by CKR
If the threat of nuclear weapon use against the United States is indeed vanishingly small for the near future, what does this imply for the US nuclear stockpile?
It might seem that matching the stockpile numbers of most other nuclear nations would make sense. Russia, like the United States, is the exception. However, those thousands of nuclear weapons in both countries are left over from the Cold War. The high was a total of about 65,000 weapons in 1987, distributed roughly 25,000 for the United States and 40,000 for the Soviet Union. Today's numbers are about 10,000 and 16,000 respectively. (Click on the graph to enlarge it.)
The Treaty of Moscow provides for further decreases: the United States and Russia have agreed that by 2012, they will limit their "operational deployed strategic" weapons to 1700-2200 each. Note that qualification: operational deployed strategic weapons, weapons on the tips of missiles (still on Cold War alert status almost twenty years on), weapons stored where they are ready to be used, strategic (city-busters) rather than tactical (battlefield). Some weapons will be undergoing maintenance, and a safety margin must be provided with non-deployed weapons. Those reserves amount to as much as twice the deployed number. The limit was stated as a range, 1700-2200, because the US negotiators of the treaty were instructed to do it fast, not necessarily right. The larger number is expected to be the limit observed. Including reserves, that gives a total of 6600 warheads for each country. China and India expect to build up their stockpiles, but they will most likely stay below a thousand warheads total, each.
Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists has done a much more detailed analysis than my threat assessment, his of the possible missions for the American nuclear stockpile. He concludes that in today's world, the mission for a stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons can only be a devastating first strike on Russia. Obviously such a strike would also be effective against the smaller nuclear powers and the non-nuclear-weapons powers. One may surmise a similar motivation on the part of the Russians, an echo of the old Cold War standoff. This is consistent with the continuing alert status of missiles on both sides of that archaic rivalry, probably the greatest current threat of nuclear destruction by accidental launch.
Both the United States and Russia have been decommissioning their nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. In 1991, the United States and the Soviet Union signed START I, in which they agreed to decrease their accountable, in the words of the treaty, nuclear weapons to 6000 each. Accountable is more or less equivalent to deployed. START I also limited the numbers of delivery vehicles.
When the Soviet Union broke up, its nuclear weapons were deployed in four Soviet republics: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. Russia inherited the Soviet Union's place in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as one of the five allowed nuclear weapon states. The United States, Europe and Russia, convinced the three new nuclear powers to send their nuclear weapons to Russia and join the NPT as non-nuclear-weapon states. Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) developed legislation to help Russia secure its weapons and fissionable material and to continue decommissioning them under START guidelines. That legislation still funds these activities in Russia, but it has been subject to the whims of those senators who argue that we should never send funding for any purpose to Russia.
Within the United States, nuclear weapons are dismantled where they were assembled: the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. The capacity of the Pantex plant is said to be about a thousand weapons disassembled a year, but in recent years it appears that many fewer are being disassembled, perhaps only 200 a year. At that rate, it would take 17 years to reach a goal of 6600 from the current stockpile of 10,000. The Moscow Treaty calls for that goal to be met in 2012, not 2024 implied by the current rate of dismantling. Additionally, it appears that the weapons are simply being disassembled and the plutonium pits stored, rather than melted down to storable, not readily usable forms.
Pantex, like the other parts of the US nuclear complex, was built during the Cold War. The United States has not had a fully functioning plutonium fabrication facility since Rocky Flats was closed down in the 1980s. Rocky Flats's buildings have been torn down, contaminated soil trucked away, and the area made a wildlife preserve. Through a series of safety breaches, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory lost its certifications to handle plutonium in the 1990s. That has left the plutonium facility, TA-55, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory as the only place where pits might be built. The road to manufacturing at TA-55 from research has been long and arduous, but a slow trickle of pits is beginning to emerge.
The Department of Energy now is proposing a new research, production and manufacturing complex to be completed in 2030. The size of this complex, and even its nature, depends on what the US nuclear stockpile is to be in the future. A stockpile of 6600 warheads requires a different complex than does a stockpile of 500 warheads. Further, the lifetime of the warheads affects the size of the facilities. A lifetime of 20-30 years has been posited in the past; recently the JASONs reported that a lifetime of 50-100 years is likely. To maintain a stockpile of 500 warheads with a 20-year life, 25 warheads must be remanufactured every year. With a 100-year life, the number is 5. For a 6600-warhead stockpile, the numbers are 330 and 66.
We must also ask whether a new plutonium, enriched uranium, explosives and electronics complex, situated together to facilitate security from terrorists and to keep transportation to a minimum,* would be able to overcome the NIMBY syndrome. The Nevada Test Site has been proposed for the location, but the current opposition in Nevada to the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository suggests that this would not be an easy task. The cost of such a facility would probably run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Complex 2030 and other attempts at defining a new plutonium processing facilitiy in addition to Los Alamos have been working through the early stages of environmental approval. But without knowing the future mission, those efforts cannot progress beyond the early stages. One alternative is to size the facility for maximum expectations (330 remanufactured weapons per year?), but this runs the cost to levels where legislative approval is unlikely.
The robust replacement warhead (RRW) also factors in to the expectations for Complex 2030. The AAAS panel considering the RRW repeats in their report that conclusions are very difficult without knowing what the mission of the RRW would be. It seems clear in this much less threatening world that the large, city-busting weapons in the current stockpile are less likely to be needed, but what is it that nuclear weapons would be used for ? If Ivan Oelrich is right about the purpose of a several-thousand-warhead stockpile, the city-busters are fine. If there is another mission, we haven't heard what it is.
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* During the Cold War, the various facilities of the nuclear complex were located in different states to protect against a single debilitating nuclear strike. If there remains a genuine possibility of such a strike, such an option should be considered alongside the other options.