USA cuts nuclear weapons and builds extra-strong A-bombs at the same time
If the U.S. breaks the moratorium on testing, then Russia, China, India and Pakistan, if not Britain and France, probably would conduct tests as well, said Philip Coyle, former assistant secretary of Defense and former deputy director of Livermore. Those countries would gain more information from testing than would the U.S., which has invested heavily in scientific research as an alternative to testing.
The stockpile includes thousands of weapons held in reserve in case a defect is discovered. Each year, some of those weapons are disassembled for inspection. The U.S. could significantly reduce the reserve if it had greater confidence in the reliability of its warheads, Brooks said.
That confidence involves not only whether a weapon will explode, but whether it will do so with the intended force. In every U.S. nuclear weapon, a primary blast must be strong enough to trigger a secondary thermonuclear reaction. If the first stage falls short, the weapon has half the power.
The driving force for developing the new weapon has come from the scientific community and members of Congress. Although the Defense Department did not initiate the program, it has won wide support within the military as well as the Bush administration.
Meanwhile, the Los Alamos and Livermore labs are revving up their culture of one-upmanship.
During the Cold War, the scientists adhered to a motto that the Soviet Union was the rival, but the competing lab was "the enemy." Still, it is a scholarly competition with few fighting words.
Though neither lab has developed a new weapon since the late 1980s, they have received billions of dollars in investments by the federal government for office buildings and massive physics machines.
Since the end of the Cold War, the labs' top priority has been to maintain existing weapons. The labs predict that the plutonium components in existing weapons have a life of 45 to 60 years, meaning that in the next 15 years some will begin to deteriorate and replacements will be needed.
On average, the U.S. has spent an estimated $6 million per warhead since World War II, said Stephen I. Schwartz, author of "Atomic Audit," a history of strategic weapons costs. Based on that, replacing all of the nation's 6,000 nuclear weapons could cost $36 billion.
The idea of having two labs compete to design nuclear weapons dates to the 1950s, when federal officials concluded that such a system would promote innovation and also allow the labs to monitor each other's science in an area crucial to national security. The labs are federally funded and operate under contract with the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Each has about 20 physicists, chemists, metallurgists and engineers on its reliable replacement warhead team, backed by a few hundred other experts working part time on the weapon. Among them are younger scientists learning the art and craft of nuclear bomb design from Cold War veterans.
Over the last decade, the labs have invested several billion dollars in computing, creating a succession of the world's fastest supercomputers and other innovations. Livermore has taken the lead in that field. Its "purple" computer, with a footprint the size of a tennis court, does mathematical models of nuclear detonations. It uses enough megawatts of electricity to supply about 4,000 homes with power.
Meanwhile, Los Alamos is developing better ways to cast molten plutonium into hollow spheres, a key part of nuclear bombs, according to Deniece Korzekwa, a casting expert at the lab's manufacturing center.
Each laboratory's culture and body of technology is very different from the other's. Each has developed its own recipes for plastic explosives used to start an atomic chain reaction.
Even in promoting their designs, each lab has taken a different approach.
Source: The Los Angeles Times
Prepared by Alexander Timoshik
Pravda.ru
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