The last two years have seen a number of reports by the government’s advisory and investigative bodies about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program and the broader goal of redesigning the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. Taken as a whole, these reports offer frustratingly few details about what exactly RRW will entail, but do offer an unusual behind-the-curtain look at how the future of the United States is being shaped at this moment in time.

For those new to the RRW debate, the most important document of the set may be the Congressional Research Service’s (CRS) report on “The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program,” which was updated in March 2006 to include a final discussion of fiscal year 2006 appropriations and an initial discussion of the 2007 budget request, among other new material. This report provides an excellent, objective description of the proposed program and a detailed summary of questions to be asked of supporters, opponents and “skeptics” of the program.

Read the CRS report on RRW: "Nuclear Weapons: The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program," Updated March 9, 2006.

In July 2005 a task force of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) released its “Recommendations for the Nuclear Weapons Complex of the Future.” The task force, which consisted both of experts in nuclear weapons issues and of experts in industrial management, found that since the end of the Cold War, the weapons complex has struggled with both an obsolete set of facilities and organizational structures and the lack of a “a unified interdependent … vision or set of mission priorities.” To correct these problems, the SEAB report recommended an RRW program oriented towards producing an altogether new “family of modern nuclear weapons.” The report also recommended consolidating facilities in order to reduce the dispersal of weapons-grade materials throughout the United States, accelerating the dismantlement of retired weapons, and creating a National Nuclear Security Adminstration (NNSA) “Office of Transformation.”

Read the SEAB report on the future of the nuclear weapons complex.

In April 2006 NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Thomas P. D’Agostino testified before the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee on the NNSA’s plans for carrying out the SEAB report’s recommendations. D’Agostino enthusiastically endorsed the report’s views regarding RRW, as well as its views on the creation of an Office of Transformation and other organizational issues, but reported that the NNSA did not intend to adopt the report’s recommendation to consolidate all large quantities of weapons-grade materials to a single facility.

Read NNSA Deputy Administrator D’Agostino’s testimony.

Read the NNSA’s press release.

Later that month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report summarizing the SEAB report’s recommendations and the NNSA’s response to those recommendations, and offered its assessment of what the urgent priorities are for reconfiguring the nuclear weapons complex. The GAO’s main recommendations were that the Department of Defense (DOD) clarify what it wants the stockpile of the future to look like and that the Department of Energy (DOE) invest more effort in producing credible estimates of the relative costs of different proposals for the future of the complex before throwing its support behind one such proposal. Beyond these two recommendations, the GAO emphasized the importance of careful planning and accountable management in implementing the selected plan.

Read the GAO Report documenting the testimony of Gene Aloise: "NUCLEAR WEAPONS: Views on Proposals to Transform the Nuclear Weapons Complex," Statement of Gene Aloise, Director Natural Resources and Environment.

In February 2006, CRS published its assessment of the SEAB report – and it was not, on the whole, a glowing one. On the issue of consolidating facilities, weapons complex veterans cited by the CRS report panned the task force’s recommendations as both harmful to the quality of the complex’s work and politically infeasible. The CRS report was even more brutal in its assessment of the task force’s recommendations regarding RRW: CRS suggested that as a question of stockpile policy, rather than of infrastructure policy, RRW “may [lie] beyond the Task Force’s mandate,” and reported that in spite of the task force’s “strong implication to the contrary,” the group had not consulted with the appropriate parties at the DOD regarding the role of RRW in the future of the stockpile.

Read the CRS report on reconfiguration. "Nuclear Weapons Complex Reconfiguration: Analysis of an Energy Department Task Force Report," Feb. 1, 2006.

The fiscal year 2006 Defense Authorization Act required the departments of Energy and Defense to report to Congress by March 1, 2007, on the possible implementations of RRW. In March 2006, the two secretaries submitted the interim report to Congress. While this report reiterates the DOE’s previously-established rationale for RRW and outlines the departments’ progress on RRW, including the inter-laboratory design competition, it offers little insight into the departments’ plans for comparing the costs and benefits of RRW to those of an alternative strategy, if such plans (and such a strategy) exist.

Read the interim report to Congress by the DOD and DOE.

The three nuclear design laboratories have also weighed in officially in support of an ambitious RRW program. In March 2005, the three laboratories jointly published a paper echoing and expressing their support for the DOE’s beliefs about the centrality of RRW to the future of the stockpile and the weapons complex.

Read the joint nuclear laboratory paper.

Finally, the coming years are expected to produce several new advisory reports on the future on the nuclear weapons complex. The committee report accompanying the House version of the fiscal year 2007 Defense Authorization Act, recently made public, includes a provision for a National Academy of Sciences study which will assess the weapon design laboratories’ Quantification of Margins and Uncertainties methodology, and, specifically, “whether [QMU] can be applied to the planned Reliable Replacement Warhead program so as to carry out the objective of that program to reduce the likelihood of underground testing of nuclear weapons.”

Updated Oct. 10, 2006:

Many details on NNSA’s plans for the future of the nuclear weapons complex, including the role of RRW in creating a “responsive” complex capable of producing new types of weapons, are outlined in a May 2006 DOE PowerPoint presentation titled “Complex 2030: A Preferred Infrastructure Planning Scenario for the Nuclear Weapons Complex.”

Read “Complex 2030.”

# # #