Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Conference Welcome and Introduction

By the Hon. Linton F. Brooks, Under Secretary of Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration U.S. Department of Energy

Thank you and welcome. Some of you have never sponsored a conference, so you wonder what do you get when you do sponsor such a conference? You get at least one, but no more than two, minutes to set the stage, that's what you get. [laughter] So here's my one minute. There are big ideas that come around from time to time in our business. Ten years ago, there were two of them, the very rapid moving away from non-strategic nuclear weapons and the whole concept of stockpile stewardship. Today, the big ideas are wrapped up in what we call the Nuclear Posture Review and the New Triad. They're big ideas about the purposes of nuclear weapons, they’re big ideas about the relationship between nuclear weapons to other capabilities.

But for us in the Department of Energy, perhaps the biggest idea is the notion, after paying lip service to it for decades, that the infrastructure is an important component of long-term deterrence. And we may be, through the combination of the responsive infrastructure and Reliable Replacement Warhead, on the verge of completely transforming the way we provide our contribution to the nation’s deterrent.

What I want to get out of this conference is a deeper understanding of where we’re going. Because if I'm right, ten years from now people will be sitting here and they’ll be talking about big ideas in the past, and the things you're going to wrestle with for the next two days will be their examples. So I look forward to a productive and interesting discussion.

Introduction By: Dr. Charles M. Perry

In his last sentence, Bob talked about lead times. That's a perfect setup because up to now, we haven’t talked about time very much in this conference. But the different things we’re talking about operate over wildly different time scales. We can issue a Nuclear Posture Review and start talking the buzz words of assure, dissuade, deter, defeat, in a day. And we can make operational and targeting changes to implement that new policy in weeks or months. And then in maybe a year, as you heard this morning, we can start integrating existing nuclear and conventional capabilities. And in a few years, we can develop new conventional capabilities.

In contrast, the infrastructure and the nuclear weapons stockpile changes over decades. And that's why I'm going to talk about the stockpile, but I'm going to also talk about the infrastructure. The most important thing you ought to get out of what I'm saying is those are not two topics, they are a single topic. If it takes as long as I say to transform the infrastructure, that limits our ability to transform the stockpile.

Let me give you a concrete example. If, as most of us assume, the Reliable Replacement Warhead requires a different, remanufactured pit, and if everything works the way we hope, we might be able to produce 40 pits a year in the first part of the next decade. For greater production, we’ll await a modern pit facility, which will not be available for at least 15 years. You can add one more year since the Congress zero funded it again this year. And so fully implementing the responsive infrastructure portion of this new triad is going to take us a while. Now, that means a few things. First, it means that the responsive infrastructure isn’t particularly relevant to Iran or to Korea or to the nuclear terrorism concerns that we discussed in the last panel yesterday. But in the long run, a responsive infrastructure may be the most important element of the new triad. Because the combination of a Reliable Replacement Warhead, or a family of Reliable Replacement Warheads, and a truly responsive infrastructure, each enabled by the other, may genuinely be transformational.

So while we wrestle with the important near term questions you heard about yesterday, we also need to focus on the long term promise of a transformed stockpile. After all, a great nation ought to be able to work on two problems at once. If we were starting today to create a nuclear stockpile, you just heard two eloquent statements saying that we wouldn’t build the stockpile we have now. We would take a much different approach. Today’s stockpile is the wrong stockpile technically. Most current weapons were designed to maximize yield with minimum size and weight so we could cram as many warheads as possible on a single delivery system. As a result, weapons designers worked close to so-called performance cliffs. If we were designing a stockpile from scratch today, we’d do it quite differently. We’d trade size and weight for increased performance margins; and above all, for ease of manufacture and maintenance and security.

Secondly, the stockpile that we have inherited was not designed for longevity. During the Cold War, we were always introducing new weapons. We turned over most of the stockpile every 15 to 20 years. You’ve heard an argument, two arguments, that we might well go to that kind of world again, but on the off chance we don’t, we’re faced with aging weapons that we are constantly rebuilding in life extension programs that are both difficult and costly.

Now, rebuilding nuclear weapons is never going to be cheap. But Cold War decisions to use certain hazardous materials in the interests of getting the smallest weight and volume, combined with today’s safety and environmental climate, means that our warheads are much more costly to re-manufacture than they would be if we were starting from scratch.

Third, as you’ve just heard, we may well have the wrong stockpile militarily because what we have is a lot of very high yield weapons with very high fission fractions. We certainly have the wrong stockpile politically, even with the President’s decision last year to take one of the largest reductions in history and to put us down at levels not seen in the Eisenhower administration, there are very few people who don’t believe that the stockpile, and especially the component of the stockpile we don’t deploy but keep as a hedge, is simply too big.

And finally, today’s stockpile is not what we’d build if we were worried about physical security. During the Cold War, what we worried about in the security world was spies stealing our secrets. We still worry about that, but now we’ve got a post-9/11 threat of well armed, competent, suicide terrorists trying to gain access to a warhead in order to detonate it in place. That change has increased security costs. In NNSA, for example, one out of every nine dollars we spend is on security. If we were designing the stockpile today, we would use new technologies and approaches to warhead design to build some of that security into the warhead and then have it there permanently.

Now, fortunately we actually know what to do about all of these problems. So let me take you ahead 20 or 25 years when our vision for nuclear weapons and the enterprise of the future has come to fruition. Let me describe that world. The deployed stockpile, which is almost certainly smaller than what we presently plan for 2012, has largely been transformed. Reliable Replacement Warheads have relaxed the design constraints imposed on Cold War systems, they’re more easily manufactured with environmentally benign materials. These modified warheads have the same military characteristics, are carried on the same delivery systems and hold at risk the same targets as the variants they replaced, but they’ve been redesigned for reliability, security and ease of maintenance. As a result, even though in this future world, Bob Monroe not withstanding, there's nobody left in the complex who remembers a nuclear test, let alone actually performed one, our confidence in the stockpile is high because of the RRW design, with its large margins enabled by a deep scientific understanding of nuclear phenomena from what by then will be three decades of stockpile stewardship as well as from the growing use of simulation, which is joining theory in experiment as a third pillar of the scientific method.

That deployed stockpile of the future is backed up by a much smaller, non-deployed stockpile than today. We met the responsive infrastructure goal established in 2004 to be able to take a warhead, find a problem, fix it, and put it back in the stockpile within a year. We’ve done that because the elimination of dangerous and environmentally difficult materials like conventional high explosives and beryllium, make it easier to process warheads. And so we don't need a large number of spares to deal with reliability problems.

The world hasn’t gotten any more predictable in 25 years. We still need a hedge against geopolitical changes and attempts by others to institute an arms race. But that hedge is no longer in hundreds of aging, obsolete spare warheads. Instead, it’s in the infrastructure. Once again, we met the goal established in 2004 of being able to produce additional warheads within a three year period, well within plausible geopolitical changes. In the same way, this future infrastructure can produce weapons with new or modified military capabilities. Because the weapons design community was revitalized by the RRW program, it can adapt an existing weapon within 18 months. And it can design, develop and begin production of a new warhead within three to four years, goals once again that were established in 2004.

Thus, if Congress and the President agree, we can respond quickly to changing military requirements of the type that you just heard from Dr. Foster and Admiral Monroe. Now, in this future world, security is still important, but the transformed infrastructure has been designed with security in mind; and more importantly, new intrinsic features built in to the growing number of Reliable Replacement Warheads improve both safety and security.

So I'm setting forth a vision of a world where there's a smaller, safer, more secure, more reliable, more adaptable stockpile backed up by a robust capability to respond to changing technical, geopolitical or military requirements. Now, that's not the only plausible future. We may decide that we need to hold on to today’s entire stockpile, that we’re not willing to take the risk of reducing life extension programs and spare warheads to free up the resources for transformation. So let’s talk about what that future would look like. The 20 year accumulation of small uncertainties leads to reduce reliability of individual warheads. And we compensate for that reduced reliability the way we always compensate for lower reliability in military terms. We compensate by redundancy, we aim three weapons where we used to aim one. This, of course, means we have to keep deployed levels high.

Since we have no ability to respond to geopolitical changes or technical problems, we keep a very large hedge of non-deployed warheads. They have the same aging problems as the deployed systems, but they're all we have. Because we didn't take advantage of building in intrinsic security, we continue to depend on costly, demanding, manpower intensive, denial strategy to insure the physical security of our warheads. As uncertainty over the reliability of our warheads grows, the political purposes of retaining nuclear weapons, however we choose to articulate them 20 years from now, become more difficult to achieve. An IFPA conference calls for transformation, but without the stimulation of the RRW program, our design capabilities have largely atrophied.

This second future isn’t completely bleak. Stockpile stewardship continues, so we understand the stockpile better. Uncertainty is increased and reliability is decreased, but perhaps not catastrophically. The ability to respond to geopolitical and technical changes may turn out to be unimportant. Physical security is perfectly adequate today. It may not get better, but it probably won’t get worse. Still, at a minimum, this second future seems to me to increase risk and be rife with lost opportunities.

Let’s return to today, I’ve given you two futures. The one that the administration is embarking is the future characterized by transformation. Nobody should underestimate the challenge of transforming the enterprise and the stockpile. But it’s clearly the right path. You heard a moment ago from my colleagues, this is a path we probably should have taken a little while ago, but we are where we are and we can take the path now. Once we establish a responsive infrastructure and demonstrate that we can produce new or replacement warheads on the same time scale in which geopolitical threats emerge, once we have demonstrated we can respond in a timely way to detectable problems, then we can go much farther in reducing non-employed warheads to meet the President’s vision of the smallest stockpile consistent with our nation’s security.

Once we have demonstrated the flexibility, then whatever the results of the national debate that Dr. Foster and Admiral Monroe have suggested to you we should have about military abilities and characteristics, we’ll be able to implement what comes out of that debate.

The vision of the future I'm setting forth has been enabled by what we’ve learned in ten years experience of science-based stockpile stewardship. It’s been enabled by what we’ve learned and planning for life extension, and it’s been enabled by what we’ve learned as we’ve tried to wrestle with the realities of the world in the 21st century. I hope you find that vision compelling. I’m convinced it’s the right one, and it’s the one that we are trying very hard to use to guide our near term planning to insure long-term security. Thank you. [applause]

Question & Answers

Audience: I'm John Caves, National Defense University. Can you compare our current approach to stockpile with what the Russians and Chinese are doing with theirs, also in the absence of testing?

Dr. Perry: I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't hear that, sorry.

Audience: I'm sorry, my cold makes me hard to understand. Can you compare our current approach with our stockpile to what the Russians and Chinese are doing with their stockpiles, because they also are not testing?

Dr. Perry: Thank you. Who would like to take that first?

Ambassador Brooks: Yes, but I'm not going to go into the detail that you’d like me to because it’s a public forum. Let me talk about Russia. Russia differs from us in still having not only the capability to manufacture pits, but the capability to manufacture plutonium, which we’re helping them to eliminate. As a result, they turn over their stockpile along the lines that we did during the Cold War. There is a great deal of literature which suggests that the Russians are developing a variety of— and I’m with Elaine Bunn, this is a horrible term-- non-strategic nuclear weapons, designed for use if NATO invades. But exactly how much of that is advocates making public debate and how much of that reflects actual government policy, I think there's some room to doubt.

The Chinese, and I suspect there are others who will take alternate views, I’ve been hearing “the Chinese are coming” since the mid-‘60s and they seem to be coming fairly slowly. It does appear that the Chinese are modernizing their forces. It does appear that that modernization is partly related to improved survivability. It remains Chinese public doctrine to have a deterrent only strategy and thus not to think in terms of theater or tactical systems. I think that the interesting question for China on which there are many opinions but no facts, is what you think about their nuclear posture vis-à-vis Taiwan. You heard a suggestion in one of the earlier presentations based on the work of the EMP commission, that Chinese could tailor nuclear weapons in a way which could reduce the effectiveness, or even cripple, the 7th Fleet, and thus make it more difficult for the United States to meet its obligations under the Taiwan Relations Act.

I think there's enough evidence for that that possibility that we ought to worry about it. I don't know that there's enough evidence to allow experts to have a complete consensus. So I think what you're seeing is what was illustrated yesterday. Nations’ nuclear weapons programs are much less coupled to what other nations do than we sometimes think. They're coupled to a country’s sense of its own need. Russia now feels itself very, very weak compared to the west. What did we do when things were reversed? We developed the Lance and the SADM and whole bunch of things. There's at least open source literature that suggests that Russia is looking at the same strategy. I won’t comment on whether it’s true, but it’s plausible.

Audience: Thanks, David Group with Global Security Newswire. These are three quick questions. The first is there's been talk about we have an arsenal full of too large weapons, weapons with too much yield. But isn’t it the case that all of these weapons can be tailored to produce a range of yields? And the second question is it was said that perhaps we could develop technologies that would then enable us to contain the fallout that would be produced by a bunker or earth penetrating weapon. But isn’t that contradicted by Ambassador Brooks’ comment earlier this year—Sorry. I had it, but I lost it.

Ambassador Brooks: Yeah, I remember it, go ahead. [laughter]

Audience: Well, basically it said it would be beyond the possibilities of physics to ever achieve that. And then the third question, it was said that our current arsenal has virtually no deterrent capability whatsoever regarding our current types of adversaries. But isn’t it the case that a very oblique threat to retaliation using our Cold War arsenal during the first Gulf War very effectively deterred Saddam Hussein from using chemical and biological weapons? Thank you.

Dr. Perry: Let Ambassador Brooks begin with the first two.

Ambassador Brooks: Okay, let me give you three—And this is all I'm going to say on that. You said isn’t it the case that all of these weapons can have their yields tailored? The answer is no. Secondly, you said how do you reconcile Dr. Foster’s statement with my statement? Well, (a) you need to look at our relative fields of expertise to decide who you want to believe. [laughter] But (b), what I said was that a gravity bomb could not penetrate and remain intact into the earth far enough to contain fallout. And I think if you look at Dr. Foster’s slide where it says B61, he’s saying the same thing I am. He is asserting, however, that there are other ways of emplacing a weapon deep in the earth if you put some scientific talent on the problem. I don't know whether that's true, but I wouldn’t bet against Johnny Foster on a technical issue.

And finally, you said that the Cold War arsenal may have, and I accept your characterization, deterred Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War. And some believe that that's why he moved to construct additional underground bunkers and why other dictators appear to construct underground bunkers, since as Dr. Foster’s analysis suggested, their physical survival seems important to them, and it appears to be U.S. policy that we’d like it better if we didn't threaten that physical survival by adapting existing weapons.

Audience: Lieutenant Commander Keith Sloan from the Defense Start Reduction Agency and I’ll limit myself to just one question. [laughter] With the START Treaty potentially expiring in 2009 and the Moscow Treaty lacking any really bite and doesn’t seem to have any real future, where do you see formal arms control agreements fitting into the new nuclear force structure in the future?

Dr. Perry: Ambassador Brooks, it sounds like one for you.

Ambassador Brooks: First of all, the United States hasn’t made any decisions about what's going to happen in 2009. We are obligated under the START Treaty to notify our partner a year in advance, and so some time over the next couple of years, we’ll decide what has to be done. I think the answer is that large scale, formal, east/west arms control of the type that I did in one of my past lives doesn’t have any future. Arms control is for regulating relations between adversaries. The United States is trying very much to create a world in which we and the Russian Federation are not adversaries. We certainly aren’t yet friends and partners in the same way that we are with Britain, and I think it’s unlikely we’ll ever get there. But we’re equally certainly not the implacable foes of the Cold War period. And I think that what we want to spend our intellectual capital on is improving the overall relations and not trying to figure out how to codify a relationship that we're trying to move beyond.

So I would not encourage you to look for a whole lot of bold new arms control east/west initiatives between now and the end of this Administration.

Audience: Steven Young, the Union of Concerned Scientists. One quick question for Dr. Monroe, Admiral Monroe, and a question for the panel. Admiral Monroe, you said basically words to the effect that America today faces an equally serious threat that it faced during the Cold War. I think that's simply patently false. In the Cold War, every single American could die in 20 minutes. So that's not the whole point of your case, but I don't think it’s not true that we face the same threat we faced during the Cold War.

The question for the whole panel, on the RRW, basically, how did it become essentially the flavor of the month? Two years ago, it wasn't in the military budget, it was put in by Mr. Hobson and now it’s everywhere for everything. Where was it two years ago when you were asking for money for the RNAP (?), how did it become flavor of the month? Thank you.

Dr. Perry: Okay, who wants to begin with the RRW? Let’s go right down.

Dr. Foster: If it’s okay, I’ll start. To me, the U.S. is currently in a political box. Congress has put the nuclear weapons program in a political box. And what's happened most recently is the willingness of the Congress to entertain a study of so-called RRW. And this RRW is a potential catalyst to get us out of our current predicament. Now, we have to move out of it because as everyone has pointed out, these warheads are over age, and that we are currently trying to refurbish them. But as Ambassador Brooks pointed out, keeping that kind of process going indefinitely leads to the wrong stockpile and more and more risks. So that's an unacceptable future. So the only future that is open to us at the moment is RRW.

Dr. Perry: Bob, you want to add to that? Or Ambassador Brooks?

Ambassador Brooks: Yeah. Every once in a while, ideas come along and they start bouncing from person to person to where everybody thinks that they're the ones who had the idea first. [laughter] And RRW’s a little bit like that. Lots of people simultaneously had the idea because it is such a compelling idea. And what started it was the realization that we can do something about a very specific warhead, the W76, on our Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) which is the most numerous deployed warhead and therefore the one you’d worry about most if there were a problem. And because we’ve reduced the numbers of warheads on the missiles, but the missile still has the same throw away and because the first President Bush ended the production of a larger yield warhead after we bought a whole lot of reentry vehicles for it, we had something that we could do that was very tailored.

And then simultaneously a number of us realized that this opened up not just a possible solution for the narrow question of how do we provide some diversity around the W76, but a much more fundamental way of looking at transforming the stockpile. And then a number of us realized that that could allow us to transform the infrastructure. And this is genuinely a case of the relatively small community of people who think about this thing, having an idea spread like wildfire to the point where I think it’s a little hard to say whose idea it is.

I want to distinguish RRW pretty sharply from the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, because the two have absolutely nothing to do with one another except for the unfortunate fact that they both start with “R.” Whatever the merits of the earth penetrator, it was a niche capability to deal with adapting an existing weapon for a specific near term problem. The RRW is a much broader, transformational approach for changing the stockpile in the coming decades. I mean, you can be for both of them or you can be against both of them, or you can be for one and against one, but what you shouldn’t do is assume that they have anything whatsoever to do with each other, because they don’t either intellectually or programmatically or politically.

Audience: Hi, this is a question for Ambassador Brooks. My name is Robert Nelson, I’m a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. Despite what some of the other panelists said, you have reaffirmed for us today that the goal of the Reliable Replacement Warhead is to develop a warhead with improved margins, but that would not require testing in the future. So today, we have a stockpile that historically is based on over a thousand nuclear tests. Every year since 1997, the laboratory directors and the Department of Energy and Defense have certified that the warhead remains safe, secure and reliable. And Dr. Foster began his talk reasserting that.

In the discussion that I have seen justifying why we need to go to a new warhead, it’s been fairly ambiguous language, along the lines of in the future we may be uncertain in our confidence about the stockpile. Now, what you're offering is a solution in which we would essentially replace our existing stockpile with weapons that have never been tested. So it seems to me that it’s not simply whether or not we can create a system that will be perfectly certain, there would be uncertainty regardless of what we do, but whether or not a replacement stockpile that has never been tested would be more secure in the long run than the existing program that we have now based on our well tested designs.

Ambassador Brooks: A fair point that others have made. Let me give you two or three responses. You may be right, there may be no need to replace the current warheads. We don’t know. What we know is that the process that you just described each year is fraught with slightly more uncertainty. So one argument is we ought to at least go forward with the capability.

Second argument is that we do things all the time that haven’t been fully tested. I don’t mean this to sound as callous as it will come across. The first nuclear weapon ever used in combat was an untested design because we had complete confidence that it would work. The RRW is intended to be sufficiently robust in its design, that our inability to conduct a full-scale test is not going to give us significant concern. I don't know if we can do that, that's why they call it research. Remember we’re talking about a program where we’re in the first year of its actual significant funding. So we don't know whether we can do any of this, because if we can, I think, it will have the advantages.

Further, even if you can convince yourself that there's no advantage in reliability, there is unquestioningly an advantage in the ability to maintain, modify, correct problems and improve safety and security. And there, we don’t need to depend on looking at different interpretations of past testing. I mean, you just look at the amount of money that we’re spending on some of the exotic materials, you look at the restrictions we're accepting to work on warheads with conventional high explosives, and you can pretty much convince yourself that there will be significant advantages to RRW, even if—and I don't actually believe this—it turns out that there is no reliability problem to be overcome.

So a few years from now when we understand this better, we will have another debate about whether to go along the charts that Steve showed you and move dramatically to an all-RRW force and voices like yours that are skeptical about not testing will be useful then. But it seems to me that the possibility that this program will be valuable for a number of reasons, certainly justifies us spending some money to find out how to move beyond view graphs and into real designs.