ArmsControlWonk.com

The House Armed Services Committee defense authorization bill contains language that would repeal language creating the RRW program in favor of a “stockpile management program.”

I notice that the term of art is management, not modernization, although I wouldn’t object to latter word if the effort was confined to the purposes established in the language:

Section 3112—Stockpile Management Program

This section would strike section 4204a of the Atomic Energy Defense Act (50 U.S.C. 2524), which codifies the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. This section would also amend section 4204, which establishes the Stockpile Life Extension Program, with a new provision establishing a Stockpile Management Program. This section would establish that the objectives of the Stockpile Management Program are to: increase the reliability, safety, and security of the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile; further reduce the likelihood of the resumption of underground nuclear weapons testing; achieve reductions in the future size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; reduce the risk of accidental detonation; and reduce the risk that an element of the stockpile could ever be used by a person or entity hostile to the United States, its vital interests, or allies.

This section would also provide guidelines for stockpile management, requiring that changes may only be made to the stockpile in pursuit of these identified objectives. This section would further require that any changes must be consistent with basic design parameters, and must use components that are well understood or are certifiable without the need to resume underground nuclear weapons testing. Additionally, this section would provide that any such changes shall adhere to the design, certification, and production expertise resident in the nuclear security complex to fulfill current mission requirements of the existing stockpile.

The Stockpile Management Program would support and complement
the science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program, which focuses on sustaining the scientific and technical expertise and the experimental tools and capabilities needed to ensure that the nuclear stockpile is safe, secure, and reliable without nuclear testing. The Stockpile Management Program, in turn, would provide a framework for the activities associated with actual work on the weapons that comprise the stockpile, including limitations on any changes to the stockpile.

It seems to me that this is a pretty sensible approach — consistent with my preference that the Congress ought to dispose of RRW on the very narrow grounds that WR1 is not the most cost effective or technically appropriate (ie lowest risk of testing) option to maintain (or manage) the capability provided by the W76. (And not on the more sweeping grounds that it is “new” or “modernized.”)

In case you are curious, here is the actual language.

Back in January 2008, Michael Bilton in the Sunday Times had a very interesting article on the UK Trident force that I somehow missed. Sort of a UK-version of Doug Waller’s excellent, Big Red.

The most intriguing part, to me, is the suggestion that the UK warheads have variable yields. Previously, UK officials had indicated that the UK “has some flexibility in the choice of yield for the warhead on its Trident missile.”

“Some flexibility,” according to Bilton, runs all the way down to 10-15 kt:

As a gesture to disarmament, in 1998 the Blair government dramatically cut the British nuclear stockpile – getting rid of all tactical weapons and limiting each submarine to a maximum of 48 warheads, weapons that can nevertheless cause terrible damage. They can strike anywhere on Earth and cause some countries to cease to exist. Britain’s post-cold-war Trident submarines go to sea with fewer missiles and warheads. Sometimes one or more of the missile tubes contains concrete ballast blocks to control buoyancy. Most British weapons have a yield of 80 to 100 kilotons – seven or eight times the destructive power dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But some are much smaller – 10 to 15 kilotons. Some missiles have multiple warheads and dummies; others contain only a small single device – probably a low-yield weapon, with limited destructive power. In some scenarios it doesn’t take a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

The key to deterrence-theory is to convince a potential adversary that we have not only the capability but also the will to fire a nuclear weapon if critically threatened. A British prime minister might feel constrained in giving the order to fire if the result was massively disproportionate to the threat from a rogue state or terrorist group. Smaller-yield single warheads could be used to demonstrate British resolve, coupled with a warning of the devastation that might follow if a potential enemy did not back off. Deliberate ambiguity is a crucial strategy. Would Britain make the first use of nuclear weapons? Ministers refuse to say. Keeping an enemy guessing is the name of the game.

Fascinating.

I’ve been reading “Caging the Dragon” on the flight to London and it reminded me of a little song from Sesame Street that goes:

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things is just not the same.

What reminded me of that? These three yields:

- Fission yield

- Fusion yield

- Hydrodynamic yield

Can you spot the one that’s not like the others? (Hint: Perhaps it’s easier to try to figure out why two of these are the same.) No fair googling the answer! I didn’t have access to google on the airplane and you shouldn’t use it either.

Spoiler Alert: as I might have expected, keen wonk-readers got the answer right away, so only read the comments if you want to see what others have said.

Scott Sagan argues very convincingly in the pages of Survival that the United States should adopt a declaratory policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons (Scott D. Sagan, “The Case for No First Use,” Survival 51:3, June–July 2009, pp. 163–182).

Particularly compelling, to me, is his demolition of “calculated ambiguity” using a case study from the Bush Administration. Whatever the appeal in theory, in real life “calculated ambiguity” degenerates into the clumsy brandishing of nuclear weapons.

I had been mulling a similar case study in a memo using the almost comical efforts to maintain “calculated ambiguity” regarding a possible nuclear strike against the Libyan facility at Tarhuna. The Clinton Administration looked like the Keystone Cops armed with nuclear weapons, which says something when you manage to upstage Muammar al-Gaddafi in a black comedy.

No need to, now. Scott executes a much cleaner demonstration of why “calculated ambiguity” is, to my mind, more trouble than it is worth:

Options on the table

A US no-first-use declaration would also enhance US non-proliferation objectives by increasing international diplomatic support for tougher diplomatic measures against potential proliferators. Recent attempts to use coercive diplomacy against Iran illustrate the point. Bush and Cheney repeatedly hinted in 2006 and 2007, by noting that ‘all options are on the table’, at US plans to use military force to attack Iran’s nuclear programme if diplomatic efforts and UN sanctions failed to persuade Tehran to give up its uranium enrichment and other facilities. In April 2006, journalist Seymour Hersh sparked an international controversy by reporting that the US contingency attack plans that had been sent to the White House included the option of using tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iranian underground facilities.

At a press conference on 18 April 2006, Bush pointedly left open the possibility that his statements were meant to include the option of a preventive first strike with nuclear weapons:

Q: Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike? Is that something that your administration will plan for?

THE PRESIDENT: All options are on the table.

It is not clear whether Bush was engaging in coercive diplomacy, following the ‘calculated ambiguity’ nuclear doctrine, or whether he was simply following the script laid out in his notes. In response to this press conference comment, however, Iran’s UN ambassador, Javad Zarif, immediately protested, in a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, against what he called ‘a tacit confirmation of the shocking news on the administration’s possible contemplation of nuclear strikes against certain targets in Iran’. British Foreign Minister Jack Straw also joined the debate, answering ‘yes’ when a BBC reporter asked him if the UK government would ‘unequivocally say we want nothing to do with this’ if the United States attacked Iran, and adding that ‘the idea of a nuclear strike on Iran is completely nuts’.

The point is not that potential veiled US nuclear threats were in any way the cause of Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme, which began long before the Bush administration took office. But US nuclear threats, intentional or not, both play into the hands of domestic forces in Iran that favour developing nuclear weapons and reduce international diplomatic support for coercive diplomatic efforts to pressure Iran to end its defiance of UN Security Council resolutions requiring suspension of its enrichment programme. If the United States were to adopt a no-first-use doctrine, the temptation for US politicians to resort to veiled nuclear threats as part of coercive diplomacy against Iran or other potential proliferators would be reduced, as would the ability of Tehran to claim it faces nuclear threats.

The very fact that the UK Foreign Secretary feels compelled to characterize the US position as “completely nuts” — to me — is a sign of a declaratory policy FAIL.

North Korea is rightly considered an international pariah that not only starves its population while pampering its dictator but also thumbs its nose at the international community’s demand that it not test nuclear bombs or continue its missile development. It is therefore, perhaps, strange to think why the DPRK tested its two nuclear bombs underground.

After all, it is much simpler and less expensive to have an atmospheric test. It also provides a cheap and accurate way of calibrating the bomb by photographing the fireball in the same frame as the sun. China used this method in at least one of its 22 atmospheric tests after the US and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. (That treaty went into force on October 10, 1963 while China’s first nuclear test, an atmospheric one, was a year later.)

Was the North trying to maintain secrecy about the design of its bombs by containing the radioactive particles that might have been used for nuclear forensics? If that was the reason, it seems unlikely that it could successfully hide all the produced radionucleotides, including the noble gases. Of course, the West has, at least to my knowledge, remained very silent on what they have detected. Or was Kim Jun-il concerned about fallout landing on his own people? If that was the concern, they could have positioned it very close to the Eastern coast and waited for a day with a constant wind blowing out of the West.

Or was North Korea, contrary to all international expectations, succumbing to the international norm of only testing nuclear bombs underground?

The plot thickens, thanks to Frank Munger’s continued pursuit of FOGBANK.

Munger has a pair of blog posts (Is there more to the story about the W76? Y-12: fogbank produced in Spring 2008) that put NNSA and POGO on a collision course. Only one of them can be accurately describing the reason for the delayed delivery of the first SLEP’d W76 to the Navy.

In a recent blog post, I observed that Ralph Vartabedian’s story on the W76 conflated problems relating to the production of FOGBANK with problems related to the new W76 AFF&F system.

I based that observation on Vartabedian’s paraphrase of NNSA spokesman Damien Lavera. Lavera, according to Vartabedian, stated that the delay for the W76 relating to the arming, firing and fusing system:

LaVera said all issues with fogbank had been resolved. The only remaining W76 issue involves potential minor defects in its arming, fusing and firing system, the safety controls that prepare a nuclear weapon for detonation

Vartabedian presented the statement uncritically. According to Munger, “NNSA spokesman Steven Wyatt reiterated that Y-12 shipped its first production unit (FPU) for the W76-1 Life Extension Program in August 2008 — as previously reported.”

That seems pretty clear to me.

Now, Peter Stockton at POGO tells Munger that the hold-up is still related to FOGBANK:

Stockton said POGO’s sources at the Pantex warhead assembly plant in Texas have indicated about a dozen W76 warheads are being assembled and disassembled there to maintain certification for the facilities and the technical personnel involved in those tasks. Stockton said those same sources indicated the holdup in delivering those warheads to the military was related to fogbank.

So, which is it? What Stockton said certainly was true, at least until recently. GAO stated while awaiting FOGBANK, Pantex remained “in ‘stand-by’ mode, which includes maintaining the skills of the technicians who will assemble refurbished W76 weapons.” (I suspect “stand-by” mode refers to the process described by Stockton.)

But is it still true in Spring 2009? I have to say, I would be very surprised if the problem continued to relate to FOGBANK. My money is on the AF&F system.

We’ll see.

click on the image for a larger version

Four Kt nuclear explosion over one “sub-harbor” in Ulsan. Overpressures are for a 4 Kt nuke detonated at the optimum height to maximize blast effects. POL destruction limit is the range where blast effects cause severe damage to oil tanks. Thermal effects, i.e. starting a firestorm, are overestimated because slant ranges are used as ground ranges.

This title might be a little misleading. I certainly don’t want to imply that a 4 Kt nuke could not kill a lot of people. It certainly could. However, I have been thinking about whether or not North Korea might be able to use a few 4 kiloton (Kt) nuclear weapons—if that is their true yield—in what we in the West would consider tactical situations but in the context of the Korean peninsula would have strategic consequences. After all, it would seem that the US and South Korea would be in a very vulnerable position if the North launched an all-out invasion. In the standard war plans the US has for handling such an attack, often abbreviated as Halt, Build up, and Retake, involved a slow as possible fall back away from the DMZ with most of the US troops and supplies come in from outside the country.

It seemed, I thought, the perfect opportunity to use nukes. Blow up a few ports, I thought, and that would have a serious impact on the US strategy. This appears especially important when you look at the top six or seven ports. Two of these, Inchon and Tonghae, are fairly close to the DMZ and might be taken by ground forces in the first couple of days. Of the others, Ulsan, near the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, has 75% of the remaining berthing capacity. If Inchon and Tonghae could be taken by “conventional” forces, then destroying Ulsan could severely hamper the “Build-up” phase.

And it still might; but it would take more 4 Kt nukes than the North might want to expend on it. There are at least four (and arguably six) separate harbor areas in Ulsan. Baring a bottleneck for rail or road transportation that I haven’t seen in GoogleEarth, it turns out it would take four to six 4 Kt nukes to destroy them. Let’s consider in more detail an attack on one of those sub-ports, the one on the West side of the mouth of the main river.

There is a major oil tank farm associated with those docks, which presumably equipped with whatever specialized oil off-loading equipment is needed for that activity. Oil storage tanks are remarkably resilient to nuclear attack. This has only increased since 1977 when my edition of “The Effects of Nuclear Weapons” by Glasstone and Dolan was published. It seems that oil tanks get more resilient as they get bigger and most of the tank farm requires blast overpressures of 12 psi or greater. (Four kilotons is right in the transition region where the radius of creating a firestorm, about 0.8 km in for this yield, is just about equal to equal to the blast radius of 10 psi, which is just about capable of knocking over a large, half empty oil tank. This change over has to happen sometime since the thermal radiation must go as the fireball’s surface area, Y^2/3, while the blast radius goes as Y^1/3, where Y is the yield.) These blast radii assume the bomb went off at the optimum height. If it was a surface blast, to create the maximum amount of contamination, it is possible many of the oil tanks in the farm might survive a 4 Kt blast.

Knocking down the cranes needed to remove containers from ships would also require a 4 Kt blast to be very close. And much of the US supplies come in on roll-on/roll-off ships so perhaps the North would have to destroy quays, something that is very hard to do. Would the DPRK want to use four to six of its nukes to destroy Ulsan? It is possible of course, but that must be a large fraction of their current arsenal for only a 75% reduction in pre-existing berthing capacity. And there lots of possibilities for an imaginative, adaptive, and motivated US military to substitute for that capacity.

Greetings from the Lufthansa Senators Lounge in Frankfurt.

I’ve been struggling with how to describe Ralph Vartabedian’s story in the Los Angeles Times about the W76 Life Extension Program. On one hand, Vartabedian (with some help from POGO) dug out some really embarrassing information the W76 Life Extension Program. On the other hand, Vartabedian uses the problem to make a larger point about the state of stockpile stewardship, which I think is misleading.

Despite claims to the contrary by NNSA in February, the first (and only) refurbished W76 is apparently still sitting in pieces at Pantex:

In February, the department’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the “first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy.”

But no delivery was ever made. The warhead is in pieces inside a production cell at the Energy Department’s Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, according to an engineer at the facility.

[snip]

B&W Pantex, the private company that operates the plant, was still awaiting delivery of a classified part from another facility and cannot assemble the warhead, the engineer said.

Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss told The Times on Thursday: “We have not received delivery of any refurbished W76 warheads. The answer is none.”

That is embarrassing for NNSA, which had fired off an awfully rah rah! press release celebrating “another great example of the unsurpassed expertise throughout NNSA’s national security enterprise.” (Really? Which is the other example?)

Now, that’s embarrassing. But Vartabedian engages in a little bait-and-switch. The “classified part,” according to NNSA spokesman Damien LaVera, is the arming, firing and fuzing (AF&F) system.

That is not an issue with the physics package, although Vartabedian devotes the bulk of his article (952 of the 1133 words by my count) to reprising old concerns about FOGBANK, which is part of the physics package. Vartabedian also describes FOGBANK as a “classified component” — which the casual reader is sure to conflate with the “classified part,” aka the AF&F system.

This is basically the same thing that General Kevin Chilton tried to pull with the vacuum tube hokum (It all knits together, Elaine) — using a problem with a non-nuclear component to cast aspersions on the success of the Stockpile Stewardship Program which is, for all practical purposes, about our ability to sustain the nuclear explosive package without yield testing.

The wolves are at the doorstep of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Several months into the Obama Administration, we still don’t have a new Administrator.

Part of the issue is that, in a few years, NNSA may no longer exist. The OMB “passback” raised the possibility of moving NNSA into DOD:

DoD and DOE, to include the NNSA, are being requested in their respective passbacks to assess the costs and benefits of transferring budget and management of NNSA or its components to DoD and elsewhere, as appropriate, beginning in FY 2011.

The Strategic Posture Commission, on the other hand, proposed establishing NNSA as a separate agency reporting to the President through the Secretary of Energy…”

What to do?

To consider some of these questions, we’ve invited Libby Turpen to brief the study she recently directed, Leveraging Science for Security: A Strategy for the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories in the 21st Century:

Who Should Own Our Nuclear Weapons?

Dr. Elizabeth Turpen
Co-director, Cooperative Nonproliferation Program, Stimson Center

Thursday, May 28, 2009
12:15 – 1:30 p.m.

New America Foundation
1899 L St NW, 4th Floor
Washington, DC 20036

RSVP

Dr. Turpen, Task Force Project Director and Co-director of Stimson Center’s Cooperative Nonproliferation Program, will present the Task Force’s findings and discuss how a restructuring of the nuclear weapons complex will help to resolve the tension between President Obama’s commitment to the vision of a nuclear free world and his assurances of maintaining a robust deterrent until such a world is attainable.

The DPRK apparently told China before its 2006 test that they were aiming for a yield of about 4 KT but they only acheived a yield around ½ KT. This implies that there was a significant problem with that design. ( Their announcement of this test seems to indicate that they are acknowledging that.) If this time they had gone with a test of a 20 KT design, as the Russians are apparently saying, it means that they were changing designs to ensure they got a big bang and avoided the publicity problems they went through after the 2006 test: of having their first test a failure.

If its yield really is closer to 4 KT, it is, of course, still possible that it was a 20 KT design that failed (which seems rather hard to believe since 20 KT is the “easiest” yield to get—that’s why it was used in the first plutonium bomb during WWII). But its also possible they were once again aiming for a 4 KT yield. That would mean they kept the basics of their old design and just corrected whatever the problem was. This would show a certain level of sophistication of project management that is not obvious in their missile development program. (That assessment, of course, depends in part on what the 2006 Tae’podong II looked like.)

If they had gone with the “fail safe” WWII design, it would probably mean it was too heavy to mount on a missile. They would be making a political bomb that would undoubtedly use a lot of high explosive to ensure it got a good compression of the plutonium pit. The 4 KT bomb, however, might very well fit on a DPRK missile. If they have stayed with this design, it probably indicates that weaponizing it is even more important than ensuring a successful test.