Posted on 03/02/2007 10:39:19 AM PST by NormsRevenge
The Bush administration selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's design for a new generation of atomic warheads, two officials familiar with the decision said Friday.
The decision, to be announced later in the day, came a year after the administration ordered a competition between Lawrence Livermore near San Francisco and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because it had not been formally announced.
The administration decided the design submitted by Lawrence Livermore, with engineering assistance from Sandia National Laboratories, could be built with greater confidence without underground testing because it was more closely tied to earlier designs that had been tested, officials said.
The Nuclear Weapons Council also found several proposed features of the Los Alamos design "highly innovative" and held out the possibility they will be integrated into the future warhead design.
As the program progresses, Lawrence Livermore will work closely with production plants, assuming Congress will pay for it and that those manufacturing facilities can be brought back to life.
If funded by Congress, the new warhead would be used for some of the nation's sea-based nuclear weapons, the administration says. Sandia will develop non-nuclear components to ensure compatibility with the Defense Department's Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile system.
Many of the warheads in the nation's stockpile were designed and built 40 years ago, and their plutonium and other components are deteriorating in ways that researchers do not fully understand.
The government spends billions of dollars each year tending to its aging stockpile. The administration has dubbed the program to design a safer and more effective warhead the Reliable Replacement Warhead.
Critics fear the project could send the wrong signal to the world at a time when the United States and its allies are trying to curb the spread of nuclear technology.
The announcement comes at a time when the administration is engaged in delicate disarmament negotiations with North Korea, which reportedly possesses several nuclear weapons, and Iran, which the administration fears wants them.
Iran recently called on the United States to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Opponents of the program also question whether a next-generation bomb can improve reliability and safety if it cannot be tested. Congress has financed the research on the condition that the redesigned weapon reduce the need for testing.
The United States has not built a nuclear warhead since 1991. The government spends about $5 billion a year maintaining the weapons, and engineers have patched problems by opening up warheads that were never meant to be opened. The accumulation of tiny engineering changes meant the bombs moved incrementally away from their original designs, with unknown effects.
The Livermore and Los Alamos labs set aside bomb-designing more than a decade ago in favor of maintaining the current stockpile.
We gotta keep our strategic stockpile strong since nuclear weapons have a relatively short shelf life and need to be upgraded periodically. And no, I don't agree with the ban on underground testing since you can never be sure if a new warhead will work unless you actually see it go boom!
Except of course the old Soviet "suitcase nukes" which Elvis Bin Laden bought on the black market.
Those are still fully operational according to some kook-burgers.
I gotta wonder how much of that research will be done at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab.
Yeah, yeah, don't ask, don't tell. Berkeley's Politburo would have a fit.
I guess the four supercomputers in the Top 10 between LLNL and Sandia helped.
I'll wouldn't be surprised if the Los Alamos designs are similar to current Chinese warhead designs.
Good job Dr. Bill.
Give my NEC's Earth simulator instead.
Peak flops != sustained flops, except on embarrassingly parallel problems.
Cheers!
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