Report of the 

Defense Science Board Task Force 

on 

Nuclear Capabilities 

Report Summary 

December 2006 

Office of the Under Secretary of Defense 

For Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics 

Washington, D.C. 20301-3140
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_______________________________________________________________TABLE OF CONTENTS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________i 

Table of Contents 

Section 1: Introduction 1 

The Task 1 

Three Key Issues and the Bottom Lines 1 

The Need for a National Consensus on Nuclear Capabilities 2 

Some Entrenched Views on Nuclear Capabilities 2 

The Need for Continuing Assessment 5 

The Need for Urgency 5 

Section 2: Summary of Recommendations 7 

Section 3: Assessing Progress in Developing Integrated Strike Capabilities in the New Triad 11 

The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century 11 

The Strategic Environment 11 

The Nuclear Posture Review and the New Triad 13 

The Strategic Defense Leg 14 

The Infrastructure Leg 14 

The Strike Leg 15 

Nuclear Reductions 17 

Nuclear Command and Control 17 

Section 4: The Structure, Organization, and Management of the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise 19 

The 21st Century Need 19 

History of the Weapons Enterprise and Current Issues 19 

Underlying Causes 20 

The DoD Role 22 

Transforming the Nuclear Weapons Production Complex 23 

Changing the Way Weapons are Designed and Produced 24 

Changing the Production Site and Facility Infrastructure 24 

Changing the Way the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise is Managed 25 

Criteria/Principles for Management and Organizational Arrangements 27 

Options for Management and Organization 28 

Reform within the Current NNSA/DOE Structure 28 

Move NNSA to DoD 29 

A Government Corporate Approach 31 
TABLE OF CONTENTS_______________________________________________________________ 

ii_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

Making the Proposal Work 32 

Forming the New Agency and the Transition 33 

Changes in DoD and at the Interface 33 

Section 5: Sustaining the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile 37 

Appendix A: Terms of Reference A-1 

Appendix B: Task Force Participation B-1 

Appendix C: Briefings Received C-1 

Appendix D: Acronym List D-1 
__________________________________________________________________INTRODUCTION

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES___________________________________________________________1 

Section 1: Introduction 

The Task

 The Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics (USD (AT&L)) 

requested that the Defense Science Board form a Task Force to assess current and future nuclear 

capabilities. 

 Specifically, the Task Force terms of reference (TOR) are: 

• Assess the current plan for sustaining the nuclear weapons stockpile and make 

recommendations to provide for relevant future capabilities. 

• Assess progress towards the goal of an integrated new triad of strike capabilities (nuclear, 

advanced conventional, and non-kinetic) within the new triad of strike, defense, and 

infrastructure. 

• Examine the DoD role in defining needs in the nuclear weapons stockpile and 

recommend changes in institutional arrangements to ensure an appropriate DoD role. 

• Examine a wide range of alternative institutional arrangements that could provide for 

more efficient management of the nuclear enterprise. 

• Examine plans to transform the nuclear weapons production complex to provide a 

capability to respond promptly to changes in the threat environment with new designs or 

designs using previously tested nuclear components. 

• Examine approaches to replacing weapons in the stockpile, over time, with weapons that 

are simpler to manufacture and that can be sustained with a smaller, less complex, less 

expensive design, development, certification and production enterprise. 

 Three Key Issues and the Bottom Lines

 The need for a national consensus on the nature of the need for and the role of nuclear weapons.

• There is agreement that the overriding priority for the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise is to 

provide and sustain a reliable, safe, secure, and credible set of nuclear weapons needed to 

maintain the nuclear deterrent. There is no national consensus on the nature of that need. 

The nuclear weapons complex and the approach to sustaining a reliable, safe, secure, and 

credible set of nuclear weapons. 

• Currently approved programs are focused on extending the life of existing weapons 

indefinitely with a production complex that is not configured, managed, or funded to meet 

minimum immediate stockpile sustainment needs. The Reliable Replacement Warhead 

(RRW) program, if it progresses to production, provides for a path to a sustainable stockpile. 

The organization and management of the nuclear weapons enterprise – DOE and DoD. 

• The current organization, management, and programs do not provide for a nuclear weapons 

enterprise capable of meeting the nation’s future needs. 
INTRODUCTION__________________________________________________________________ 

2_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

The Need for a National Consensus on Nuclear Capabilities

For the fifty years of the Cold War, there was a viable national consensus on the need for nuclear 

weapons and the role these weapons played in the security of the United States and its allies. 

Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, this consensus no longer exists. Most Americans 

agree that as long as actual or potential adversaries possess or actively seek nuclear weapons (or 

other weapons of mass destruction), the United States must maintain a deterrent to counter 

possible threats and support the nation’s role as a global power and security partner. Beyond 

that, there are sharp differences on the role and complexion of how the U.S. nuclear deterrent 

should shape the security environment. On the one hand, there is an entrenched set of views held 

by an influential segment of the U.S. population that transforming the stockpile is the wrong way 

to shape the security environment and counter nuclear proliferation pressures. On the other hand, 

there are alternative views that this Task Force believes need to be much more widely 

understood in order to transform the nuclear enterprise to one effective in meeting the security 

threats we face today. 

The result of this lack of consensus is an entrenchment of longstanding and strongly held views, 

with little genuine debate aimed at forging a new consensus. A new consensus would enable 

sensible and supportable choices on future nuclear capabilities and doctrine needed to move 

forward in providing the right nuclear weapons and nuclear enterprise for the 21st century. To 

begin to remedy this situation, senior leaders need to do more than reaffirm the need for a 

modern, safe, and reliable nuclear deterrent. They need to engage more directly to articulate the 

persuasive case for nuclear transformation that provides an integrated vision of the role of 

nuclear weapons – their currency in international politics, their contribution to the New Triad, 

and the prospects for further stockpile reductions. 

Some Entrenched Views on Nuclear Capabilities 

There is a set of entrenched views that make it more challenging to deal with nuclear strategy 

and nuclear weapons issues. Contrary to expectation, as the Cold War wound down, nuclear 

issues have become more, not less, complex as the nation moved from the dangerous, but slowly 

evolving, set of challenges characterizing the Cold War to the more complex, rapidly changing, 

and still dangerous, challenges in this century. Further, the stewards of the nation’s nuclear 

deterrent are not active in articulating alternatives to the entrenched set of views -- partly because 

they tend to dismiss these views out of hand. The discussion in this section of the report is not 

intended to dismiss the entrenched views. It is not about which views are right and which are 

wrong. It is about coming to a more complete understanding of complex issues that ultimately 

frame progress on future nuclear capabilities. The following addresses a subset of five widely 

expressed views. It is not an exhaustive presentation, but presents some of the most salient issues 

in contemporary public discussion of nuclear weapons. The Task Force believes it important to 

bring these views to the forefront as the context in which to assess current and future nuclear 

capabilities. 

View 1: Lower numbers of U.S. nuclear weapons are preferable regardless of the starting point, 

with zero as the ultimate goal. Typically, this goal of zero nuclear weapons is regarded not as an 

instrumental objective, but as a desirable end in itself. Occasionally, a security-oriented rationale 

for this goal is suggested: a nuclear-free world would be a safer world for the United States 

because we would dominate a conventional-only world. This view that the United States should 
__________________________________________________________________INTRODUCTION

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________3 

move fully away from nuclear capabilities is an element in the domestic political opposition to 

any U.S. nuclear initiative. 

Alternative View: The desirability of a nuclear-free world is irrelevant. It is not possible to erase 

from history technology that has been widely understood for decades. The worst outcome would 

be for the United States to have a nuclear deterrent that is inadequate to address the variety of 

weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threats confronting the United States and its allies. 

The objective for U.S. nuclear capabilities should be to ensure that the U.S. capability is a 

powerful force for peace. It clearly served that role in Europe where two armed camps, with 

divergent political doctrines faced each other across a common political border for half a century 

navigating successfully through a wide range of crises that could have led to major armed 

conflict. 

Filling that role in the post-Cold War era requires credible, sustainable capabilities that include 

reliable, safe, and secure nuclear weapons. A fundamental requirement for credibility is the 

belief by the potential adversary that we would execute our deterrent threat. Any other attitude 

invites dangerous challenge to our resolve and virtually assures that deterrence will fail. 

View 2: U.S. nuclear development and sustainment activity causes other states to seek their own 

nuclear weapons. U.S. initiatives lead others to see greater value in acquiring nuclear weapons, 

thereby spurring proliferation. The corollary often appended to this view is that if the United 

States rejects any new nuclear initiatives, other states, including Rogue leaderships, will not seek 

to acquire nuclear weapons. This view that the United States’ rejection of nuclear initiatives will 

decisively reduce the value that others see in nuclear weapons also is an element in domestic and 

international political opposition to any nuclear initiative. 

Alternative View: Nations, including Rogues, pursue weapons of mass destruction because they 

have concluded that acquiring WMD is in their national interest – often because they feel 

threatened by neighbors, want to intimidate their neighbors, or because they want to ensure 

freedom of military action in pursuit of their own regional ambitions. These countries reach their 

own conclusions about the value of WMD to their national interest, not because they mimic the 

United States. It would be enormously self-centered to believe that the U.S. influence as a role 

model is more powerful than a foreign leadership’s own conclusions about its national interests 

and the value of WMD. 

In those cases where rogue leadership considers U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities in their 

attitudes and aspirations, a continuing robust U.S. capability can help dissuade them from 

acquiring nuclear capabilities. The credibility of U.S. capabilities and intentions has led a 

number of nations with the capability to acquire nuclear weapons to decide not to do so. In 

addition, allied confidence in U.S. nuclear capabilities has been at the heart of the extended 

“nuclear umbrella.” An enduring, reliable U.S. capability enhances assurance to allies reducing 

their motivation to acquire or expand their nuclear weapons capabilities. A credible U.S. nuclear 

deterrent capability contributes significantly to global non-proliferation. 

View 3: Non-proliferation is a more important value than nuclear deterrence in a post-Cold 

War era. The Soviet Union is gone, neither Russia nor China pose a serious threat. The real 

threat to the United States instead now comes from proliferation. Therefore, nuclear deterrence 

in the post-Cold War era is a lower priority goal than non-proliferation. This view, in 

combination with View 2 described above, is the basis for dismissing arguments that a U.S. 
INTRODUCTION__________________________________________________________________ 

4_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

nuclear initiative could be important to sustain or enhance the United States’ capability for 

deterrence: if non-proliferation is a higher priority than deterrence, and a nuclear initiative would 

undercut the United States’ non-proliferation efforts, then even if a nuclear initiative might 

contribute to deterrence, it should not go forward. The tradeoff should favor the priority goal of 

non-proliferation. This view, again, is an element in the domestic political opposition to any U.S. 

nuclear initiative. 

Alternative View: The holders of this view assume they can predict the intentions of sovereign 

nations into the distant future with confidence. So long as there remains, in the hands of other 

than a completely reliable and trustworthy friend, WMD capable of inflicting intolerable levels 

of destruction on the United States or its allies, the assured ability to deter such an act remains 

the first priority in meeting the fundamental first responsibility of a democratic government – to 

keep its people alive and free. 

We should applaud the improved relationship between the United States and Russia and continue 

to work towards making the two nations reliable and trustworthy friends. Similarly, we should 

seek to promote cordial relations with China. In neither case, however, is that the current 

situation. We have, since the end of the Cold War, repeatedly dealt with strong differences in 

U.S. and Russian national interests, e.g., Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, 

Georgia, Ukraine, and Iraq. In each case the national interest led us down a path seen by the 

Russian leadership as inimical to their interests. The potential flashpoint with China over Taiwan 

remains an immediate concern and the basis for some bellicose statements by Chinese military 

leaders towards the United States. It is naïve to believe that nuclear deterrence is no longer 

essential to the long-term security of the U.S. 

View 4: Nuclear weapons should deter only nuclear threats. This view is based on the notion 

that U.S. threatened retaliation must be comparable to the provocation it seeks to prevent. 

Consequently, nuclear deterrence should only be intended to deter nuclear threats. When 

combined with the view described above, that neither Russia nor China pose threats necessitating 

nuclear deterrence, the conclusion is drawn that the U.S. need and role for nuclear deterrence is 

narrow and that U.S. nuclear capabilities should be treated accordingly. This view also is an 

element in the domestic political opposition to any U.S. nuclear initiative. 

Alternative View: Deterring nuclear threats is, by itself, an adequate reason to sustain a credible 

nuclear deterrent. But, there is a convincing case that, in the modern world of chemical and 

biological weapons (CBW) proliferation, U.S. nuclear deterrent capabilities have a broader 

purpose. 

Reserving nuclear deterrence to address only nuclear threats would be a dramatic change from 

established practice, and would pose potentially significant risks to the United States and its 

allies. Throughout the Cold War, NATO’s doctrine of Flexible Response was based on 

presenting the Soviet Union with the possibility of NATO nuclear escalation if the Warsaw Pact 

attacked NATO with overwhelming conventional military force. That deterrence policy 

succeeded for decades. There is no reason for the United States to now reserve nuclear 

deterrence to address only nuclear threats when the growth in the number and severity of 

chemical and biological threats continues to expand. The United States has decided to forego 

CBW, even for deterrence purposes. It would be hubris in the extreme to base U.S. and allied 

security on the proposition that U.S. non-nuclear weapons are and will be adequate to deter all 

CBW threats. 
__________________________________________________________________INTRODUCTION

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________5 

View 5: Any new nuclear initiatives are unnecessary for deterrence, and would undermine the 

higher priority non-proliferation goal. Nuclear deterrence will work reliably without any new 

nuclear capabilities. Those types of nuclear weapons that provided adequate deterrent effect 

during the Cold War will be adequate for future deterrence needs, at greatly reduced numbers. 

This final view also is an element in domestic political opposition to any U.S. nuclear initiative. 

Alternative View: The view that it is possible to sustain, in the 21st century, an element of 

national security completely unchanged from its Cold War origins is applied uniquely to nuclear 

capabilities. In no other aspect of national security do we assume an unchanging constant in a 

rapidly changing world. The existing set of nuclear weapons was designed for a finite life against 

a defined national security need. Most of these weapons are already well beyond their defined 

life and the world environment that drives national security needs is changing daily. Although 

part of the current nuclear stockpile is becoming less relevant to contemporary threats, it is true 

that much of the current set of nuclear weapon capabilities remains appropriate for the task of 

deterring a major nuclear conflict with a peer or near-peer adversary. It is not obvious, however, 

that the existing set of nuclear capabilities is suitable for deterring the WMD threats increasingly 

posed to the United States and allies by Rogue states. Further, deterrence is not the only national 

goal supported by U.S. strategic forces. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review formally identified 

additional important national goals that had, in fact, long been understood: assurance, dissuasion, 

and defense. What types of nuclear weapons will be needed to support deterrence and these 

additional goals now and in the future is a question that deserves intense attention; not a 

premature answer that what was adequate in the past will be adequate for the future. 

In addition, it will not be possible to sustain the current weapons without replacing some current 

nuclear warheads with new nuclear warheads. It will not be possible to sustain a credible nuclear 

deterrent in the 21st century with only Cold War capabilities. No one would imagine the 

possibility of doing so with any other element of our national security capability. 

The Need for Continuing Assessment

The differences in views expressed above underscore the need for continuous attention to the 

range and implications of emerging, plausible nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities that 

can threaten the security of the United States and its allies with potentially catastrophic 

consequences and the implications for U.S. capabilities and policies. In past eras, we have 

benefited from an intense and sustained intelligence effort, a wide and deep intellectual 

commitment, and sustained national leadership attention to the role of nuclear capabilities, ours 

and those of potential adversaries. This level of commitment and attention was aided and abetted 

by focus on a well-understood set of capabilities in the hands of a well-understood threat. 

It would be reasonable to expect that a more complex security environment with a more widely 

varied potential for catastrophic consequences from adversaries – national and transnational – 

would result in more, not less, focus on nuclear capability and policies. Instead, the present 

reality is far less focus on that capability. 

The Need for Urgency

The current deficiencies in the nuclear weapons complex are already resulting in triage among 

demands to sustain a healthy nuclear enterprise. Current capacities are forcing choices between 

essential areas of work. At present: 
INTRODUCTION__________________________________________________________________ 

6_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

• We are behind on weapons surveillance, which is essential to continuing confidence in the 

reliability, safety, and security of weapons; 

• We are behind on dismantling unneeded weapons which adds to the security and safety 

concerns and burdens; 

• We are currently trying to catch up on capability for essential elements of warhead life 

extension work; 

• We have little or no capacity to respond to unexpected problems in the physics elements of 

weapons in the stockpile; 

• The DoD requirements for numbers and status of warheads beyond the deployed stockpile 

continue to strongly drive the weapons production complex workload and need to be 

rationalized and clearly stated; 

• We have an inadequately defined and funded capability for replacement, over time, of aging 

weapons in the stockpile; and 

• The current nuclear weapons production complex demands extensive added resources for 

security and maintenance. 

These issues are discussed in more detail elsewhere in the report, but the bottom line is that the 

nation is currently behind in essential work to sustain the weapons in the current nuclear 

stockpile. Hence, there is reason for urgency in providing credible guidance for weapons needs 

that are appropriate to the 21st century and an efficient, effective, right-sized set of laboratory and 

production complex capabilities to meet those needs. We are already late in addressing needs and 

the current pace of progress in defining, approving, and implementing the needed capabilities is 

not encouraging. 
____________________________________________________SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES___________________________________________________________7 

Section 2: Summary of Recommendations 

Assessing Progress in Developing Integrated Strike Capabilities in the New Triad:

• The national security leadership should: 

o Declare, unequivocally and frequently, that a reliable, safe, secure, and credible 

nuclear deterrent is essential to national security and a continuing high priority; 

o Form a standing assessment team (Red Team) to continuously assess the range of 

emerging and plausible nuclear capabilities that can threaten the United States and 

its allies and friends with potentially catastrophic consequences; and 

o Form a Deterrence Team tasked with gaining greater understanding of a variety of 

contemporary and future potential foes so as to establish optimal U.S. approaches 

to deterring WMD threats. 

• The Secretary of Defense should review the plans to improve the missile defense 

capability to deal with expected threats. This will require investment in new 

developments, especially to address the challenge of dealing with countermeasures. 

Fielding the current systems in larger numbers will not lead to a robust system. 

• The Secretary of Defense and the Commander, U.S. Strategic Command 

(USSTRATCOM), should strongly advocate accelerated development of the full set of 

New Triad capabilities – missile defense, infrastructure, and the Strike Triad, 

including a credible Nuclear leg of the Strike Triad.

• The Commander, U.S. Strategic Command should: 

o Develop a comprehensive plan for effective non-kinetic attack options and 

provide a time-phased roadmap for growing non-kinetic capabilities. 

o Ensure that recommendations for changes beyond those agreed to in the 

Moscow Treaty: 

 Take into account the full spectrum of U.S. national goals, i.e., assure, 

dissuade, deter, and defeat, and our contemporary inability to predict the 

future strategic environment with confidence; 

 Carry benefits worth the potential cost in capability; and 

 Remain reversible until clear evidence that the world situation, to 

include developments in Russia and China, provide confidence in future 

directions.

• The Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and the Assistant Secretary of Defense 

(Networks & Information Integration)(ASD/NII) should define and pursue a robust, 

survivable New Triad command and control structure that makes the best available 

information available to senior decision makers, communicates those decisions, and 

supports responsive execution. Such a system must exploit modern information 

networking while meeting the full set of current Integrated Threat Warning and Attack 

Assessment (ITW/AA) requirements.
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS_____________________________________________________ 

8_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

The Structure, Organization, and Management of the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise:

• The national security leadership should demand that the weapons complex be capable 

of producing a predetermined number of RRW-class warheads per year by 2012 for 

timely evolution to sustain a reliable, safe, secure, and credible stockpile. 

• The National Security Council should recommend to the President a National Nuclear 

Weapons Agency (NNWA) with the administrator reporting to the President through a 

Board of Directors made up of the Secretaries of Defense, Energy, and Homeland 

Security and the Director of National Intelligence who are accountable to the President 

for oversight and support of the nuclear weapons enterprise. 

o The core of the new agency’s responsibility should be the three national 

nuclear weapons laboratories and the weapons production complex. 

o The agency’s responsibilities should also include those activities that require 

unique knowledge of nuclear weapons. 

• The Secretary of Defense should: 

o Direct that the Nuclear Weapons Council (NWC), with full participation by the 

Commander, USSTRATCOM, perform a full risk management assessment 

weighing the demand on resources to sustain the current quantities and 

diversity in the nuclear weapons stockpile against the resources required to 

provide needed future capabilities.

o Direct action to change the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (NCB) to an 

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Weapons (ASD (SW)), reporting to 

the Deputy Secretary of Defense with continuing responsibility for nuclear, 

chemical, and biological programs. The ASD (SW) would have a Deputy 

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Weapons (DASD (NW)). 

o Propose and facilitate the Congressional process to: 

 Appoint the Deputy Secretary of Defense as the chairman of the Nuclear 

Weapons Council; and 

 Make the Commander, U.S. Strategic Command a member of the 

Nuclear Weapons Council.1

• The Secretary of Defense and the Administrator, NNSA should pursue plans to reduce 

the number of DoD and DOE sites and locations within sites containing bomb-size 

quantities of Category I nuclear materials. 

• The Administrator, NNSA should: 

o Contract for nuclear weapons production involving nuclear materials with a single 

contract with incentives for creating the most efficient production enterprise with 

right sizing and consolidation;

 

1

 As of early May 2006, the House Armed Services Committee markup of its version of the FY07 Defense 

Authorization Bill includes adding CDRUSSTRATCOM as a member of the Nuclear Weapons Council. 
_____________________________________________________SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________9 

o Ensure that line management (federal and contractor), has the authority and 

accountability to deliver the mission product;

o Ensure that staff and advisory board functions are supporting, not directing, line 

management; and

o Thoroughly embed safety and security functions in line management with the 

concerns of staff and outside agencies passing through the crucible of systems 

analysis, risk management, and line mission management judgment. 

• The Chairman of the NWC should produce an annual calendar for the NWC that 

provides for comprehensive and integrated review of nuclear weapons programs and 

policies to include the full nuclear warhead and delivery vehicle programs. 

Sustaining the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile:

• The Nuclear Weapons Council should: 

o Clearly articulate a new policy for sustaining the nuclear weapons stockpile 

that depends on evolving the stockpile, over time, to one of weapons with 

greater margins in performance, safety, and security; 

o Establish a policy that no more than 20% of the deployed stockpile be invested 

in a warhead for which there is not a genetically different alternative warhead 

suitable for timely deployment in the event of a single mode failure of a 

warhead type; and 

o Direct that: 

 The RRW program be pursued as a broad new approach to sustaining the 

stockpile, re-energizing design capability, and transforming the weapons 

complex; and 

 RRW-1 as the pilot for the RRW program, be pursued as a full weapons 

program and trade-offs with the scope of the W76 life extension effort be 

analyzed and implemented at the appropriate point in the W76 program. 
SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS_____________________________________________________ 

10_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON
______________________________________________________________ASSESSING PROGRESS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES___________________________________________________________11 

Section 3: Assessing Progress in Developing Integrated Strike Capabilities in 

the New Triad 

The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century

Any discussion of options for improving the U.S. nuclear deterrent must be grounded in an 

understanding of the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century. Nuclear capabilities remain an 

essential element of U.S. national security strategy and defense posture. The knowledge needed 

to create the power and destructive potential of nuclear weapons is widespread and is a 

continuing fact of life. Global abolition of these capabilities is a naïve hope. Consequently, the 

effective implementation of U.S. national security strategy in the 21st century requires nuclear 

capabilities adequate to the task of continuing deterrence in a dynamic world where the 

emergence of new and diverse threats makes the deterrence task more complex and less certain. 

It is widely understood that nuclear weapons carry both strategic and political utility. Our 

potential adversaries could reasonably believe that the acquisition of nuclear weapons and other 

weapons of mass destruction provide the means to threaten, intimidate, or deter the United States 

from pursing our national interests that may be in conflict with their perceived interests. These 

weapons can accord status and power to states that cannot challenge the United States with 

conventional capabilities. They can be seen as a means of “leveling” the military and political 

playing field. Nuclear weapons can also serve as instruments of mass terror and destruction both 

by nations and non-state actors. 

The continued reduction of U.S. nuclear forces is intended to reduce the nuclear danger and 

promote trust and understanding between the United States and our former, Cold War nuclear 

adversaries. Paradoxically, reductions in the quantity of weapons with no change in their 

qualities, may, by itself, degrade our capability to deter war, assure our allies, dissuade 

challenges, and defend against attack. Today’s nuclear weapons were tailored for the Cold War 

adversary and Cold War policies. Without tailoring to the present and possible future 

circumstances, these weapons may not be credible for other than massive retaliation in the eyes 

of 21st century potential WMD adversaries. Credible deterrence requires that the adversary 

believe that U.S. capabilities will be used if the adversary takes the course of action that we seek 

to deter. Without such a belief, deterrent effect is neither predictable nor reliable. Some have 

expressed the view that tailoring the nuclear weapons stockpile, over time, to make its deterrent 

power more credible lowers the nuclear threshold increasing the probability that nuclear weapons 

will be used. The opposite is far more likely. That is, the more credible their use in the face of 

extreme provocation, the more powerful their deterrent effect, and the less likely their 

employment will be needed. 

For these reasons, it is essential to an effective deterrent that the U.S. nuclear weapons complex 

be capable of producing and maintaining a set of nuclear weapons that are credible in our eyes 

and in the eyes of adversaries so that those adversaries are deterred from attack, and dissuaded 

from acquiring nuclear weapons and other threatening military options. 

The Strategic Environment

The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and the nuclear reductions it recommended were 

predicated on the assumptions of an increasingly benign post-Cold War relationship with Russia 
ASSESSING PROGRESS______________________________________________________________ 

12_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

and the ability to respond flexibly and promptly to any future negative political or technical 

changes in the global strategic environment. The nuclear reductions postulated in that NPR were 

indicative of both an existing relationship with Russia very different from the Cold War 

relationship and the desire to forge a new strategic relationship no longer based on the theory of 

mutual assured destruction that was the hallmark of the Cold War rivalry. 

Although United States relations with Russia are considered relatively benign at the moment, 

Russia retains the capability to destroy the United States in 30 minutes or less. Russia’s strategic 

nuclear arsenal has declined in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, lost key production 

facilities now located on “foreign” soil, and faces budgetary and economic constraints. 

Nevertheless, the concomitant decline in Russia’s conventional military forces has resulted in 

greater emphasis by the Russian government on the importance of nuclear weapons for 

maintaining superpower status, deterrence, and potentially warfighting. 

In addition, Russia’s transition to democracy has been difficult as evidenced in a variety of social 

spheres. Russian foreign policy continues to often be at odds with fundamental U.S. principles 

and actions, notably regarding Iraq and Iran. Russia is also increasingly challenging the U.S. 

presence in Central Asia. Domestically, the Russian government has exhibited signs of 

increasing conservatism in its policies and practices. In an April 2005 address to the Duma, 

President Vladimir Putin declared the collapse of the Soviet Union to be “the greatest 

geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” 

These and other indications suggest that Russia’s future as a democratic state remains uncertain. 

The first DoD Strategic Capabilities Assessment following the 2001 NPR, conducted largely in 

2003, concluded that nothing had changed so significantly since 2001 to affect the scope or pace 

of the drawdown of U.S. nuclear forces postulated in the NPR. Given recent Russian activities, 

especially in the nuclear arena, that conclusion may be open to reasonable challenge. 

China’s military modernization program is also a cause of concern. Though its current nuclear 

forces remain modest, political tensions with the United States over Taiwan make it prudent to 

take China’s nuclear capabilities seriously. Despite official denials, some Chinese military 

officials have suggested that an American defense of Taiwan in the event of conflict with the 

mainland would result in the use of nuclear weapons against the United States. 

In addition, the development of nuclear and CBW capabilities by countries such as North Korea 

and Iran is a reality now. North Korea has declared itself to possess nuclear weapons, and Iran 

has an active nuclear weapons program. Each also has ongoing missile development programs. 

The question of how to establish effective deterrence and dissuasion policies vis-à-vis these 

states looms large, as does the prospect of assuring our allies in their vicinity. 

Despite the desire for improved relations with Russia, the direction, scope, and pace of the 

evolution of U.S. capabilities must be based on a realistic recognition that the United States and 

Russia are not yet the reliable, trusted friends needed for the United States to depart from a 

commitment to a robust nuclear deterrent. Intentions can change overnight; capabilities cannot. 

Moreover, the military courses of China, North Korea, and Iran require continued attention to 

effective dissuasion and deterrence. There is a need for a continuing focus and process to ensure 

that nuclear weapons capabilities plans and policies reflect the changing world environment and 

the impact that environment has on the effectiveness of the nuclear deterrent. 
______________________________________________________________ ASSESSING PROGRESS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________13 

Recommendation: The national security leadership should: 

• Declare, unequivocally and frequently, that a reliable, safe, secure, and credible 

nuclear deterrent is essential to national security and a continuing high priority; 

• Form a standing assessment team (Red Team) to continuously assess the range of 

emerging and plausible nuclear capabilities that can threaten the United States and 

its allies and friends with potentially catastrophic consequences; and 

• Form a Deterrence Team tasked with gaining greater understanding of a variety of 

contemporary and future potential foes so as to establish optimal U.S. approaches to 

deterring WMD threats. 

The Nuclear Posture Review and the New Triad

The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review outlined a goal of modernizing and transforming U.S. strike 

capabilities to make them more relevant to the changed strategic environment of the 21st century, 

particularly the increased uncertainties surrounding the reliable functioning of deterrence against 

emerging threats. This included reducing the size of deployed legacy nuclear forces (the nuclear 

“Triad”) while developing improved nuclear, conventional, and non-kinetic capabilities to deal 

with contemporary threats and support the broad national goals of assurance, dissuasion, 

deterrence and defense. This triad of capabilities comprises the strike leg of the NPR’s “New 

Triad” of strategic capabilities. As illustrated in Figure 1, the New Triad embraces a triad of 

triads. 

 

Strike

Triad Nuclear

Triad

Bomber ICBM

SLBM

Advanced Conventional 

Strike Capabilities

NonKinetic

Responsive

Infrastructure

Defenses

New Triad

Fig 1: The Triad of Triads (U)

Command & Control,

Intelligence &

Planning

Along with these strike capabilities, the New Triad calls for developing strategic defenses – both 

active and passive – and a robust infrastructure to allow for timely development, fielding, or 

reconstitution of capabilities should the strategic environment warrant. To enable the integration 
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14_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

of these reinforcing capabilities, the New Triad would be strengthened by improved intelligence 

and a robust command and control system. 

These capabilities are intended to provide greater flexibility, adaptability, and robustness for 

addressing contemporary threats and future potential negative political and technical 

developments. As such, the purpose of the New Triad is to strengthen global deterrence across 

the full spectrum of immediate and potential threats by ensuring that the President and/or 

Secretary of Defense has a full range of strategic options and alternatives; can effectively 

communicate its decisions; and can have timely knowledge of the outcome of those decisions 

once executed. The New Triad is also intended to provide the warfighter with the range of 

capabilities needed to successfully execute assigned missions. 

Four years after promulgation of the Nuclear Posture Review, progress in achieving the goals of 

the New Triad remains elusive. The only robust capability in the New Triad is the Old Triad – 

the legacy nuclear forces of land-based ICBMs, sea-based SLBMs, and strategic bombers. These 

forces continue to be retired and removed from service as part of the reductions postulated in the 

NPR with little compensating progress in other aspects of the NPR goals. 

To ensure responsiveness to the evolution of current and future threats, the NPR called for 

periodic assessments of the strategic environment and of progress in developing the capabilities 

represented by the New Triad. These assessments were expected to take place every two years. 

The first periodic assessment was completed in 2004. Referred to as the “Strategic Capabilities 

Assessment,” it reviewed changes in the strategic landscape since 2001 and assessed progress in 

developing the capabilities called for as part of the New Triad. While actions have been taken to 

implement various aspects of the NPR, the Strategic Capabilities Assessment identified 

significant areas of deficiency where insufficient progress has been made to develop the 

capabilities called for in the New Triad. 

The Strategic Defense Leg

The approach to active strategic defenses is the ballistic missile defense program. That program, 

after several decades, is deploying a mid-course intercept system and expanded terminal phase 

systems. Development has also started on boost phase capabilities. 

The most critical, continuing challenge for the mid-course system is to discriminate the warhead 

from decoys. There is broad agreement in the missile defense community that there are viable 

options for more robust discrimination. However, while pieces that can contribute to these 

options are being pursued, there is not a coherent, funded program to develop and test these 

options. 

Recommendation: The Secretary of Defense should review the plans to improve the missile 

defense capability to deal with expected threats. This will require investment in new 

developments, especially to address the challenge of dealing with countermeasures. Fielding 

the current systems in larger numbers will not lead to a robust system. 

The Infrastructure Leg

The United States does not currently have the infrastructure required to sustain a reliable, safe, 

secure, and credible stockpile of nuclear weapons. Plans to provide such an infrastructure are still 

in development and are not funded. The production complex is discussed in Section 4: The 

Structure, Organization, and Management of the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise. 
______________________________________________________________ ASSESSING PROGRESS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________15 

The Strike Leg

The “strike” leg of the New Triad consists of nuclear and advanced conventional forces, both 

kinetic and non-kinetic. The importance of the strike leg of the New Triad is reinforced by the 

difficulties discussed elsewhere in the report in realizing progress in fielding the capabilities 

represented by the other two legs. 

Enhancements to U.S. nuclear capabilities, envisioned as part of a restructured set of strike 

capabilities more appropriate to contemporary threats, have encountered a number of obstacles 

including: the unique requirements of maintaining aging systems; the overall decline of the 

nuclear weapons production complex; the decline in scientific and engineering talent; the lack of 

high-level official attention to nuclear weapons issues; a general lack of understanding regarding 

the importance and role of nuclear weapons in U.S. deterrence strategy in the 21st century; the 

absence of an effective public affairs strategy; and congressional opposition. 

In recent years, these difficulties have been illustrated by the debate over the Robust Nuclear 

Earth Penetrator (RNEP). The RNEP effort has been opposed on the basis that it is a “new” 

nuclear weapon whose development would make it more “useable” and, therefore, more likely to 

be employed. The RNEP plan has a modest objective. The proposal was a study effort to address 

what would be required to hold at risk hard and deeply buried targets, including those which 

might house weapons of mass destruction. 

The nature of the debate over RNEP tends to ignore a fundamental truth with respect to 

deterrence that is worth repeating: weapons that are not seen as useable and effective by 

potential adversaries cannot be an effective, reliable deterrent.

RNEP is one of a number of nuclear initiatives that has fallen victim to allegations that the 

United States is pursuing a nuclear “warfighting” strategy. Other nuclear initiatives that have 

engendered opposition among legislators, arms control advocates, and some in the 

nonproliferation community include the Modern Pit Facility – intended to produce the plutonium 

“pits” necessary for nuclear weapons; the Advanced Concepts Initiative – designed to investigate 

concepts for new warhead designs that could lead to more credible deterrence in the 21st century; 

and the Enhanced Test Readiness program – designed to reduce the amount of time necessary to 

conduct an underground nuclear test from three years to eighteen months. 

Given the political opposition and reduced funding for these initiatives, there has been little 

progress to date in evolving needed U.S. nuclear capabilities to address effectively the more 

diverse range of potential threats likely to emerge in the 21st century. 

The deployment of a suite of advanced conventional precision strike capabilities with greater 

accuracy, penetration, and reduced time-to-target is a major element of the New Triad. It is also a 

major priority for USSTRATCOM, which has been assigned the Global Strike mission. 

According to the Unified Command Plan, USSTRATCOM’s responsibilities include “providing 

integrated global strike planning and C2 support” to execute global precision strike objectives in 

support of national policy. 

The United States possesses an impressive set of conventional attack capabilities including the 

capability to attack almost any target, anywhere in the world, anytime, in any weather, and with 

high precision. However, conventional weapons’ capabilities are globally less responsive than is 

the case with strategic nuclear weapons. 
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As part of fulfilling its global strike mandate, USSTRATCOM is investigating the utility of 

arming ballistic missiles with conventional payloads. This option would provide a rapid strike 

capability with worldwide reach. USSTRATCOM has been given the mission of synchronizing 

DoD efforts to combat WMD worldwide. Conventionally-armed, ballistic missiles – which have 

the ability to strike quickly at long distances – would provide an important new capability that 

could augment efforts to destroy WMD before they can be used against the United States, its 

allies, or interests. They also could contribute to U.S. policy goals of deterrence, dissuasion, and 

assurance. 

Options for developing a conventional, long-range, ballistic missile capability include both landbased and sea-based alternatives. Follow-on improvements in capability will present more 

difficult challenges than any near-term alternatives being investigated. USSTRATCOM is 

already taking steps to develop a wider range of conventional deterrent weapons. Key initiatives 

include2

: 

• Deploy an initial precision-guided conventional Trident SLBM capability as soon as 

practical. The speed and range advantage of a conventional Trident missile increases 

decision time and provides an alternative to nuclear weapon use against fleeting, high 

value targets. The conventional Trident missile could be particularly useful in deterring 

or defeating those who seek to coerce or threaten the U.S. with WMD. 

• Develop a new land-based, penetrating long-range strike capability to be fielded by 

2018. 

• Study alternative options for delivering prompt, precise conventional warheads using 

advanced technologies such as hypersonic vehicles from land, air, or the sea. 

 Various avenues for non-kinetic strike programs are also promising but are in the formative 

stage at this point. 

Recommendation: The Commander, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) should 

develop a comprehensive plan for effective non-kinetic attack options and provide a timephased roadmap for growing non-kinetic capabilities. 

In summary, the capabilities represented by the New Triad have the potential to significantly 

enhance global deterrence by providing a robust and credible set of capabilities and alternatives 

for responding to a variety of extant and emerging threats. However, the implementation of New 

Triad programs has been slow and, in some cases, encumbered by a lack of understanding of 

how these programs contribute to global deterrence, dissuasion, and assuring allies. 

Without greater emphasis on explaining the rationale behind the New Triad concept, coupled 

with senior-level support for the funding required to make the necessary programs a reality, 

implementation of New Triad capabilities will be jeopardized. 

Recommendation: The Secretary of Defense and the Commander, U.S. Strategic Command 

should strongly advocate accelerated development of the full set of New Triad capabilities – 

missile defense, infrastructure, and the Strike Triad, including a credible Nuclear leg of the 

Strike Triad. 

 

2

 Statement by General James S. Cartwright, Commander USSTRATCOM, before the Strategic Forces 

Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Service Committee on Global Strike Plans and Programs, 29 March 2006. 
______________________________________________________________ ASSESSING PROGRESS

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________17 

Nuclear Reductions

The NPR recommended reductions in the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear 

warheads to a level between 1,700 and 2,200 by the end of 2012. The Moscow Treaty codified 

these reductions in 2002. 

Reductions in legacy nuclear weapons and systems are occurring apace, despite the concerns 

over Russia’s future strategic course noted previously. Peacekeeper ICBMs have been retired 

and the MIRVed Minuteman III ICBM force is being reconfigured with single warheads. Four 

Trident SSBNs are being removed from strategic service and being modified as SSGNs capable 

of carrying cruise missiles and special operations forces. The U.S. heavy bomber force no longer 

stands on day-to-day alert and is increasingly tasked for conventional missions. 

Further reductions in the deployed ICBM and SLBM force are expected to occur to comply with 

the mandated Moscow Treaty limits. The reduction in strategic nuclear weapons is the only 

element in the transition to the New Triad that appears to be proceeding according to the 

anticipated schedule. Moreover, the President has approved a plan that will reduce by roughly 

one-half the number of nuclear weapons available in the stockpile for reconstitution in the event 

of a negative change in the strategic environment. These capabilities, once eliminated, are 

unlikely to be restored. 

Recommendation: The Commander, U.S. Strategic Command should ensure that 

recommendations for changes beyond those agreed to in the Moscow Treaty:

• Take into account the full spectrum of U.S. national goals, i.e., assure, dissuade, deter, 

and defeat, and our contemporary inability to predict the future strategic environment 

with confidence; 

• Carry benefits worth the potential cost in capability; and

• Remain reversible until clear evidence that the world situation, to include developments 

in Russia and China, provide confidence in future directions.

Nuclear Command and Control

There is also concern in U.S. nuclear command and control capabilities. As nuclear forces are 

reduced, the ability to exercise effective command and control over residual forces to ensure the 

continued functioning of deterrence has never been more important. Numerous studies, 

assessments, and exercise results have highlighted the nuclear command and control system as a 

capability that must be sustained into the future, as dictated by national policy3

, as we continue to 

study Nuclear C3 migration into the evolving net-centric environment. 

Although the nuclear command and control system was designed to ensure a robust and enduring 

capability for nuclear retaliation, the command and control structure envisioned by the New 

Triad has a far broader role. The effective integration of the strike forces comprising the New 

Triad can only be achieved with reliable, robust, and survivable command and control. This 

includes ensuring that the nuclear command and control system is robust and adaptable to the 

new security environment. 

 

3 Nuclear C3 (“Thin-line”) and Migration to a New Triad Architecture, OASD (NII)/C2 Policy DISA/GIG 

Transport Engineering, briefing presented to the DSB Task Force on 17 June 2005. Briefing was a result of Nuclear 

Weapons Council tasking in March 2005 to inform the NWC on the current nuclear C3 architecture and construct. 
ASSESSING PROGRESS______________________________________________________________ 

18_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

In addition to their primary purpose and function, the assets generally associated with nuclear 

command and control also comprise an essential component of a broader national system that 

supports decision-making and operations in non-nuclear crises and conflicts. There is a 

demonstrated need for a responsive, reliable, survivable, and robust command and control 

system that can provide the President with the information, access to advisors, and the means 

necessary to respond deliberately and appropriately to any crisis, without constraining the 

President’s decisions due to weaknesses in command and control or in the continuity of 

Presidential authority. At present, the current nuclear command and control system represents the 

only capability in the near- to mid-term that has the potential to meet the robust command and 

control requirements dictated by current national policy. Investment will be required to ensure 

adequate capability. 

Recommendation: The Commander, U.S. Strategic Command and the Assistant Secretary of 

Defense (Networks & Information Integration)(ASD/NII) should define and pursue a robust, 

survivable New Triad command and control structure that makes the best available 

information available to senior decision makers, communicates those decisions, and supports 

responsive execution. Such a system must exploit modern information networking while 

meeting the full set of current Integrated Threat Warning and Attack Assessment (ITW/AA) 

requirements. 
___________________________________________STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES___________________________________________________________19 

Section 4: The Structure, Organization, and Management of the Nuclear 

Weapons Enterprise 

The 21st Century Need

Both the nuclear weapons stockpile and the enterprise that sustains the needed stockpile are in 

need of fundamental transformation. The needed transformation will be difficult for several 

reasons. It will have to be carried out, or at least be set on the right track, at a time when nuclear 

weapon capabilities do not receive the same degree of military and political support as they did 

during the Cold War. Transformation of the nuclear complex will require added resources at a 

time when there will be increasing budget pressures and competing priorities. At the same time, 

when transformation is so urgently needed, there are significant management and leadership 

issues. The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) part of the nuclear enterprise has 

not achieved the degree of focused autonomy needed to effectively and efficiently manage and 

lead the nuclear weapons enterprise. Further, the nuclear weapons program suffers from lack of 

consensus and support in the national security decision-making apparatus. 

Meeting the concert of these challenges will require extraordinarily effective leadership and 

management, facilitated by more effective and efficient organizational arrangements. The 

weapons programs and enterprise will have to be transformed in fundamental ways. At the 

present time there are three fundamental challenges with the leadership and management of the 

nation’s nuclear capabilities. 

• While the national security leadership has clearly declared a need to sustain a credible 

nuclear deterrent, this has not been accompanied by a clear and coherent national 

approach to doing this for the long term. 

• The DoD leadership, to include nuclear force providers, is not playing the needed role of 

demanding customer for the nuclear capabilities which are to be provided by the DOE. 

• The DOE leadership that should be responding to demanding customers has been unable 

to provide a comprehensive, coherent, funded plan or capability to sustain a reliable, safe, 

secure, and credible stockpile of nuclear weapons for the long term. 

History of the Weapons Enterprise and Current Issues

After World War Two and the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was 

established to explore and develop military and civil applications of nuclear energy and science. 

At first, such an independent organization was deemed necessary in part “to keep nuclear 

weapons out of the hands of the military,” but soon sounder reasons held sway: to assure strong 

commitment to both the civil and the military programs, and to provide an independent view on 

nuclear matters to the President, to whom the chairman of the Commission reported. 

Growing out of the Manhattan Project and the early days of the AEC was the institutional 

arrangement that came to be known as the Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated, FederallyFunded Research and Development Center (GOCO FFRDC), the epitomes of which were the 

national laboratories. The essence of this model is science and engineering competencies 

concentrated in contractor-operated facilities, and sustained and adapted over long periods of 

time to address large, enduring scientific/technical problems of national significance. The 
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20_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

national laboratory model was fostered by a productive partnership between the AEC and the 

Congress’ Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE). 

These generally successful arrangements for the weapons program – AEC sponsorship of GOCO 

laboratories and production facilities – continued until the energy crises of the 1970s led to 

disestablishment of the AEC and formation, in the mid-1970s, of the Department of Energy and 

the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The JCAE was also disbanded at this time. In the nuclear 

arms control climate at the time, the nuclear weapons program, rather than being incorporated 

into the DoD, was attached to the new DOE, with little regard for natural congruence of missions 

and programmatic approaches. 

When the first Reagan administration proposed the disestablishment of DOE in 1981, the initial 

approach was to locate the nuclear weapons program in DoD. Because of the Services’ concerns 

over budget impacts, however, the draft legislation instead located the weapons program in an 

essentially autonomous agency, somewhat similar in structure to the AEC. However, in the end, 

of course, DOE was not disestablished, the draft legislation was not enacted and the weapons 

program remained part of DOE. 

Underlying Causes

During the 1980s and 1990s, the lack of congruence between the DOE’s missions, policies, and 

methods relative to the weapons program, led to increasing encumbrance by DOE management 

based on approaches that were not tailored to the needs of a nuclear weapons enterprise. Also 

during this period the appreciation for, and effectiveness of, the GOCO FFRDC model began to 

decline as DOE exercised increasingly detailed authority over the organizations that were formed 

to provide a level of stable technical and management expertise not available in the government. 

This is the basic reason for establishing FFRDCs. Today, the national laboratory FFRDC model 

is poorly understood, in DOE, the Congress, and elsewhere in government. 

A key disconnect has been in knowledge and experience. From the early days of the AEC, the 

weapons program, because of its uniqueness, grew its own expertise in-house -- in science, 

engineering, programmatics, and surety – and mainly outside of government, in the national 

nuclear laboratories and the production plants that largely comprise the enterprise. The AEC, the 

JCAE, and these organizations grew up concurrently, following in Leslie Groves’ footsteps, and 

were confident in their ability to execute effective government oversight without detailed control 

or frequent intervention. When the DOE was formed, for a variety of reasons the necessary 

expertise was never effectively transferred to the DOE as a whole. Further, in the process of 

absorbing the nuclear weapons mission into DOE, a fundamental principle essential to the proper 

management of the nuclear enterprise was lost. That principle is that the source of expertise for 

the federal line management for mission execution, to include risk management in safety and 

security, must be the contractor line management. Instead, increasingly DOE replaced reliance 

on this essential contractor expertise with rules and processes developed and enforced in staff, 

not line organizations, thereby inappropriately separating accountability from authority. No 

compilation of rules can be a substitute for the expert judgment of those accountable for 

delivering the mission product, safely and securely. The developing bureaucratic encumbrances 

to the efficient and effective operation of the nuclear weapons enterprise were examined in detail 

by the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board in the February 1995 report on Alternative Futures 

for the Department of Energy National Laboratories (the Galvin Report). Among an extensive 

list of specific management oversight excesses, the report noted that: 
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NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________21 

“The net effect is that thousands of people are engaged on the government payroll to oversee 

and prescribe tens of thousands of how-to functions. The laboratories must staff up or 

reallocate the resources of its people to be responsive to such myriads of directives; more and 

more of the science intended resources are having to be redirected to the phenomenon of 

accountability versus producing science and technology benefits.”4

In March 1999, the Commission on Maintaining United States Nuclear Weapons Experience 

(Chiles Commission) characterized the impact of increasingly detailed oversight from DOE 

headquarters and the site offices with the following: 

“The current stewards of the stockpile experience frustration caused by the high level of 

DOE micromanagement in the workplace. Worker feelings range from anger to resigned 

despair. Uncertainties are created by the overlapping and unclear government roles in 

supervision of operations. At the extreme, some felt that supervisory bureaucracies had 

become the prime customer of their facility – that is, pleasing the overseers has become 

equally or more important than accomplishing their stewardship mission.”5

In October 1999, recognizing the dissonance inherent in the situation and the encumbrances for 

the weapons program, President Clinton signed into law a bill establishing the NNSA to be a 

semi-autonomous agency within the DOE responsible for enhancing national security through 

the military application of nuclear energy. The law specifically transferred responsibility for 

managing the nuclear weapons complex from DOE to NNSA. 

 A year after the NNSA Act, a special oversight panel of the House Armed Services Committee 

found that “NNSA was little more than a paper organization, bereft of the leadership, structure, 

and degree of semi-autonomy intended by the Congress.”6

 The panel expressed hope that the 

impending appointment of a new Administrator would lead to fulfilling the intent of Congress. 

The evolution of management approaches since that time has not increased the autonomy of the 

NNSA, which must still operate within the DOE bureaucratic structure. In contradiction to the 

NNSA Act, the DOE Implementation Plan specifically preserved oversight responsibilities of the 

existing DOE staff agencies. The Implementation Plan declared “The Implementation Plan does 

not change the scope of responsibility of the Departmental offices that perform independent 

oversight and have the Department-wide responsibilities for overall policy in staff areas, such as 

environmental compliance, worker safety and health, and project management.”7

 Hence the 

Implementation Plan denied the NNSA the intended autonomy. Further it established that DOE 

practice was de facto assignment of what are clearly line management responsibilities to staff 

agencies. Specifically, the plan characterizes environmental compliance, worker safety and 

health, and project management as staff, rather than line management functions. With this 

construct, it is difficult to impossible for the NNSA management or the contractors operating the 

nuclear weapons complex to integrate these essential functions into the daily management and 

operations of the enterprise. This approach continues to produce results that do not meet mission 

needs, but that are regularly blamed on contractor line management rather than on the confusion 

 

4 Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories, Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, 

February, 1995, Apendix A. 

5 Report of the Commission on Maintaining United States Nuclear Weapons Expertise, Pursuant to the National 

Defense Authorization Acts of 1997 and 1998, March 1, 1999, p. 36. 

6 An assessment by the Special Oversight Panel on Department of Energy Reorganization, Committee on Armed 

Services, U.S. House of Representatives, October 13, 2000, Executive Summary. 7 The Department of Energy Implementation Plan, National Nuclear Security Administration, January 1, 2000, pg 9. 
STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT ___________________________________________ 

22_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

of authority and accountability engendered by excessive oversight, micromanagement, and a risk 

avoidance policy. 

This assessment of the effect of the language of the Implementation Plan is not a recent issue. 

The GAO noted in 2000 that: 

“DOE’s Implementation Plan simply transfers many of the DOE’s historic shortcomings to 

NNSA. In particular: 

• NNSA’s organizational structure does not establish clear lines of authority or streamline 

the field structure. 

• NNSA is taking a “business as usual” approach to planning, programming, budgeting and 

securing skilled technical staff instead of affecting needed change as part of the 

Implementation Plan. 

• While NNSA was to be distinct from DOE, they have duplicative and overlapping 

functions. 

• Significant questions remain about the relationship between NNSA and DOE’s 

organizations that oversee NNSA and DOE’s line management to ensure effective 

security and environment safety, and health programs.”8

Some five years later, the issues - identified in studies, commissions, and panels – that led to the 

establishment of the NNSA persist. The latest evidence is found in the 13 July 2005 Report of the 

Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force which declares that: 

“The complex must learn to balance quality, safety, security and cost in order to meet the 

needs of the nation in a cost-effective, appropriate manner. . . . Many administrative orders 

and procedures designed for the DOE civilian research and science laboratories are not well 

suited to the product-oriented Complex. The NNSA mission requires clear deliverables and 

requirements for the nuclear weapons life cycle, achieved by design, testing, manufacturing, 

and production with materials that by their very nature embody risk.”9

Some members of the nuclear community believe that demands for new and life extension 

production will correct the current imbalances. The Task Force believes that, given all that has 

gone before, the needed transformation in the nuclear weapons enterprise will require some 

fundamental change in the current situation, and it is time for a remedy that would both enable 

the transformation and be part of it. 

The DoD Role

There is also an urgent need for changes in scope of the DoD involvement in the broader nuclear 

enterprise and capabilities risk management equation. Specifically, DoD is requiring continuing 

stockpile levels that include the operationally deployed warheads and a significant non-deployed 

stockpile as a hedge against technical problems or geopolitical changes. This approach appears to 

be low risk on the surface but can, instead, be the source of high risk to the future enterprise and 

capabilities. The resource demands of sustaining the stockpile, both in numbers and in types of 

 

8

 Testimony of Associate Director of GAO, Views on DOE’s Plan to Establish the National Nuclear Security 

Administration, Special Oversight Panel on Department of Energy Reorganization, March 2, 2000, pp. 1, 2. 9

 Recommendations for the Nuclear Weapons Complex of the Future, Report of the Nuclear Weapons Complex 

Infrastructure Task Force of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, 13 July, 2005, par. 5 & 5.2. 
__________________________________________ STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________23 

warheads, puts high pressure on available resources and may put the future enterprise at high 

risk. The DoD needs to participate fully in the trade-offs, accepting prudent risks in the current 

environment, to help ensure a viable set of capabilities in the longer term where the environment 

is far more uncertain. 

Recommendation: The Secretary of Defense should direct that the Nuclear Weapons Council, 

with full participation by the Commander, USSTRATCOM, perform a full risk management 

assessment weighing the demand on resources to sustain the current quantities and diversity 

in the nuclear weapons stockpile against the resources required to provide needed future 

capabilities. 

Transforming the Nuclear Weapons Production Complex

There have been no new nuclear weapon types produced since the early 1990s and only minimal 

modification of some of the weapon types since that time. Various DOE internal and external 

studies suggest there is little reason to be confident in the responsiveness of the production 

infrastructure today and the current schedule backlogs in weapon surveillance and dismantlement 

contribute to this lack of confidence. 

There are studies past and present replete with ideas and concepts, but the DOE has yet to put 

forward a plan for a responsive production infrastructure prescribed in the 2001 Nuclear Posture 

Review. There are two current, high profile, studies that bear directly on this issue -- the ongoing 

DoD/DOE Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) study and the recently released report of the 

DOE Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force (NWCITF). The RRW study will not 

be completed until November 2006. The DOE NWCITF study was recently released. It is 

important to note that the NWCITF included the RRW concept as a keystone for transformation 

to a responsive production infrastructure. 

The key NWCITF recommendation on organization and structure of the production complex is 

to create a single consolidated site for work with special nuclear materials (SNM). A single site, 

while theoretically attractive, is not likely to be viewed as an affordable near-term approach. 

 The reality is that the 2020 production complex will be some version of the current set of 

facilities though downsized and upgraded. There are affordable plans and opportunities to reduce 

the number and size of locations where SNM is involved in work or storage. This can both 

improve efficiency and reduce the cost of security. Some examples are included in this report. 

The RRW concept can provide the catalyst to transform the complex to a responsive 

infrastructure and to provide the production capability needed to sustain the nuclear deterrent as 

required. The RRW pilot program is a competition to design a more reliable, safer, more secure 

replacement for follow-on increments of the W76 life extension program. The RRW requirement 

is discussed in the next section of this report (Section 5: Sustaining the Nuclear Weapons 

Stockpile), but the corresponding near-term production challenge is to be able to produce a 

predetermined number of RRW-class warheads per year by 2012 (determined by 

USSTRATCOM to meet operational requirements and ensure the endurance of the W76 as a 

viable deterrent). This is not the end point for the complex, but rather the driving near-term need. 

For the longer-term, pit production capability must be expanded to meet the broader future need. 

Planning for that warrants a high priority now. 
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Recommendation: The national security leadership should demand that the weapons complex 

be capable of producing a predetermined number of RRW-class warheads per year by 2012 for 

timely evolution to sustain a reliable, safe, secure, and credible stockpile. 

There seems to be no question about the need for transformation of the production complex. The 

issue is transformation to what, with what, and for what purpose. Three key elements of needed 

transformation are: 

• Changing the way weapons are designed and produced; 

• Changing the production site and facility infrastructure; and

• Changing the way the nuclear weapons enterprise is managed.

 Changing the Way Weapons are Designed and Produced

Replicating major segments of the current stockpile of high performance (yield-to-weight) 

weapons to extend their lives for the long term is proving to be difficult and expensive. These 

weapons are difficult to build and difficult to certify. An ongoing program to address this issue is 

the RRW concept discussed in the next section of this report. The RRW approach has great 

potential merit for a number of reasons, to include improved manufacturability, and in a properly 

managed complex, will contribute to reduced cost of production. However, it will not 

significantly reduce cost with the current approach to production management. Less and less of 

the total resource is actually consumed by direct labor on the nuclear warhead. As a reasonable 

first approximation, 80% of the total cost would go to operate the production infrastructure in 

warm standby and 20% of the total cost would go into producing the warheads. 

 Even with a completely successful RRW program, current weapon types will remain a 

significant fraction of the stockpile for the next 20 years. The RRW can be one of a set of 

enabling actions for transformation, but there are other enabling actions that would be timelier in 

reducing costs and improving responsiveness. 

Changing the Production Site and Facility Infrastructure

The report of the DOE NWCITF recommends immediate action on the RRW concept and 

essentially a point solution for the production infrastructure, the Consolidated Nuclear 

Production Center (CNPC). Currently, new pit and secondary production facilities are the most 

critical needs. To first approximation, these facilities require the same safety, security and 

production infrastructure. Based on the current DOE approach, it is unrealistic to assume that 

new nuclear production facilities would appear less than 10-15 years from today. 

Today, the distributed production infrastructure is sub-optimized, resulting in high cost and slow 

response. Since each element of this sub-optimized structure is under separate contract, there is 

little contractor incentive to contribute to a more effective and efficient production complex. 

With either the CNPC concept or a distributed production infrastructure, a single contract 

arrangement could be the vehicle for incentives to reduce cost and improve responsiveness in the 

near term. 

Consolidation of administrative and technical overhead for production operations involving 

materials alone should yield significant savings. Technical overhead refers to the significant 

level of analytical work that is required today to run a safe, secure, and environmentally 
__________________________________________ STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________25 

compliant production facility – for example, extensive hazard analyses to support facility safety 

basis documentation. 

The single contract should include the Pantex and Oak Ridge Y-12 plants, the tritium facilities at 

the Savannah River Site, the Nevada Test Site, and the pit manufacturing facility. The resulting 

savings could be applied to supporting critical production capabilities for existing weapons and 

RRW while the stockpile and production infrastructure are being transformed. Current contracts 

are on an approximate 5-year cycle, so this action could be implemented far sooner than building 

new facilities.10 

Recommendation: The Administrator, NNSA should contract for nuclear weapons production 

involving nuclear materials with a single contract with incentives to creating the most efficient 

production enterprise with right-sizing and consolidation.

This “single contract” recommendation should be considered an important near-term strategic 

step to enable a longer-term transformation to a more responsive and cost-effective production 

infrastructure. 

In the current structure, nuclear materials are located at multiple sites and at multiple locations 

on sites. Efforts to consolidate nuclear materials at fewer locations in smaller footprint restricted 

areas would change the demand for the protective force size to meet the increased design basis 

threat. There are consolidation opportunities within both DOE and DoD sites. For example, at 

one DoD site the restricted area for nuclear weapons storage is five times larger than needed to 

store the current and anticipated inventory of weapons at that location. A modest restructuring 

could significantly enhance security at this site. At a DOE site, the restricted area containing 

SNM could be reduced to 1/10th the current size providing for more efficient operations and a 

concurrent reduction in security costs. 

Recommendation: The Secretary of Defense and the NNSA Administrator should pursue 

plans to reduce the number of sites and locations within sites containing bomb-size quantities 

of Category I nuclear materials. 

Changing the Way the Nuclear Weapons Enterprise is Managed

This portion of the report focuses on the more tactical day-to-day operation of the nuclear 

weapons production infrastructure and particularly the risk management model exhibited by the 

DOE. 

The DOE risk management model responds to concerns about safety, even those that are highly 

hypothetical, with a work stop until a new detailed safety basis is established. For example, the 

W76 surveillance program lost about 30 weeks in 2004, mainly through safety and securityrelated shutdowns. Internal staff agencies and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board 

exercise influence that amounts to de facto directive authority over safety matters with no 

accountability for the impact of their activities on productivity. Hence, the precipitous drop in 

productivity has gone unchallenged – perhaps unnoticed. There is an urgent need to ensure that 

people with competence in the details of the mission analyze safety and security issues so that 

the concerns are properly addressed with an acceptable level of risk in balance with the mission 

 

10 At the time this report was written there was an ongoing public discussion of DOE/EM re-bidding the Savannah 

River Site contract to include the weapons tritium facilities. These facilities should be under the contracting control 

of the new NNWA. 
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26_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

of the enterprise. Risk management is an inherently line management function that must be fully 

integrated into the daily execution of the mission. 

A key example of the result of the current disconnected approach is found at Pantex. Pantex is 

selected for the example because, unlike other operations in the NNSA complex, there has been 

no break in the continuing demand for dismantlements and surveillance. As compared with the 

workload in the 1980s, today Pantex, with about the same hands-on work force as in the 1980s, 

has only a capacity of about 10% of the throughput for fiscal year 2005. The workload is

expected to increase significantly by FY2011.11 

The sharpest decline in productivity was between 1995 and 1999 and is primarily due to 

restrictive processes in response to safety and security concerns. Given this state of productivity, 

there is a significant and growing backlog meeting even the current workload. The difference is 

not attributable to increased complexity of the operations. It is attributable to the way the 

operation is managed. For example, in a scenario involving a potential safety issue, the response 

was to limit operations while a safety basis was devised to reduce the probability of the identified 

accident scenario to no more than one in a million. Since responding to hypothetical safety 

challenges can require proving a negative, resolving any such issue can take months or years. 

The effect on productivity of this single issue is enormous. 

Further, much of the most expensive manpower is tied up searching for solutions to respond to 

people with no managerial or production accountability. It has reached the point that, at Pantex, 

there are three process engineers for each hands-on worker even though they are dealing with 

weapons that have been in the inventory for an average exceeding 20 years using processes that 

have a perfect, decades-long record of achieving the goal of no scattering of plutonium from any 

accident scenario. 

In spite of the high cost, one might decide that the nation is willing to pay that price in 

productivity for a zero-risk approach. The demonstrated reality is that the nation is not willing to 

pay the price; hence the large backlog in work at some NNSA facilities. Further, stopping work, 

in most of these incidences, is not zero risk. It can, instead, increase risk. It is likely that a 

significant contributor to this overwhelming primacy of safety concerns over productivity is 

because it has been well over a decade since the complex was required to actually produce 

weapons. Even so, the current attitude of “no work equals zero risk” has created a large backlog 

of past due surveillance and a large dismantlement backlog. Some of the awaiting 

dismantlements, long in queue, were removed from the active stockpile because of identified 

operational safety concerns. Yet, after several years they still wait in queue. 

One of the purposes of regular surveillance is to provide an early warning signal that hazards in 

the weapon are occurring due to aging or other reasons, such as improper handling or storage. 

Delaying surveillance because of theoretical safety issues can produce greater and more real 

safety issues. 

Recommendation: The Administrator, NNSA should: 

• Ensure that line management (federal and contractor), has the authority and 

accountability to deliver the mission product; 

 

11 NNSA briefing to DSB Task Force on Nuclear Capabilities on 21 July, 2005, entitled Status of Production 

Complex and Readiness, slide 8, Pantex Throughput (Current NNSA FY & FYNSP Years P&PD 2005-0 – Pantex 

(weapon equivalent operations).
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• Ensure that staff and advisory board functions are supporting, not directing, line 

management; and 

• Thoroughly embed safety and security functions in line management with the concerns 

of staff and outside agencies passing through the crucible of systems analysis, risk 

management, and line mission management judgment. 

 Criteria/Principles for Management and Organizational Arrangements

Certain criteria, principles, and goals must guide the needed changes: 

• The nation must have a nuclear weapons enterprise that is fully capable of sustaining a 

reliable, safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent, limiting and dealing with 

proliferation, and avoiding technical surprise. 

• The crucial imperatives are a focus on nuclear weapons and organizational independence 

from disparate equities and interests. 

• The enterprise must report at the top to experienced people who care about the mission, 

and who understand that the long-term foundation of deterrence is the nation’s 

intellectual capital regarding nuclear weapons beyond the extant stockpile and 

infrastructure. 

• The enterprise must operate in accordance with well-proven management and leadership 

practices and norms that give line management unquestioned authority and accountability 

for all aspects of enterprise operations and products. 

• The nuclear weapons enterprise consists of the stockpile of warheads, the inventory of 

platforms, and the associated development, production and operational infrastructures. It 

also consists of science and weapon R&D, weapon and platform production and 

sustainment, integration of weapons with platforms and with DoD operations with 

nuclear weapons, and national policy. Organizational arrangements must be evaluated as 

to competence across this wide range of activities, commitment to the program, as well as 

congruence between these activities and the parent organizations’ other activities. 

• Arrangements must properly strike three kinds of balances: 

o Between integration with DoD and maintaining an independent view on nuclear 

weapons matters, 

o Between assuring a strong focus on nuclear weapons and contribution to other 

security needs of the nation. 

 Especially for the national nuclear laboratories, working on other securityrelated matters both strengthens the nation and provides a broader base for 

weapons work. It would benefit both weapons and other national security 

needs if the nuclear laboratories were once again treated as true national 

laboratories, taking on large, long-term, high-risk/high-payoff problems of 

importance to national security. 

o Between management approaches conducive to R&D and management 

approaches conducive to production. 

• The interface between DoD and the warhead/weapons program must be effective. 
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28_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

• There must be commitment to management practices conducive to mission 

accomplishment including: 

o Consolidating contracts into a small number covering the broad mission areas, 

and 

o Broad delegation of responsibility to the contractors, so that decisions can be 

made at the point where expertise and authority coincide, including especially 

returning responsibility for safety and security of operations to the line 

management organization. 

Options for Management and Organization

The Task Force considered three options to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of 

managing the nuclear weapons enterprise. 

• Reform within the Current NNSA/DOE Structure 

• Moving NNSA to DoD 

• A Government Corporate Approach 

Reform within the Current NNSA/DOE Structure: NNSA was established to provide clear lines 

of authority to accomplish the mission of sustaining a reliable, safe, secure, and credible 

stockpile. A Secretary of Energy could direct and enforce internal reforms that would meet that 

purpose, providing the needed semi-autonomous NNSA accountable only to the Secretary. 

However, this would take a fundamental change in the culture currently driving nuclear weapons 

complex operations. Further, this culture has spread to the NNSA itself. As a minimum, there 

would need to be effective and credible steps to correct the most fundamental detractors from the 

nuclear weapons mission within DOE. They include: 

• A return to a risk assessment approach that balances risk against mission demands with 

safety concerns passing through the crucible of analysis before taking precipitous action. 

This does not imply less emphasis on safety. Instead, it implies more effective emphasis with 

safety awareness and attention embedded in operations at every level. 

• An end to the excessive oversight and micromanagement that has been repeatedly identified 

by line management and by a long series of commissions and studies over the past decade 

with literally thousands of detailed how-to processes imposed on daily operations at all 

levels. As noted earlier in this report, the excessive oversight and micromanagement that 

characterizes the current situation long predated establishing the NNSA. 

• Moving all the functions to NNSA needed to plan, program and execute nuclear complex 

infrastructure and weapons activities. 

Given the culture of excessive oversight, micromanagement, and risk aversion without regard to 

productivity that has developed since the end of the Cold War, this Task Force has low 

confidence in the prospect for an effective lasting change in management of the nuclear weapons 

enterprise within DOE. It is more likely that there will be continuing pressures to more fully 

absorb NNSA functions within the regular DOE structure. 

The politics and programmatics of the broader energy needs, the economy, and the environment 

make intense demands on the top leadership in DOE. Management demands for nuclear weapons 
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NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________29 

are very different than for nuclear reactors or other energy programs. Energy R&D is conducted 

in a market context; weapon R&D in a deterrence context. Hence it has proven somewhere 

between difficult and impossible for that leadership to attend to the breadth of demands while 

dealing with the unique demands of running the nuclear weapons enterprise. 

Because of the nature of nuclear weapons, the program has always been and will continue to be 

controversial. Furthermore, inherent in the weapons program is managing significant levels of 

risk in program operations and in weapon design and surety. The risks are of a level and type 

significantly different from those related to DOE’s other energy activities. Considering weapons 

controversy and risk-management differences together, the tendency to micromanage the nuclear 

weapons complex and the resulting delayed and conflicted decisions are not surprising. 

DOE does not engage in production other than nuclear weapons. 

In contrast to the relationship between NNSA and DOE headquarters and field offices, the Naval 

Nuclear Propulsion (Naval Reactors) program operates effectively with the level of 

independence envisioned by the Congress for NNSA. However, the Naval Nuclear Propulsion 

program had existed as a tightly integrated, largely independent, focused program for more than 

25 years before the establishment of DOE. Hence, the success of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion 

program within DOE does not provide confidence that the approach to the broader nuclear 

weapons program can be modified within the DOE to provide for efficient and effective 

management. 

On balance, the DOE alone is not a good fit for the nuclear weapons program for the crucial time 

ahead. This is not judgment critical of the DOE enterprise or its leadership. The driving 

motivation for the formation of DOE in 1977 and its predecessor Petroleum Board in 1972 and 

Energy Research and Development Administration in 1974 was dealing with the energy crisis. 

Given the continuing urgency of that need and the divergent demands of managing the nuclear 

weapons program, divestiture of the nuclear weapons enterprise from DOE would be in keeping 

with proven good business practice to spin off functions that do not fit coherently into the larger 

enterprise. Almost 30 years of experience should provide enough of a basis to conclude that such 

a divestiture could benefit both the increasingly important energy program and the nuclear 

weapons enterprise. 

Move NNSA to DoD: In terms of competencies, commitment, and congruence of goals and 

management approaches, the DoD could be a better match for oversight and support of NNSA. 

National defense is a common goal. The DoD -- its agencies and contractors – engage 

competently in R&D, quantity production, weapons integration with delivery systems, and many 

other aspects of nuclear weapons operations that underwrite deterrence. 

But behind these top-level affinities there are considerations that raise serious doubts about a 

natural fit for nuclear weapon R&D and production in DoD alone. Much of the discussion about 

the difficulty in accommodating the demands of the nuclear weapons enterprise embedded in 

DOE also apply to DoD. Even during the Cold War, nuclear weapons were something of a round 

peg in a square hole in DoD. They were (and are) instruments of national policy more than 

weapons of military operations -- although for deterrence there must be sound operational 

planning for their use and a credible expectation that they would be used if deterrence failed. 

Without such a credible expectation, there is no deterrence. 
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30_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

The DoD has done a competent job in developing, producing, and operating nuclear weapons 

delivery systems, in integrating weapons into delivery systems, and in the many other aspects of 

nuclear weapons operations that underwrite deterrence. These DoD aspects of the overall nuclear 

weapons enterprise are extensions of DoD’s general competencies in system development and 

military operations. 

But warhead R&D and production are different from other DoD activities, partly because of the 

nature and importance of the basic science involved. Because of the unique phenomena and the 

extreme physical regimes involved in nuclear explosions, fundamental physics is more intimately 

tied up in warhead design and production than in design and production of almost anything else, 

and confidence in weapons’ reliable performance must be based on a uniquely deep 

understanding of the science involved. It was never possible to test nuclear weapons enough to 

gain statistical confidence in them, and in a time without nuclear testing, fundamental 

understanding is even more important. Furthermore, because the science must be reflected in the 

produced weapon, and because of the extremely rigorous imperatives for nuclear weapons safety 

and use control, there are demands placed on the quality and understanding of the engineering 

involved that are equal to those for the science, and there must be seamless integration of the 

science, the engineering, and the manufacturing of weapons. 

Since the end of the Cold War, DoD senior-level attention to nuclear weapons management has 

been minimal at best. The Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Atomic Energy’s focus was 

expanded to include chemical and biological that have little in common with nuclear matters 

except the generic term of WMD. The Air Force has eliminated a major command focused on 

nuclear capabilities and has changed the headquarters organization dealing with nuclear matters 

several times in recent years and has no headquarters office or organization with nuclear in the 

title. Within the Navy the Strategic Systems Programs (SSP) organization has remained intact 

and effective. But that is largely a matter of a longstanding, tightly integrated and focused 

organization that has existed with little change in organization and status since 1957. 

Furthermore, just as in the early days of the nuclear weapons program, it remains important to 

preserve an independent view, for the President and the Congress, on nuclear weapon matters. 

And finally, the nuclear weapons laboratories are needed by other departments’ national security 

related work, especially homeland security and the intelligence community, and are strengthened 

by doing that work, as long as a reasonable balance is maintained. 

Hence, on balance, DoD alone is not a good fit for NNSA. 
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NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________31 

A Government Corporate Approach: A compromise that provides the best hope of providing the 

needed supplier and customer attention and giving the nuclear weapons complex the appropriate 

unfettered focus is a fully independent agency. The independent agency – the National Nuclear 

Weapons Agency (NNWA) – would be headed by a Senate-confirmed, Executive-Level 2 

Administrator, reporting to the President, with a Board of Directors to ensure active and balanced 

attention. The Board would be made up of the cabinet officers who have the most direct stake in 

the enterprise -- the Secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security, and Energy, and the Director of 

National Intelligence. The Secretary of Defense would chair the Board. The organization is 

illustrated in Figure 2 below. 

President

Board of Directors:

• SecDef, Chair

• SecEnergy

• Sec/HS

• DNI

National Nuclear Weapons Agency

LANL LLNL SNL Weapons Production Complex

Fig 2: A Government Corporation

The Task Force recognizes that this is a unique organization with no identified existing model in 

the Government. However, the nuclear weapons enterprise is a unique enterprise creating unique 

management demands. Hence a unique solution may be the best solution. 

Recommendation: The National Security Council should recommend to the President a 

National Nuclear Weapons Agency (NNWA) with the administrator reporting to the President 

through a Board of Directors made up of the Secretaries of Defense, Energy, and Homeland 

Security and the Director of National Intelligence who are accountable to the President for 

oversight and support of the nuclear weapons enterprise. 

• The core of the new agency’s responsibility should be the three national nuclear 

weapons laboratories and the weapons production complex. 

• The agency’s responsibilities should also include those activities that require unique 

knowledge of nuclear weapons. 

With this option, the Administrator of the National Nuclear Weapons Agency (hereafter referred 

to as NNWA) would be charged with advising the President on issues related to nuclear weapons 

and on other national security technologies within his purview. 

The Board of Directors would assure the fundamental viability of the enterprise, that its 

objectives are clearly defined and achieved, and that the balances mentioned above are properly 

struck. 
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The NNWA would be staffed by drawing from the nation’s full range of competence in labs, 

universities, industry, government, and elsewhere. Personnel policies must be put in place to 

allow this. 

New management and regulatory practices would be used, drawing on current and past best 

practices, and reflecting the nation’s priorities and urgencies. Of crucial importance would be to 

let the contractors involved, who make up the core of the enterprise, do their jobs with only the 

minimum essential government oversight and intervention. In addition to their intrinsic merit, 

these and other measures would help to revitalize the concept of the national laboratory, at least 

within the NNWA sphere. 

There is no perfect arrangement for the nuclear weapons program. This proposal seeks to strike a 

workable balance among the competing considerations for the nuclear weapons program – 

certainly a better balance than in today’s arrangements. 

Making the Proposal Work

In the method of appointment of the Administrator, serious consideration should be given to 

institutionalizing measures that will provide for continuity, appropriate experience and, to the 

extent possible, avoiding politicization. A relatively long-term appointment similar to that of the 

Naval Nuclear Propulsion program that is not tied to the presidential election cycle would 

contribute to this goal. 

The proposed cabinet-level Board of Directors for the Agency will be crucial. Key to making the 

Board of Directors work well is what makes boards of directors of corporations work well – that 

is accountability. The Board would be written into the legislation that establishes the NNWA, 

and the nature of the enterprise itself adds to the expectation that the Board will pay serious 

attention. Among the Board’s functions would be to: 

• Report annually to the President on the health of the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise. 

• Address issues related to use of NNWA assets by other agencies/departments so as to 

assure both a) long-term support for the nation’s nuclear weapons technology and 

industrial base and b) ease of access to unique NNWA capabilities by 

agencies/departments with relevant needs. 

The NNWA’s core would be the entirety of the current NNSA nuclear weapons program. In 

addition, activities related to proliferation, arms control, threat reduction, homeland security, and 

intelligence should be examined for inclusion. Carrying the nuclear aspects of some or many of 

these activities into the NNWA would add scope and coherence to the nation’s nuclear 

deterrence posture, but it would also divert management attention from the U.S. nuclear weapons 

program. Perhaps they should all be incorporated in the NNWA, perhaps none, perhaps some. 

Activities included in the new Agency should be those that require unique knowledge of nuclear 

weapons. The decision should be made on the basis of a detailed review of what would provide 

best for deterrence and the security of the United States. At the same time, the nuclear weapons 

laboratories, as distinct from the NNWA, can and should play a broader role in national security 

technology, subject always to striking the right balances among nuclear weapons focus, 

contributing to the nation’s security by working in other areas, and strengthening the labs’ 

nuclear weapon technology base by doing such other work. 
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Although this proposal provides for significant organizational changes, the most fundamental 

aspects of the proposed arrangement are unchanged: it would be still a federal agency with 

nuclear weapons as it highest priority and contracting outside of the federal government for 

operation of federally-owned facilities. 

 Forming the New Agency and the Transition

It will be important to avoid the pitfalls that deflected the will of Congress as NNSA was formed. 

It will also be important to separate sharply the nuclear weapons enterprise from the myriad set 

of regulatory, safety, inspection, and other bodies associated with the nuclear power industry. 

The objective is to clearly assign full responsibility and accountability for all aspects of the safe, 

secure operation of the enterprise to line management within the new agency with appropriate 

oversight by the Board of Directors, i.e., all mission operations and all oversight are invested in 

that chain of authority with appropriate oversight by the Congress. 

A change will be needed to the legislation to create an independent agency reporting to the 

President through a board of directors with the composition of the Board specified in law. 

However, most of the other provisions of the NNSA Act remain valid. 

The assumption is that the appointment of the three Cabinet members and the Director of 

National Intelligence as the members of the Board of Directors will ensure the needed champions 

to correct the longstanding deficiencies identified in the operation of the nation’s nuclear 

weapons enterprise. However, the Congress will also need to provide strong support so that this 

time, the intent of Congress is implemented to create a safe, secure, and effective nuclear 

weapons enterprise that efficiently meets the nation’s security needs. 

Changes in DoD and at the Interface

Changes in DoD are also essential, and these will be difficult, but changes are an essential part of 

a needed comprehensive package. 

As already stated, nuclear weapons have always been and continue to be more instruments of 

national policy than weapons of military operations. Hence, even during the Cold War, nuclear 

weapons required special organizations and approaches in DoD. These were generally dedicated, 

nuclear-unique, organizations and programs at the DoD staff level, in the military departments 

and in the combatant commands. Since the end of the Cold War, with the escalation of other 

national security challenges, nuclear matters have slipped even further toward the edge of DoD’s 

mainstream attention. With perhaps one exception – the Navy Strategic Systems Programs -- the 

nuclear-dedicated organizations were disestablished, vitiated, or tasked with additional missions 

that, in various degrees, submerge the nuclear weapons activities. Nuclear weapons need to be 

addressed within the context of the NPR and the overall strategic posture, to include non-nuclear 

capabilities. Still, nuclear weapons remain unique in their policy implications, their effects, and 

the demands of safety and security. Hence, a competent and committed structure for nuclear 

weapons within the DoD needs to be re-established. 

The basic structure of the national nuclear weapons enterprise can be thought of as having three 

parts: 

• Suppliers of equipment – the NNWA for the warheads, DoD contractors and DoD’s 

acquisition apparatus for delivery systems and nuclear/strategic C4ISR, 

• Force providers, and 
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34_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

• Users/operators. 

Changes are needed in all three and especially in their inter-relationships. The recommendation 

for the NNWA addresses, in part, the supply of warheads/weapons. In DoD there are three key 

needs – creating an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Weapons (ASD (SW)), 

strengthening the Nuclear Weapons Council, and strengthening the role of the U.S. Strategic 

Command. 

The relationship between an “Assistant to the Secretary” of Defense and other DoD authorities 

has, over time, become cloudy and inconsistent. For this and other reasons, the Task Force 

believes that the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and 

Biological Defense Programs (ATSD (NCB)) should be changed to a new office/position -- the 

Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Weapons (ASD (SW)), reporting to the Deputy 

Secretary of Defense, with authorities that are clear and well understood. 

The ASD (SW) would be the architect of the strategic offensive weapons (nuclear and kinetic 

non-nuclear) systems-of-systems, and the proponent in OSD for nuclear weapons programs. The 

ASD (SW) would support the Secretary of Defense’s responsibilities on the Board of Directors 

of the NNWA, previously proposed. The NWC is discussed later in this report. The 

responsibility for oversight of strategic systems acquisition would remain in the office of the 

USD (AT&L) as currently organized. The ASD (SW) would work closely with the USD (Policy) 

on nuclear weapons issues. This structure appropriately elevates attention on strategic weapons 

for the critical time ahead. 

Within the ASD (SW), a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Weapons (DASD 

(NW)) would be established and have responsibility for the nuclear aspects of strategic weapons. 

The DASD (NW) would have the nuclear weapons responsibilities of the current ATSD (NCB) 

and the nuclear weapons aspects of global strike-related programs. The ASD (SW) would work 

closely with the USD (AT&L) to better ensure oversight of the status and responsiveness of 

DoD’s contractor/industrial base for nuclear weapons. 

USSTRATCOM should play a more influential role in the strategic systems acquisition process 

and must be the bridge from acquisition to operations. This is needed in part because nuclear and 

(other) global strike weapons, by their nature, have been and will likely continue to be “things 

apart” from the bulk of the Services’ responsibilities and interests. Such specialized capabilities 

require strong combatant command advocacy in acquisition deliberations and the resource 

allocation process. As such, the Commander, USSTRATCOM is now an official member of the 

Nuclear Weapons Council. 

The functions of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in support of the U.S. strategic 

posture remain crucial. In this new construct, DTRA would report to the ASD (SW). DTRA 

would continue to provide strong support directly to combatant commanders. 

Recommendations: The Secretary of Defense should: 

• Direct action to change the Office of the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense (NCB) 

and establish an office/position of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic 

Weapons (ASD (SW)), reporting to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. The ASD (SW) 

would have a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Weapons (DASD 

(NW)). The ASD (SW) should function as Executive Director of the NWC (currently 

performed by the ATSD (NCB)), and 
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NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________35 

• Propose and facilitate the Congressional process to make the Commander, U.S. 

Strategic Command a member of the Nuclear Weapons Council.12

The NWC should be redirected to provide comprehensive and integrated reviews and oversight 

of nuclear weapons policies and programs. The current practice is piecemeal review of specific 

issues, e.g., Project Officer Group briefings on individual weapons status, review of ad hoc 

nuclear-related studies and issues, NNSA surveillance updates. Such issues are better handled 

by the ASD (SW) and the Administrator of the NNWA. The needed approach would 

periodically review complete programs, e.g., plans and programs for the family of ballistic 

missile warheads, nuclear bombs, ballistic missiles, strategic aircraft, and nuclear cruise 

missiles, and how these comprise the integrated nuclear deterrent to meet U.S. security needs for 

the future. 

Given the need for the Nuclear Weapons Council (NWC) to play a more expansive role in broad 

reviews of the nuclear weapons program and in assessing the nuclear weapons enterprise needs 

with an authoritative customer and supplier interface, the Deputy Secretary of Defense should 

become the NWC chair with USD (AT&L), USD (Policy), the Vice CJCS, the Commander, 

USSTRATCOM and the Administrator NNWA (NNSA) as members. Other changes may be 

needed in the inter-relationships, and policy and acquisition aspects of the nuclear/strategic 

posture, but assigning the Deputy Secretary of Defense as chair can catalyze the needed 

changes. 

Recommendations: 

• The Secretary of Defense should propose and facilitate the Congressional process to 

appoint the Deputy Secretary of Defense as the chairman of the Nuclear Weapons 

Council. 

• The Chairman of the NWC should produce an annual calendar for the NWC that 

provides for comprehensive and integrated review of nuclear weapons programs and 

policies to include the full nuclear warhead and delivery vehicle programs. 

 

12 As of early May 2006, the House Armed Services Committee markup of its version of the FY07 Defense 

Authorization Bill includes adding CDRUSSTRATCOM as a member of the Nuclear Weapons Council.
STRUCTURE, ORGANIZATION, AND MANAGEMENT ___________________________________________ 

36_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON
___________________________________________SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES___________________________________________________________37 

 Section 5: Sustaining the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile 

Much of the information in this section was extracted from studies on the future of the nuclear 

weapons stockpile by the ATSD (NCB) and the USSTRATCOM Strategic Advisory Group. This 

section addresses important deficiencies in the current path to sustaining a reliable, safe and 

secure stockpile of nuclear weapons. 

The current guidance from the President for nuclear weapons was communicated in the Nuclear 

Weapons Stockpile Memorandum (NWSM) and Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Plan of January 

2006. It provides the long-term objectives for the transformation of strategic capabilities of 

1,700-2,200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads in 2012. The President stated in 

the NWSM that it is of vital importance to U.S. interests to maintain a safe, secure, reliable, and 

effective nuclear weapons stockpile. In doing so, we must ensure that U.S. nuclear forces have 

the right types and quantities of nuclear warheads critical to achieving defense policy goals. 

Maintaining the infrastructure that supports nuclear warheads, reserves of tritium, and special 

nuclear material is essential to sustaining reliable operations. 

The Administration has defined responsive capability as a combination of responsive 

infrastructure and weapon re-deployment options. For the near-term – until the nuclear 

infrastructure is sufficiently restored and responsive to unexpected needs – the responsive 

capability will depend primarily on excess capacity in the force structure and on preserving an 

inventory of non-deployed warheads. 

 The current approach to refurbishing the stockpile of aging weapons is not sustainable and will 

not provide for the characteristics described by the President and the Secretary of Defense. 

Specifically, the current approach to maintaining a reliable, safe, and secure stockpile of nuclear 

weapons is to refurbish weapons for another 30 years. This approach would continue the Cold 

War legacy of designs optimized to accommodate maximum yield on delivery platforms. 

Meeting these Cold War-design goals with acceptable confidence in the reliability, safety, and 

security of the weapons require: 

• A planned design life of 20-25 years, 

• Underground nuclear testing available as needed to verify proper operation of the original 

design and any significant subsequent changes, and 

• A production complex capable of quickly producing replacements when needed. 

None of these conditions exist today. The current plan is to sustain many of the weapons for 

more than double their design life via life extension programs (LEPs). The production complex 

is not responsive to the demands mentioned above and some aspects of the original designs are 

difficult to replicate due to changes in materials, manufacturing processes, environmental 

constraints, and safety requirements. 

Attempting to continue to sustain these weapons with the current set of characteristics will 

require reconstituting an extensive and expensive weapons production complex requiring more 

resources than are likely to be available. The cumulative changes in aging weapons and the lack 

of a responsive production complex, force the U.S. to retain non-deployed weapons in the 

stockpile as a hedge against technical failure or changes in the security environment. The current 

approach attempts to extend weapons of the 1980s into the 2040s and requires programs to 
SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE ___________________________________________ 

38_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

refurbish and sustain current weapons decades beyond design life. This approach attempts to 

project the past into the future rather than bring the desired future into the present. 

Recommendation: The NWC should clearly articulate a new policy for sustaining the nuclear 

weapons stockpile that depends on evolving the stockpile, over time, to weapons with greater 

margins of performance, safety, and security. 

Until a responsive infrastructure capable of sustaining the stockpile in the face of unexpected 

failures in aging weapons exists, the approach is to maintain a hedge of non-deployed warheads 

that can be used as substitutes. There are warhead or weapon substitutions available for most of 

the stockpile. While other capabilities can compensate for most shortfalls in the force from a 

single warhead type failure, a common mode failure would negatively impact the deterrent force, 

and recovery with the current state of the production complex would take well over a decade. 

Recommendation: The NWC should establish a policy that no more than 20% of the deployed 

stockpile be invested in a warhead for which there is not a genetically different alternative 

warhead suitable for timely deployment in the event of a single mode failure of a warhead 

type. 

The needed path is to transition away from the current stockpile life extension program as 

envisaged today. This program would produce large numbers of single-configuration, aging, 

complex, hard-to-manufacture warheads. A new approach is required that would produce 

genetically different sets of weapons that are robust, require less complex manufacturing 

processes, are safer and more secure, and provide for less adverse consequences from a common 

mode failure. 

More than a decade of investment has produced understanding and tools that provide increased 

confidence in new weapons designs with higher performance margins and greater intrinsic safety 

and security. With the reduced warheads per platform in future deployed force and responsive 

force plans, the weight and volume constraints can be relaxed to facilitate design and increase 

confidence while permitting simplified manufacturing processes. The proposed path to 

transformation to this more robust and sustainable approach is the Reliable Replacement 

Warhead program that has the following characteristics: 

• Trade size and weight for increased performance margins and ease of manufacture and 

certification, 

• Transition to efficient, responsive infrastructure – design for production, 

• Enhance safety, security and control in weapons and in the complex, 

• A new approach key to sustaining confidence in our capabilities, and 

• For warheads that make up a large percentage of the deployed stockpile or a warhead 

with no deployable alternative, use a new approach that relies on: 1) Life Extension 

Program warheads, 2) Reliable Replacement Warheads (RRW), and 3) reliability backup options using current genetically different components. 

This proposed approach is the key to addressing vulnerabilities for those warheads that make up 

a large fraction of the deployed or responsive capability, and for which there is no substitute 

warhead. The approach is to break the programs for these weapons of concern into blocks of a 

size such that the failure of any one block would not put the nuclear deterrent in jeopardy for an 
__________________________________________ SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________39 

extended period. The block approach also provides for an orderly evolution from refurbishing 

complex Cold War weapons to weapons that will constitute a sustainable stockpile and 

infrastructure. Figure 3 illustrates this approach. 

DNT 2004 0097 LL-DNT-S-04-150752. 6

Deployed 

warheads

WxxBlock

Wxx Life 

Extension 

(LEP)

(U) Current Plan

Deployed 

warheads

Life Extension

WxxBlock 0

Current Plan New Approach (U) Block Approach

RRW/Risk 

Reduction

Fig. 3: Sustaining the Nuclear Enterprise: 

Reliable, Safe, Secure Weapons & a Responsive Production Complex

Time Time

Since the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad provides both the most stressing risk from common 

mode failure and the first opportunity to move to the recommended approach to a sustainable 

stockpile of weapons, the Task Force recommends that it receive first priority attention. 

The solution needs to: 

• Depart quickly from a path that is clearly not a sustainable approach (i.e., solely warhead 

life extensions), to a path that can provide a sustainable approach (i.e., the RRW 

program). 

• Reduce the consequence of a common mode failure in a single warhead type to an 

acceptable level. The assumption for any level stockpile should be that there is an 

infrastructure capability to replace those warheads over time. If the total numbers of 

deployed warheads are reduced, the upper limit on a single type should also be reduced. 

• Provide more robust designs with larger performance margins, increased surety (safety, 

security, and use control), and that are simpler to manufacture. These are essential 

prerequisites for an affordable, adaptable infrastructure that can design, certify, refurbish 

or produce the weapons that make up a sustainable, minimum-sized stockpile. 

• Take advantage quickly of the pool of weapons designers and producers experienced with 

major acquisition programs before they age out of the workforce. These experienced 

people need to be heavily involved with the younger workforce to perpetuate the needed 

expertise over the long term. 

• Provide near-term alternatives in the event the RRW is delayed for technical or other 

reasons. 

• Produce some slack in schedules and resources to continue scaled-back refurbishment 

programs while designing replacement weapons, and establishing the needed 

infrastructure to sustain the stockpile. 

• Improve surety, especially security and use control. 
SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE ___________________________________________ 

40_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

A proposed approach to sustaining the SLBM force is: 

• A laboratory design competition for a ballistic missile Reliable Replacement Warhead 

(RRW-1). 

o Designs must enable the transformation to a responsive infrastructure. 

o Interchangeability with the ICBM platform should be a goal. 

• A laboratory design study for a minimum-cost, risk-reduction design effort and solution. 

o A hedge against delays in production and deployment of RRW-1. 

• Reduce planned W76-1 refurbishments/LEPs. 

The proposed approach retains the currently planned operationally deployed W88 warheads. 

To support interim pit production needs prior to 2022, the plutonium facility at Tech Area 55 at 

Los Alamos is to be upgraded by 2012 to a production rate of 30-50 war reserve pits per year 

continuing until the proposed consolidated plutonium center comes on-line.13 Experience with 

the W88 would indicate that production of 30-50 pits per year is an optimistic expectation. 

However, with the criteria of more robust, simpler designs for the RRW, the production rate 

planned at LANL could suffice. If that goal proves unattainable, options would be available to 

sustain the planned operationally deployed force with some increased risk until the warhead 

production rate catches up to the need. 

The timeline for an RRW first production unit is challenging. Therefore, a two-laboratory design 

competition is needed for a risk-reduction warhead replacement using existing nuclear 

components. 

Given these two actions, the SLBM deployed force and responsive capability should be 

sufficiently sustained in the future-- given the baseline force structure. The exact number of 

W76-1s will be determined with USSTRATCOM requirements and Service logistical needs. To 

generate the needed slack in schedule and resources, production could be spread over a suitable 

period of time to enable infrastructure transformation and efficiency. 

The follow-on to the SLBM solution are approaches to sustain the cruise missile force and, at a 

later date, after the potential benefits and costs of RRW concepts are better understood, an 

approach to sustaining the ICBM force. 

The NWC has approved a multi-laboratory competition to design RRW-1 for, initially, a followon increment of the currently planned W76 life extension program. Further, a joint Project 

Officers Group has been formed to oversee the program. Initially, this competition focused 

primarily on the physics package. Currently the focus has expanded to embrace the complete 

warhead system. The focus on a deployable warhead needs to be carefully sustained. This is 

essential for the RRW program to serve either of its key purposes that are: 

• To reduce the consequences of a single mode failure in the SLBM force, and 

 

13 Statement of Thomas P. D’Agostino, Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs, NNSA, before the Strategic 

Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, April 5, 2006. 
__________________________________________ SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES________________________________________________________41 

• To serve as the catalyst to getting off the current unsustainable path of extending the life 

of 1980s-era weapons and, instead, forging a viable approach to sustaining a reliable, 

safe, secure, and credible stockpile. 

Recommendations: The NWC should direct that: 

• The RRW program be pursued as a broad new approach to sustaining the stockpile, reenergizing design capability, and transforming the weapons complex. 

• RRW-1, as the pilot for the RRW program, be pursued as a full weapons program and 

trade-offs with the W76 life extension effort be analyzed and implemented at the 

appropriate point in the W76 program. 
SUSTAINING THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS STOCKPILE ___________________________________________ 

42_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON
____________________________________________________________________APPENDICES

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES_________________________________________________________A-1 

Appendix A: Terms of Reference 
APPENDICES _____________________________________________________________________ 

A-2_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON
____________________________________________________________________APPENDICES

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES_________________________________________________________B-1 

Appendix B: Task Force Participation 

 Task Force Members Affiliation

Dr. John Foster, Co-Chairman Northrop Grumman 

Gen (ret) Larry Welch, Co-Chairman Institute for Defense Analyses 

Dr. Joe Braddock The Potomac Foundation 

Dr. Bryan Gabbard Defense Group Inc. 

Mr. Steve Guidice Independent Consultant 

Dr. Ted Hardebeck Science Applications International Corporation 

Dr. Clark Murdock Center for Strategic and International Studies 

Dr. Keith Payne National Institute for Public Policy 

Dr. William Schneider International Planning Services, Inc. 

Mr. David Trachtenberg CACI - National Security Research, Inc. 

Dr. Rich Wagner Los Alamos National Laboratory 
APPENDICES _____________________________________________________________________ 

B-2_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

Appendix B: Task Force Participation (continued) 

Task Force Government Advisors

Mr. Lew Arnold – USSTRATCOM 

Maj Gen Roger Burg, USAF – Air Force/XOS 

Dr. Mark Byers – Defense Threat Reduction Agency 

VADM (ret) G. Pete Nanos -- Defense Threat Reduction Agency 

Mr. John Schaefer – Navy/Strategic Systems Programs 

Mr. Martin Shoenbauer – National Nuclear Security Administration 

Task Force National Laboratory Advisors

Dr. Mike Anastasio -- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 

Dr. Roger Hagengruber -- Sandia National Laboratories 

Dr. C. Paul Robinson -- Sandia National Laboratories 

Dr. Fred Tarantino -- Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Dr. Joan Woodard -- Sandia National Laboratories 

Executive Secretary

Col Dan Wilmoth, USAF – OATSD (NCB)/Nuclear Matters

DSB Secretariat Representative

Lt Col Dave Robertson, USAF – OUSD (AT&L)/DSB 

Task Force Support

Ms. Michelle Ashley – Science Applications International Corporation 

Ms. Brenda Poole – Science Applications International Corporation 
____________________________________________________________________APPENDICES

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES_________________________________________________________C-1 

Appendix C: Briefings Received 

April 15, 2005

Mr. Mike Elliot Deputy, Plans & Policy, J-5 USSTRATCOM Vision for the Nuclear 

Deterrant 

Mr. Steve Henry Deputy ATSD(NCB) Nuclear 

Matters 

Approach to Sustaining a Reliable, Safe 

and Secure Stockpile 

RDML Rick Hunt United States Navy Joint Staff Vision for the Nuclear 

Deterrant 

CDR Cathal O’Connor United States Navy, Joint Staff J-8 J-8 Global Strike Capabilities Based 

Assessment (GS CBA) 

Mr. Tom Scheber OSD – Forces Policy Strategic Capabilities Assessment (SCA) 

May 26-27, 2005

Mr. Tom Cook/Mr. Elmer Stover Department of Energy Chinese Nuclear Weapons 

Developments 

Dr. Jerry Freedman NNSA NNSA Plutonium Manufacturing – 

Requirements and Planning 

Mr. Kevin Kyle DIA Worldwide Fissile Material 

Mr. Don Linger DTRA Special Perspectives on Testing 

Ms. Lynch/Mr. Larry Thornbull CIA Russia Nuclear Weapons 

Developments 

Mr. Eric Miller National Institute for Public 

Policy 

Russia and Its Near Abroad: From 

One Empire to Another? 

Mr. Scott Petrakis/Mr. Jeff Lucas NGA Chinese Test Activities 

Ms. Robin Richard NGA Russian Test Activities 

Mr. Mark Schneider National Institute for Public 

Policy 

Weapons Policy of the Russian 

Federation 

Mr. Andrei Shoumikhin National Institute for Public 

Policy 

In Search of “New Ideology” in 

Russia 

Mr. Robert Wapole NIO/WMD and Proliferation Trends in Nuclear Proliferant 

Capabilities 
APPENDICES _____________________________________________________________________ 

C-2_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

June 17, 2005

Mr. Paul Filios DISA Current State of Nuclear Command and 

Control 

Dr. Joseph Martz Project Director for RRW, LANL Introduction to the Reliable Replacement 

Warhead Concept 

Mr. Walter Morrow DSB DSB Task Force on Future Strategic Strike 

Skills 

Mr. Steve Zavadil Systems Planning & Analysis New Triad Risk Management Approach 

July 21-22, 2005

Mr. George Allen NNSA NNSA Responsive Infrastructure 

Mr. Bryan Fearey Senior LANL Advisor on National 

Security Strategy 

Enterprise Modeling – Lab-Developed 

Tools 

Mr. Doug Henson Sandia Sandia National Laboratories 

Transformation Perspectives 

Mr. David Krivich Lockheed Martin New Triad Capabilities – Industry 

Perspective 

Mr. Rick Lavelock Senior Project Specialist for 

Responsive Infrastructure 

Kansas City Plant Transformation 

Perspectives 

Mr. John McClelland Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory 

Transformation Perspectives 

Mr. Hank O’Brien RRW Program Leader Lawrence Livermore National 

Laboratory Transformation Perspectives 

Mr. Martin Schoenbauer Director, NA-12 NNSA Transformation Persepctives 

August 31, 2005

Mr. David Overskei NNSA NNSA SEAB Complex Study 
____________________________________________________________________APPENDICES

NUCLEAR CAPABILITIES_________________________________________________________D-1 

Appendix D: Acronym List 

AEC Atomic Energy Commission 

AFB Air Force Base 

ASD/NII Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks & Information Integration 

ASD(SW) Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategic Weapons 

ATSD(NCB) Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear & Chemical & 

Biological Defense Programs 

B53 Nuclear Gravity Bomb 

C2 Command and Control 

C4ISR Command, Control, Communications & Computers, Intelligence, 

Surveillance and Reconnaissance 

CBW Chemical and Biological Weapons 

CJCS Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff 

CNPC Consolidated Nuclear Production Center 

D5 specific missile for Trident II Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile 

DASD(NW) Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Weapons 

DoD Department of Defense 

DOE Department of Energy 

DTRA Defense Threat Reduction Agency 

FFRDC Federally-Funded Research and Development Center 

FPU First Production Unit 

FY US Government Fiscal Year 

GAO General Accounting Office 

GOCO Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated 

ICBM Intercontinental-Ballistic Missile 

ITW/AA Integrated Threat Warning and Attack Assessment 

JCAE Joint Committee on Atomic Energy 

LEP Life Extension Program 

MIRVed Multiple Independentlt0targeted Reentry Vehicles 

NNSA National Nuclear Security Administration 

NNWA National Nuclear Weapons Agency 

NPR Nuclear Posture Review 

NWC Nuclear Weapons Council 
APPENDICES _____________________________________________________________________ 

D-2_________________________________________DEFENSE SCIENCE BOARD TASK FORCE ON

NWCITF Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force 

NWSM Nuclear Weapons Stockpile Memorandum 

R&D Research and Development 

RNEP Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator 

RRW Reliable Replacement Warhead 

RRW-1 pilot program for Reliable Replacement Warhead 

SLBM Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile 

SLEP Stockpile Life Extension Program 

SNM Strategic Nuclear Materials 

SSBNs Nuclear-powered Ballistic Missile Submarine 

SSGNs Nuclear-powered Guided Missile (Cruise Missile) Submarine 

SSP US Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs 

TOR Terms of Reference (for DSB Task Force) 

USD Undersecretary of Defense 

USD(AT&L) Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics 

USSTRATCOM United States Strategic Command 

W76 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile nuclear warhead 

W80 Cruise Missile nuclear warhead 

W88 Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile nuclear warhead 

WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction