I’ve been working for weeks on a couple of posts, including one on FOGBANK. As a result, I’ve neglected a bunch important things including the fantastic article that Benn Tannenbaum and Francis Slakey (aka T-Baum and Slake) wrote about the aging of the stockpile in IEEE Spectrum.
The bottom line is that we don’t need new weapons, just more stockpile stewardship activities:
Geopolitics is an inexact science, to put it mildly. But physics is not, and as physicists who’ve been involved in science and national security policy for many years, we believe that science and technology can, in this case at least, tell us all we need to know to decide this issue. Based on the available data, we are confident that the current program of stockpile stewardship, with some modifications, can preserve the U.S. arsenal for the foreseeable future and that it isn’t necessary—and may even be counterproductive—to pursue new warheads.
For my part, I think the article is an important step for the arms control community — we need a proactive explanation of how we will maintain a safe, secure and reliable deterrent in the absence of testing.
They also make a strong argument that what we should be for is the FrankenLEP, although I still tend to think of such programs as risk mitigation measures in the event of a significant problem in the normal Life Extension Program process.