[Beerinkol]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...r-force-budget

Buried in Vol. 2 (of 3) of the Air Force’s FY 2011 R&D budget (the entire budget encompasses 33 documents, some of them are more than 1,000 pages long) is an item referring to the “reliable replacement warhead.” This is the controversial Bush administration proposal (once, and perhaps still, supported by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) to design a less complex nuclear warhead that is less prone to decay and dysfunction over time. This is important because every weapon in our current arsenal is at least 20 years old (and some are much older) and many of them are incredibly complex and thus, potentially, don’t work any more—but we don’t know it. Former nuclear weapons designer Thomas Reed analogizes a nuclear weapon to highly complex sports car: You can’t leave a Ferrari in the garage for 20 years, and then decide one day you want to take it for a spin, and count on it starting just like that.

Not that we are quite so neglectful as that. The U.S. has a lot of programs to gauge the potential reliability of our arsenal, but all of them stop short of the decisive step—fissile testing—because that is deed too internationally provocative and domestically unpopular. Our best guess is that the tests we do run are quite good. But at the end of the day, we can’t be sure that which or how many of our weapons will work and which won’t. Which, of course, undermines the basic purpose of the arsenal: to scare (“deter”) potential attackers from doing anything too rash lest they unleash the worst we can throw at them.

The answer was once said to be the “reliable replacement warhead,” a less complex design made from existing fissile material and no small measure of recycled parts that would incorporate everything we have learned from more than half a century of research, design, and testing. It would not be as powerful or as advanced as our most cutting-edge weapons, but that is the whole point. In being simpler, it would be more, well, reliable. Rather than a Ferrari in that garage think of it as maybe not quite a Model T but a ’57 Chevy.

The RRW is controversial because doves and disarmament advocates believe it amounts to building new nuclear warheads and thus moves in the wrong direction from where we should want to go (a world without nuclear weapons), sets a bad international example, and perhaps could spur a new arms race. President Obama has made opposition to the RRW a key component of his nuclear policy agenda. Vice President Biden and Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher have denounced it in vociferous terms. Nonetheless, one reads occasionally of rear-guard actions within the bureaucracy to keep the program alive.