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I just completed an interview with Bruce Tartar—former Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and chair of the AAAS panel of the Reliable Replacement Warhead—for a forthcoming issue of the Bulletin. You’ll have to wait for it to come out, but he mentioned something extremely interesting in passing.

Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) recently sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, Secretary of State Condi Rice and National Advisor Steve Hadley complaining about lukewarm administration support for the RRW. (John Fleck had noted the letter and posted the full text on one of his many blogs.)

The interesting part is that St. Pete closed with this paragraph:

Finally, based on the success of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, we now have the confidence to design and manufacture RRW weapons that will be deployed without underground testing. In light of this reality, I would like to discuss with you how this could impact the Administration’s decision to revisit its position on the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and if you believe that such action would guarantee that countries like India, Pakistan and North Korea would sign on the Treaty and would encourage China, Iran, Indonesia and Egypt to follow the U.S. action to ratify the treaty.

Really?

When Domenici voted against the CTBT, he held out the possibility that “if my concerns about the overall strategic arms strategies and their relationship to CTBT can be alleviated, and if the potential for stockpile stewardship during the next decade can be realized, I will be able to vote for a CTBT in the future.” [Emphasis mine.]

Domenici —who may face a tougher than expected 2008 re-election campaign—was always the linchpin of the bipartisan compromise that would be necessary to secure ratification of the CTBT. “When Pete Domenici whistled, everybody jumped,” NRDC’s Chris Paine told Mother Jones in 1999. “The administration was trying to craft a bipartisan compromise on testing. They did that by giving Domenici everything he wanted on the SSP.”

Put another way, the Stockpile Stewardship Program was the central element of what the AAAS report describes as a “bargain”:

”[T]he nuclear weapons Laboratories … informed President Bill Clinton that it was likely they could maintain the stockpile in the SSP without nuclear testing, and he asked the Senate to approve the CTBT. In return, he agreed that a necessary condition for success was the vitality of the three weapons Laboratories, and he also put important safeguards into the language requesting Senate approval of the treaty.”

The question now is what sort of bipartisan bargain on nuclear testing and the future of the stockpile do we need today?

I put that question to Tartar, but you’ll have to wait to find out his answer.

Comment [7]

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Department of Energy plans to announce the reliable replacement warhead contract today:

The Energy Department will announce today a contract to develop the nation’s first new hydrogen bomb in two decades, involving a collaboration between three national weapons laboratories, The Times has learned.

The new bomb will include design features from all three labs, though Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area appears to have taken the lead position in the project. The Los Alamos and Sandia labs in New Mexico will also be part of the project.

Teams of scientists in California and New Mexico have been working since last year to develop the new bomb, using the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

The weapon is known as the reliable replacement warhead and is intended to replace aging warheads now deployed on missiles aboard Trident submarines.

The contract decision was made by the Nuclear Weapons Council, which consists of officials from the Defense Department and the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Energy Department. Plans were underway Thursday to announce the award this afternoon.

The article also has some info on the design that was selected, and why it looks like Livermore will be taking the lead:

The design details are secret, but Livermore’s version utilizes major components that had been tested — though not produced — for a Navy bomb about two decades ago.

By contrast, Los Alamos selected a design that involved an atomic trigger and a thermonuclear component that had been tested individually.

However, the two elements were never tested together, said Philip Coyle, who serves on scientific advisory committees and formerly was deputy director at Livermore.

The Los Alamos design is said to contain highly attractive features, including innovative mechanisms that would prevent terrorists from detonating the bomb should they gain access to it, experts said. Those use controls were cited by military officials as a key factor in developing the weapon.

Comment [2]

I/’ve just returned from the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, only to learn of an event of major geopolitical importance: the Government of Saint Kitts and Nevis has signed the CTBT. I will, of course, closely follow the ratification process in the National Assembly.

This was the top headline on the CTBTO website for five days, before being overtaken by the equally earth-shattering ratification of the CTBT by Belize.

It has been hard to keep up with all the progress on arms control and disarmament that has been made under the Bush Administration. Truly, as Assistant Secretary Bolton said, "our commitment to multilateral regimes to promote nonproliferation and international security never has been as strong as it is today, through numerous arms control treaties and nonproliferation arrangements..."