Bush is asking Congress for $27 million to jumpstart a new nuclear weapons program, the “reliable replacement warhead” program. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/02/148233; http://www.lasg.org/PressRelease02-06-06.htm.
What’s the point of this? Doesn’t the U.S. already have the world’s most formidable arsenal of nuclear weapons? And what use would nuclear weapons be against any enemy we’re likely to face in the near future?
I would imagine that nuclear weapons age and begin to suffer mechanical failures making them less than reliable when it comes time to use them. So far as I know the United States reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for biological or nuclear attack. I find it unlikely that we’ll never use nukes again so we might as well make sure they’re in tip top shape.
Marc
The US has not produced or tested any warheads in a number of years, under treaty agreements. The stuff does deteriorate over time, and the physics of that are not perfectly known. In short, we don’t know if what we have works anymore.
Meanwhile, “the enemies of freedom” are trying to get their hands on Nigerien yellowcake and the like, and maybe their stuff does work, or would if they get that far. Perhaps he’s thinking that our deterrent, to the extent it *is * a deterrent, needs to be more credible?
Easily discernible, rational motivations for his behavior. That would be, like, sooo cool.
Wouldn’t inspection and maintenance be adequate? Why do we need to actually upgrade the technology?
Can we resume atmospheric testing, too? Those mushrom clouds are so awesome! A
Do you really?!
I’ve seen a number of stories about how demoralized the remaining nuclear weapons scientists are with nothing to build, nothing to test, nothing to do but try to figure out how quickly their earlier work will deteriorate. The labs simply can’t even attract talented young physicists at all anymore. This may sound weird, but one reason for advancing the technology again could be to bring in and keep people who can handle the decaying old stuff too.
In fact, I’d be more concerned with violations of the treaty requirements that created the current situation, and would focus more attempts on detection of and defense against suitcase and dirty and other types of terrorist-basement-lab bombs, than on means of destroying entire cities of mostly innocents in retaliation for when one of those does go off here.
Would it? I work as a mechanic and although inspection and proper mainenance can go a long way towards keeping your machine in working order there comes a point where it is no longer cost effective to keep them in operation. It seems logical to consider the development of new technologies, or at the very least the application of technologies that weren’t available at the time, when it comes to maintaining our nuclear arsenal. That means getting rid of the old and bringing in the new.
Oh, and I meant to say I find it likely that we’ll use nukes in the future but I suppose that was a Fruedian typo.
Marc
That’s what I thought you said! :eek:
If we are going to have the damn things, and I suppose we have too, then we should make sure they work. And we should look for ways to improve on them…and you can only do that through testing and R&D. Seems like a no brainer to me. Doesn’t seem like they are too serious about it though…christ man you can barely do a study on flatworms for a measly $27 million these days. That is probably just enough to cover expenses for the study to look into what needs to be looked into to determine who should do the study on re-building America’s nuclear arsenal. And it will probably over run to $50 million before they even decide who to do the actual study…
-XT
Why?
Each year, we spend around six and a half billion dollars to keep our existing stockpile of nuclear weapons in working order. I am a very strong proponent of reducing our arsenal to a few hundred weapons, but I also like the idea of investing a relatively modest amount of money to help make a warheads that don’t require $2 million each per year in research and maintenence.
Why do we have to have them? Come on BG, you know the answer to this as well as I do. We have to have them because others have them. There are multiple levels to that. The threat of our having them will at least give pause to some other country using them either against us or against someone else…not exactly the old MAD arguement, more like just AD. Toss one of those puppies at us and we Assure (your) Destruction.
Having them will prevent another nation from being able to black mail us because we don’t have them.
No, once we opened Pandora’s Box and let this foul genie out we chained ourselves to the reality of having the god damn things. And, if we are going to have them they may as well work…and they should be improved on, at least in a limited way, with ongoing development.
-XT
After the Cold War ended, there was a window we could have used to negotiate universal nuclear disarmament. It might not have entirely closed yet. I bet even NK would agree to dismantle their nukes, conditional on us doing the same.
BrainGlutton:
Highly unlikely. Even if the US could have convinced the former USSR to disarm, would China have disarmed? What about France…they were testing their nukes in Polynesia just a few years ago, despite the lack of significant external threats. And then, of course, there are Israel’s “worst-kept-secret” nukes.
Pure speculation on your part…and not very good speculation IMHO. Only through force of arms…or the threat of the use of arms…could we have gotten universal nuclear disarmarment. Perhaps we could have cowed the Euro’s into giving up there arms (Though as cmkeller said I doubt the French would have gone along), but I don’t see how we could have convinced most of the other nations out there to do the same.
Even if we did, the nuclear genie was out of the bottle. Hell, even I know the rudiments of building an atomic bomb, and I have a rough idea of how a hydrogen bomb works as well…and I’m just an engineer. No, like it or not we have to live with the fact that the knowledge is out there, and there are a number of nation states that have both the desire and the means to build the things. Not all of which are friendly to the US.
-XT
Read Dyer’s “War” for an excellent historical explanation of minimum deterrence theory.
Nuclear weapons are a fact of life as long as the world is organized into nation states. They cannot be gotten rid of, because even if you dismantle them all, you can always build more. And arms races are much more dangerous than arms stockpiles, because you reintroduce the possibility of someone panicking over, or taking advantage of, an imbalance.
It does not matter if you dismantle all the nukes in the world; there’s at least 20 countries who could build a new one in a year, and 50 more who could do it in two or three.
The warheads on many of the weapons we currently have are at 2x their expected life cycle… meaning if they were cans of food, you wouldn’t want to open them…
The development of new warheads would likely be the development of SMALLER yield weapons (we can hit things a lot better now… and don’t the same OOMPH to do the same job)… or varible yield weapons (we have some now… but they aren’t quite a nice as advertised)…
Developing new weapons, tend to save lives… not cost more (with the same techonolgy… in general)… the more accurate our weapons, the fewer of them go off target, and the smaller the yield of the warhead (conventional or nuclear)… since we dont have to worry about knocking over he building we just missed…
You want more nuclear research… it means better ways of having the same things we have now… safer, more accurate, smaller…
Exactly. I think EEMan nailed the best reasons right there.
-XT