ALBRIGHT: ‘3+2’ WARHEAD STRATEGY UNLIKELY TO BE REALIZED

Albright said the Administration’s recent decision to delay work on the W78/W88 interoperable warhead by five years would likely trigger a series of events moving the Administration away from the strategy. With the interoperable warhead delayed, he noted that the Administration still will need to do work on the non-nuclear portion of the W88, which he suggested is likely to expand to include the nuclear package as well. “Then the Navy almost certainly will argue that if I’m doing that, why do I want to pay for an interoperable warhead; that costs too much money,” said Albright, who resigned from the top spot at Livermore in October. “Let’s just go ahead and make this the way we did last time which is what they did on the W76.” Such an approach would decrease the incentive for the Air Force to pursue an interoperable warhead for the W78, and could lead to its retirement if the Air Force concludes it can live with the W87 as its only ICBM warhead. “I really think ‘3+2’ is the right thing to do. I really do,” Albright said. “I just don’t think it’s going to happen. I think there is a reasonable chance that we should be prepared for.”

 

Whether the “3+2” strategy succeeds or fails, Albright suggested the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories and their workforce face a grim future with a large gap in warhead work looming, and he argued that new weapons designs could invigorate the workforce. “If you don’t change how you think about Stockpile Stewardship then the labs basically become Maytag repairmen,” he said. “They’re basically—‘let’s take these things down to Pantex, let’s cut them open, oh, there’s a smudge, let’s fix it or not fix it and go forward.’ Think about the kind of workforce you’ll attract in that kind of environment if that was all they did.”