Dimitri Kusnezov, chief scientist of the National Nuclear Security Administration, fully subscribes to his agency’s commitment “to maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing,” but he also describes a more nuanced view of the contingent future of nuclear testing in a world that is always changing.
“What does it take to ensure that we are actually stressing the system, that it’s not just a scientific or virtual side of the exercise? That if we have to deliver something we can?” he asked during a telephone interview this week. If necessary, he wonders, can the United States build the right weapon in a reasonable time frame to meet its national security needs?
“At the moment, we don’t see testing as an important part of that,” he said. “But we look at that carefully and that’s a real-time assessment that we are running continuously.” He worries that in the years to come, that Department of Energy nuclear laboratory directors who have not been involved in nuclear testing would not deeply understand how the guarantees for integrated total system performance must work in the domain of nuclear weapons. “It’s not visible to most people what we have to do to replace what we could do with the testing,” he added.
After decades of above-ground and underground test blasts, the question of U.S. nuclear testing was settled to some degree with a moratorium in 1992, during President George H. W. Bush’s last year in office. That answer was strengthened when President Bill Clinton first signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, but then the door was left ajar again when the Senate voted 48-51 against ratifying the pact in 1999. And, although the moratorium is firmly established in current practice, a new president could cancel it with a signature.
In place of testing is the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, an ongoing effort of science and engineering to maintain and modernize the nuclear deterrent. While support for the program is broad and deep, there are others who worry it is insufficient as nations such as China and Russia move assertively to update their arsenals.
At NNSA, Kusnezov recognizes that the enterprise doesn’t have to be testing something, but it does need to know where there are gaps: “What are the gaps we need to be worrying about so that it’s not just hubris in the end, but it’s actually a deep understanding of how responsive we should be, if the nation decides to turn in another direction.”
Even when testing is indefinitely hibernating, the issue of nuclear tests still raises interest.
At a recent meeting of a local arms control group in Los Alamos, N.M., John Hopkins, a former J-Division (weapons testing) director at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, addressed the subject of “Nuclear Testing: What is Needed and Why.” The talk expanded on a theme he had previously prepared for an audience at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Hopkins said he was surprised at that time by the amount of interest in the subject.
One question from his most recent audience was whether he was calling for a return to testing. Hopkins said he was not advocating testing, but rather describing what would need to be done, assuming testing became necessary, “People have no idea how big and expensive nuclear testing was, hundreds of millions of dollars a year and thousands of people,” he said after the meeting. The studies that would have to be done just to decide where to test, along with the environmental issues and new technical questions, would be daunting, and it would be hard to estimate how long that might take today. Those questions, Hopkins believes, would probably be easier to address than the political concerns that would be unavoidable.
“I don’t think the tide toward testing ever seriously built up again, after the summer of 1996,” said Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group, a disarmament and energy watchdog, who recalled that DOE was given a four-year window for a final suite of tests, but did not conduct any. “Since then confidence in knowledge about the stockpile has only increased. The data available from U1a (the subcritical, underground testing facility at the Nevada National Security Site) is now vastly more, in key respects, than was ever available from nuclear tests,” Mello said by email.
Although the testing debate has been sublimated to some extent, the argument has a way of changing forms.
The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), has been developing a plan that first appeared in the fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act under the title “Design and use of prototypes of nuclear weapons for intelligence purposes.” The legislation directed the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration to arrange for the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia national laboratories to design and build experimental nuclear packages “to further intelligence estimates with respect to foreign nuclear weapons activities,” adding the explicit provision that no nuclear yield would be produced in the testing of these prototypes. In the same authorization, at the behest of Congress, the NNSA administrator was instructed to initiate a National Academy of Sciences study of the nuclear weapons-related peer review and design competition activities among the three laboratories.
Two years later, the fiscal 2015 authorization bill directed that the plan include “Design, system engineering and experimental testing (using surrogate special nuclear materials) of above-ground experiment test hardware,” and “Design and system engineering of scaled or subcomponent experimental test articles…for conducting experiments at the Nevada National Security Site.”
Then, last year, a new section, “Stockpile Responsiveness Program” was added to the authorization bill, with a more elaborate set of prescriptions, including the request for “status, plans, activities, budgets and schedules for carrying out the stockpile responsiveness program” for the five years after the plan is submitted. When the NAS study was concluded, it was the subject of a Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing earlier this year, potentially laying the groundwork for authorizing additional quasi-testing activities.
The study recommends a lab design competition, for example, in which “the winning design would be carried through to a prototype device.” However, “The device would not be manufactured for the stockpile and would only be tested in a manner consistent with U.S. treaty obligations—that is, without nuclear yield.” Nonetheless, along with the experience gained, there would be a new nuclear explosion package available, should other conditions change.
“I don’t think anything is actually being funded at this point – this is all authorization,” said Kusnezov. “I think we look at all these authorizations as being useful. It engages the mood of the Congress and the country on what we should be thinking about.” Very much aware of the gap between science and policy on the testing issue, Kusnezov said, “It is a rich space where there are never optimal solutions.”
Concluding his talk to the Los Alamos Committee on Arms Control and International Security, Hopkins expressed the hope that he had left his audience with an appreciation for how complex and expensive it would be to resume testing. He also said that although it was not the purpose or the place for talking about the political, national security, or technical weapons implications, those would obviously be at the top of the list of any serious discussion about the resumption of nuclear tests.
