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INTERACTIVE FEATURE
A Better Bomb
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n the Cold War arms race, scientists rushed to
build thousands of warheads to counter the Soviet Union. Today,
those scientists are racing once again, but this time to rebuild an
aging nuclear stockpile.
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are
locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in the Bay Area to design the nation's first new
nuclear bomb in two decades.
The two labs have fiercely competed in the bomb trade with
technologies as disparate as Microsoft's and Apple's.
The new weapon, under development for about a year, is designed to
ensure long-term reliability of the nation's inventory of bombs.
Program backers say that with greater confidence in the quality of
its weapons, the nation could draw down its stockpile, estimated at
about 6,000 warheads.
Scientists also intend for the new weapons to be less vulnerable to
accidental detonation and to be so secure that any stolen or lost
weapon would be unusable.
By law, the new weapons would pack the same explosive power as
existing warheads and be suitable only for the same kinds of
military targets as those of the weapons they replace. Unlike past
proposals for new atomic weapons, the project has captured
bipartisan support in Congress.
But some veterans of nuclear arms development are strongly opposed,
contending that building new weapons could trigger another arms race
with Russia and China, as well as undermine arguments to stop
nuclear developments in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere.
And, the critics say, It would eventually increase pressure to
resume underground nuclear testing, which the U.S. halted 14 years
ago.
Inside the labs, however, emotions and enthusiasm for the new
designs are running high.
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Joseph Martz |
"I have had people working nights and weekends," said
Joseph Martz,
head of the Los Alamos design team. "I have to tell them to go home.
I can't keep them out of the office. This is a chance to exercise
skills that we have not had a chance to use for 20 years."
A thousand miles away at Livermore, Bruce Goodwin, associate
director for nuclear weapons, described a similar picture: The lab
is running supercomputer simulations around the clock, and teams of
scientific experts working on all phases of the project "are
extremely excited."
The program to build the new bomb, known as the "reliable
replacement warhead," was approved by Congress in 2005 as part of a
defense spending bill. The design work is being supervised by the
National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the
Energy Department.
The laboratories submitted detailed design proposals in March that
ran more than 1,000 pages each to the Nuclear Weapons Council, the
secretive federal panel that oversees the nation's nuclear weapons.
A winner will be declared this year.
If the program is implemented, it would require an expensive
remobilization of the nation's nuclear weapons complex, creating a
capacity to turn out bombs at the rate of three or more a week.
Proponents of the project foresee a time when nuclear deterrence
will increasingly rest on the nation's capacity to build new bombs,
rather than on maintaining a massive stockpile.
The proposal comes as Russia and the United States have agreed to
further reduce nuclear stockpiles. The Moscow Treaty signed in 2002
by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin calls for
each country to cut inventories to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads
by 2012.
Without the reliable replacement warhead, U.S. scientists say the
nation will end up with old and potentially unreliable bombs within
the next 15 years, allowing adversaries to challenge U.S. supremacy
and erode the nation's so-called strategic deterrent.
