Maintaining a Viable Nuclear Weapons Program in a Test Ban Environment:
A Strong Technical Foundation in the Laboratories

# C. Paul Robinson

# President and Laboratories Director, Sandia National Laboratories

(Presented at the Nuclear Security Decisionmakers Forum, March 28, 2000,
Albuquerque, NM)

• Background: The Administration and Senate are at "loggerheads" over
whether the Comprehensive Test Ban (CTBT), as submitted, is the best way
to assure US and worldwide peace and security over the long term.

• Nuclear weapons have provided the cornerstone for US national security
for more than fifty years, and their role in preventing major global war
over this period is undeniable.

• As the world evolves from the bilateral standoff of the Cold War---in
retrospect a remarkably stable period---to a multipolar World, what will
be the role of nuclear deterrence in preventing wars and capping the
level of conflict if a regional war should occur?

• The current stalemate is a clash of views between:

> the **far left**, who press for the elimination of weapons at the
> earliest time, and
>
> the **far right**, who press for the creation of a missile defense
> system, in the belief that it could eliminate the threat that nuclear
> weapons increasingly play to US territory, allies, and interests.

• I represent a more centrist view. I do not know how to eliminate
nuclear weapons from the world scene; nor is it obvious to me that the
world would be necessarily a better place if nuclear weapons were
eliminated, particularly if the world once again became enveloped in
world wars.

• It is prudent that the US continue to maintain a robust retaliatory
force of nuclear weapons for the foreseeable future.

• The CTBT debate has made the US nuclear laboratories the losers on
both sides; even the far right neglects the importance of an offensive
retaliatory force, which would surely come into play after a missile
attack. Yet if we are to have the option to maintain a nuclear deterrent
over the long term, we must maintain robust and capable nuclear weapons
laboratories.

• It was the triumph of US science and engineering that placed in our
hands this most potent stockpile of nuclear weapons in the first place,
and which kept it vital throughout the Cold War years.

• We must not lose sight of the role of the laboratories, and we must
find ways to strengthen and revitalize these institutions to fulfill
their missions under changing circumstances.

• As we come to a transition point in Presidential administrations, it
is appropriate that we examine the condition of the weapons themselves,
as well as the condition of the laboratories which design them and
maintain responsibility for their safety and reliability. How can we
keep both of them not only viable but second to none?

• Studies of the past five months have concluded that the program is
"stretched far too tightly." Unfortunately, the debate within the
government could not resolve whether this resulted from insufficient
funding or "too much program." I would have gone further in suggesting
that we are about to hand a new administration a program that I believe
is badly under-funded, in DoD, DOE, labs, plants, and the
infrastructures that support them. Yet, I do not believe the solution
should be to raise the problems within the nuclear weapons program as a
partisan, political issue in this, an election year. I've worked
throughout my career to prevent this from happening.

• To prevent it, we must go back to examine the choices made in the
past, review their rationale from today's vantage point, and come up
with a true system solution that preserves for the nation its most
valued strategic strength over the long term---30 to 50 years, or more.

• Can you imagine just how hard it is for even the best scientists and
engineers to be confident that they can assure the reliability and the
safety of US nuclear weapons in a regimen where they cannot design,
build, nor test them? Further, how much more difficult does it become:

> -- as the experts who design, certify, manufacture, and diagnose them
> retire?

-- as the components and the weapons themselves age beyond their design
lifetimes?

-- with a production complex that can no longer manufacture certain key
weapons parts, and no longer has a surge capacity for the rest?

• Our laboratory---Sandia---is responsible for nearly all of the
nonnuclear subsystems and for the ordnance engineering required to pair
these subsystems with the nuclear subsystem and the military delivery
systems. These tasks include the design and development of many
electronic systems, whose performance characteristics and reliability
must exceed anything available in industry.

• In most parts of our laboratory, we remain at the leading edge of
electronics capabilities. In collaboration with our sister labs,
Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley, we have a multi-hundred
million dollar project---**financed by US industry**---to bring to first
production the manufacture of the most advanced microcircuits yet
conceived \[less than 0.1-micron feature size\]. Yet the electronics in
the US stockpile are all sufficiently aged as to be either obsolete or
"sun-setted" \[functional, although nearing the end of their useful life
and no longer manufactured\]. Some stockpile weapons still have vacuum
tubes within them---not for hardness, but because that was the best
technology available when they were designed.

• We have put into place an enhanced surveillance capability to monitor
the health of these older technology components and subsystems. This is
a considerable workload, and it increases each year as the stockpile
systems continue to age. We continue to undertake some "fixes" to
specific stockpile components each year, but our "watch list" of
anomalies is growing a little each year.

• We are developing plans to refurbish the electronics components within
the US stockpile, replacing older components with modern ones. Since the
most crucial aspect of achieving the extremely high reliability goals is
how these components will function together as a system, I have proposed
that we adopt a philosophy of replacing only those older systems that
are provably better in reliability, safety, or use control. These
judgments cannot be made in the same manner as we would have attempted
in the past; indeed the new modeling/simulation and test capabilities
will greatly aid this task and may well be crucial, particularly in the
absence of full systems tests.

• We are betting much of our future ability to bring leading-edge
electronics once again into the US stockpile on the development of a new
complex we call MESA, for Microsystems and Engineering Sciences
Applications. This \$350 million line-item project will allow us to
modernize warhead electronics, optics, and mechanical components in an
integrated way, harnessing directly the new computer-based design and
collaboration tools and technologies we have been developing over the
past five years. This complex will house the best and the brightest
workers in advanced electronics, photonics, and microsystems
technologies; will connect them to other specialists through large
design networks; and will provide advanced prototyping facilities for
improving the safety, fusing, and use-control features in the future.

• In the debate over CTBT ratification, much attention was focused on
what I believe to be a misdirected question: Is stockpile stewardship
working or not?

• Larry Welch, in his paper "*A Workable Strategy"* suggests that the
confusion resulted from a mistaken view that "SSP is a destination. In
fact, it is a journey." The US program in nuclear weapons research,
development, design, and production has been deeply rooted in scientific
excellence throughout its history.

• Sandia has made major steps forward in developing better understanding
and better design tools for neutron generators---critical components of
nuclear weapons for which we have both design and production
responsibility. The advanced computer modeling systems have been
combined with aboveground experiments (test simulators)---the pulsed
power Z Machine and the Sandia Pulsed Reactor---to do a remarkable job
of evaluating the performance of these systems under the conditions of
hostile radiation. I have no hesitancy to say that in some ways these
recent techniques are giving us better analysis than could have been
provided in the underground test environments on which we relied in the
past. Unfortunately, this success does not answer the question of
whether such approaches will eventually be able to replace all roles for
nuclear testing in the future. Presently, no one can answer this
question for the long term.

• Let me suggest an analogy. There is an old story about a man who was
pushed out of an upper floor of a tall office building. As he passed
various floors, he was heard to say, "I'm OK so far." Each year, as we
prepare our annual certification statement, we are in somewhat the same
position. We can say with some confidence that, "We're OK so far,"
without having to ask for a nuclear test, as we have now done for the
past four years since the new process was brought into being. This is
primarily a result of the US stockpile being in superb shape when we
began the process. But like the man in free fall, we have been pushed
into a "terra incognito," where we have little experience to predict
what will happen. We should not be too optimistic that no harm will
result from potential changes to the stockpile in the future.

• Perhaps the biggest challenge we face is preparing for whatever the
future may hold. I should note, as I did in my Senate testimony on the
CTBT, that the first step in approaching certification is to ensure that
the scientists and engineers, on whom we must rely to make the complex
technical judgments about the condition of the stockpile, are **fully
capable** of doing so. It is here that SBSS faces the greatest
challenge. Those who have carried out these design and surveillance
tasks in the past were necessarily our most senior veterans. What will
be the case in 10 to 20 years when all of these proven experts will have
retired? \[Back to the man-in-free-fall analogy, it is in 10 to 20 years
that we will surely be approaching the "lower floors."\] Whether we can
create a new generation to pick up the stewardship tasks, and have them
function at the same level of competency, without having been "tested"
themselves through full-up experiments, is a huge challenge.

• Throughout this Administration, we in the DOE community have been
operating under instructions from the September 1994 Nuclear Posture
Review. It directed that DOE must maintain the US nuclear weapon
capability---but without nuclear testing or fissile material production.
Our taskings included:

> \- the creation of a surveillance engineering base;
>
> \- the capability to refabricate and certify the enduring stockpile;
> and

-   maintaining the capability to design, fabricate, and certify new
    warheads---but with **no** production of new designs.

What's wrong with that? Perhaps nothing, but perhaps this list is
incompatible. Can we really maintain capability without actually doing
an activity? I have, in fact, believed throughout my career that in
scientific or high-tech pursuits, one can't tread water. "If you're not
advancing, you're declining." \[This quote is from Edward Gibbon, author
of *The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire*\]. What's missing? To me it
seems that they may have made the very human error that "things will
stay just as they are today"---or more precisely "as things **seem** to
us to be today." I can't but perhaps worry that quite a few in the
Pentagon and the Interagency have themselves turned into wide-eyed
optimists, banking the nation's future security on Disney's First Law:
"Wishing will make it so."

Although I believe all of us would wish that the US will never need new
nuclear weapon designs; based on the past, this is quite unlikely. The
US will undoubtedly require a new nuclear weapon, either for a different
delivery mode or vehicle or, quite likely, because it is realized that
the yields of the weapons left over from the Cold War are **too high**
for addressing the deterrence requirements of a multipolar, widely
proliferated world. Without rectifying that situation, we would end up
being self-deterred. Will the US then consider the need for a new
nuclear weapon to equate with our Supreme National Interest, as
President Clinton has said he would do for a problem in reliability or
safety of a critical weapon in the current stockpile?

I confess to not being sure of that answer. In fact, this issue and most
of the others I raised in this talk are very difficult questions. Yet
they are being left on the table for a new administration.