the 21st century, announcing the start of a multiyear process to repair and replace facilities where they would be developed and assembled and where older warheads could be more rapidly dismantled…”

Pincus makes an interesting observation given recent events,

”…Yesterday's announcement comes as the Bush administration is pressing its allies to take harsh steps to halt nuclear weapons programs in both North Korea and Iran that it says are violations of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. That same treaty calls for the United States and other members of the nuclear club to eliminate their own stockpiles, but it gives no deadline by which that should take place…”

This is a reference to Article VI of the NPT that calls on all Nuclear Weapon States to pursue, in good faith, measures toward nuclear disarmament. Clearly pursuing a weapons programme meant to ensure a stockpile of warheads “that would last well into the 21st century” hardly qualifies as an Article VI measure.

Interestingly, whilst Kim Jong Il was letting off a little steam the French apparently were engaging in supercomputer simulations of the physics of nuclear explosions at Bruyeres-le-Chatel, for reasons undisclosed.

The Reliable Replacement Warhead Programme is also noteworthy from another perspective. An interesting Congressional Research Service report on the Replacement Warhead Programme contains a pretty good discussion on yield to weight ratios.

”…Now, ballistic missiles carry fewer warheads than they did during
the Cold War due to reduced targeting requirements. As a result, it is possible to revisit the Cold War tradeoffs, redesigning warhead components to give greater emphasis to other characteristics at the expense of yield, weight, or both…”

This is very much related to Stephen Younger’s discussion on low yield nukes (such as the bunker buster pictured here; note 1.0Mt is not a low yield! Also be aware that the 1.0Mt warhead is meant to destroy targets buried to 1,000 feet a la Kosvinsky Mountain). The Congressional Research Service report furthermore states,

”…Precision guidance enables conventional bombs to score direct hits on targets, and similar technology could apparently be used to make missile-delivered nuclear warheads more accurate, permitting lower yield. Indeed, some argue that the United States needs some lower-yield warheads. In this view, lower-yield warheads would create less of the unintended damage that might prevent the United States from using them. Such warheads, some argue, would be a better deterrent precisely because their use would be more credible…”

Translation? Advocates of the Reliable Replacement Warhead Programme argue that new nuclear warheads would be more useable than cold war era designs. The Reliable Replacement Warhead Programme requires a final get go from Congress.

So, we have a programme that basically tells the world that the US will trash Article VI of the NPT in order to create precisely more “useable” nuclear weapons. We should by now be aware what more “useable” nuclear weapons would mean for Russian and Chinese nuclear command and control.