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Key resources: nuclear weapons ban, plutonium pit production

February 24, 2018

Bulletin 244: Nuclear budget bites

Dear friends --

Yesterday the administration's detailed budget request for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was finally published (we put it here, with related documents). This proposal will be the starting point for congressional debate this year. There are a few details we would like to share with you today.

First, as our press release of Feb. 12 noted, the administration is requesting the largest single-year spending increase for nuclear weapons since 1962. We prepared what turns out to be a striking graph of constant-dollar warhead spending since 1948 to illustrate this. [Note 1]

Obama took the US beyond even Reagan-level warhead spending, to the highest in US history. Trump would take us further still, in a great jump to twice the average constant-dollar Cold War spending level for warhead research, testing, and production, even though no entirely new nuclear weapons are in the budget. [Note 2]

However, there is even more unwelcome novelty in the Trump budget than there was in Obama's (besides the big scoops of financial ice cream heaped all over the budget as treats for warhead contractors). Fresh follies in the Trump budget include the low-yield Trident submarine-launched warhead, an unprecedented budgetary emphasis on plutonium warhead cores ("pits") -- and, coming sooner or later but not here, in this part of the budget this year, a nuclear sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) warhead. 

Next, take a look at Trump's proposed budget for "plutonium sustainment," i.e. pit production, vs. Obama's last budget proposal:

We recently wrote a general overview of this issue (article, background) on the blog of the International Panel on Fissile Materials. As far as we can tell, and using NNSA's own claim, the US doesn't need pits to maintain its giant stockpile of doom until, at the very earliest, 2063 -- if then.

Here's NNSA's current pit strategy in a nutshell, as far as it is publicly known. There's a lot more to say about this but right now is may be best to just let the magnitude of the proposed spending sink in. Over the coming five years, 27% of the proposed overall increase in warhead spending is for pits. In FY2022 and FY2023, well over half the proposed increases for those years are to be devoted to building and preparing for resumption of large-scale pit production.

Third, here's the Obama vs. Trump proposed outyear spending on warheads.

The FY19 "Trump jump" aims at establishing warhead spending parallel with Obama's vision but about $2 billion more every year. The labs and other contractors must be very happy. 

Finally -- and this is a bit tricky -- in the graph below you can see what we believe is the proposed funding stream for the low-yield (primary, i.e. boosted-fission, stage only) Trident warhead, the so-called "W76-2," as follows.

Each line shown below is the sum of two budget items, one for general W76 warhead sustainment and the other, for building the upgraded warhead called the "W76-1," which is markedly more accurate than the W76-0 from which it is made as a "hard-target killer." (For more on this important subject see Ted Postol especially, collected here.) The W76-1 upgrade is slated to finish in the first quarter of FY2020. Funding for that program then falls to zero, leaving only generic W76 warhead sustainment, previously to be funded at about $50 M per year. That is the picture you see in the blue line, which would flatten after FY2021 if the request went out that far.

The Trump proposal (orange line) is quite different. First, the sum of the proposed increases over the Obama FY17 request for the W76 warhead for the two years at the end of the W76-1 upgrade program (FY19-20) is $72 million (M). Then the Trump W76 sustainment funding levels off at twice the level previously needed for the W76, a huge increase. Both differences are consistent with producing W76-2 warheads as well as W76-1s near the end of the W76 LEP, when W76-0 warheads will still be coming to Pantex, and the W76 tooling and procedures are still up and running there, and after that, maintaining two warhead variants instead of one.

Given that congressional approval is necessary, and approval of a low-yield SLBM warhead without open congressional discussion and debate is unlikely to say the least, the earliest that W76-2s could be produced is FY19. Given the W76 LEP schedule, the latest any W76-2s could be produced is FY2020. FY2020 ends a few weeks before the next presidential election. It is unlikely that the Trump administration would want to delay acquisition of one of its two signature nuclear weapons programs -- by far the simpler and cheaper one and the most controversial -- until after the 2020 general election.

To make the W76-2, as then-Acting NNSA Administrator Steve Erhart has called the new warhead, it is only necessary to substitute a dummy "secondary" nuclear explosive for a live one. NNSA's Pantex and other contractors already do this routinely in the preparation of Joint Test Assemblies (JTAs), which are highly-instrumented warheads used in flight tests. Occasional JTAs are part of normal activity in any "Life Extension Program" (LEP) at the Pantex plant.

Yesterday's Nuclear Security and Deterrence Monitor (2/23/18; paywall):

“A low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead capability, deemed the W76 Mod 2, will be fielded by configuring a small number of existing ballistic missile warheads for primary-only detonation,” Steven Erhart, who on Wednesday was the acting NNSA administrator, said at the ExchangeMonitor’s annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit.

Erhart was replaced on Thursday by Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, the Trump administration's choice to replace Frank Klotz as head of the Department of Energy nuclear weapons agency. Erhart returned to his previous job as director of the NNSA's policy office.

The current W76, like other thermonuclear warheads, has two explosive stages.

Erhart would not say whether the NNSA plans any work in the upcoming 2019 fiscal year to support W76 Mod 2 in particular, or a low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile in general. The detailed NNSA budget justification released Friday acknowledges the Nuclear Posture Review's directive to work on a low-yield warhead, but does not identify any requested funding for that program, or identify any associated deliverable.

The day after Erhart spoke, former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks estimated it would cost tens of millions of dollars to create the W76 Mod 2, or something like it.

"And everything about it as a policy is probably the easiest thing we’ve done," Brooks said during a panel discussion at the Deterrence Summit. "[W]hen we test fly W76s, we have a dummy secondary and a dummy primary. When we go to war with W76s, we have a real secondary and a real primary, and so to replace the real secondary with a dummy secondary is not ... a technical challenge.”

That's it for now. We are leaving off the moral of these stories. "Just the (narrowest) facts," for now. But let this be fodder for horses of outrage. There's a lot of trampling to do.

Best wishes,

Greg Mello

***********
Note 1: Sources. There is a slight exaggeration in the proposed fiscal year (FY) 2019 jump-up, in that we did not attempt to predict this year's inflation in advance and so just used current-year dollars for the last point on the graph, as is commonly done. Year-on-year CPI inflation is currently running at 2%. Using this estimate would take roughly $220 M from proposed FY19 spending levels.

Note 2: During the Cold War, the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor agencies spent vast sums not just on warheads per se but also on making plutonium, highly-enriched uranium, and other special nuclear materials. The first two materials are not being made in the US today but budgets for tritium -- including soon the brand-new dedicated uranium enrichment capability deemed necessary to produce enough new tritium for a large stockpile -- and lithium are rapidly rising. For a brand-new peek into the strange, arbitrary, and crooked world of U enrichment and tritium see "NNSA Should Clarify Long-Term Uranium Enrichment Mission Needs and Improve Technology Cost Estimates," Government Accountability Office, GAO-18-126, Feb 16, 2018.