TRANSCRIPT

Defense Writers Group

A Project of the Center for Media & Security New York and Washington, D.C.

The Hon. Thomas P. D'Agostino National Nuclear Security Administration July 17, 2007

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS. USERS ARE ADVISED TO CONSULT THEIR OWN TAPES OR NOTES OF THE SESSION IF ABSOLUTE VERIFICATION OF WORDING IS NEEDED.

Q: Our guest this morning is Thomas P. D'Agostino. He is currently the deputy in NNSA for defense programs. He has been nominated and shortly will be confirmed to be the under secretary for energy for nuclear security and the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration.... I'd like to start this morning with the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

A: OK, certainly. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to your breakfast. I consider it a real honor to be here and have an opportunity to talk to you about defense programs activities, as well as some of the other NNSA activities that we might get into, though I'm quite a bit more familiar with the DP activities since I've been in that program for many years, over a decade. I've come up through the, what we call in the Navy the civilian ranks or the career ranks, and so therefore I'm quite a bit more knowledgeable technically, spent most of my career on the nuclear side. So I've seen what the Cold War stockpiles look like, where it's come from, and I have a vision, I think, where it needs to go. And RRW is part of that vision, at least, I believe it's something that the country should analyze. And so the question, both from the political standpoint, I'll deal with the political first, and then we'll go a little bit to the technical. That's a good way to do it.

Politically, many of you know that we have two authorization, two appropriations committees. Three of the four committees, essentially, have provided either authorized or appropriated resources towards RRW. The fourth committee is the House Energy and Water Appropriation subcommittee, chairman Visclosky and ranking member Hopson 1 are the folks that Bill Ostendorf, who is the acting administrator right now, have been dealing with and talking to them, talking to their staffs over the last few months or so. I testified before their committee earlier this year and the difficulty in testifying in this case is it's, you know, many of the details are classified and the arguments are best made in a classified setting. Clearly, we're not going to get into that today, but Mr. Visclosky was very accommodating and had agreed, now unfortunately after the bill was put out, but agreed to come see, I'd be allowed to him in a closed setting. And so we're in process of doing that, we'll be talking to the chairman shortly to at least give him the technical details of how many nuclear weapons we have, how many designs we've done over the past years, what that means, what features are there in this potential RRW design, because remember, right now all it is is a, we've down-selected proposals by our laboratories and teams, and where we want to be is to understand the feasibility of this strategy--does a reliable replacement strategy make more sense than a pure Cold War life extension strategy? That's really the question on the table.

We're at that kind of point in any program where you have to decide; am I going to go on the left road or am I going to go on the right road? And we actually haven't made that decision, we're going on a left road, or we're going to go on the right road. Where we're at right now is, there's two roads--which road do we take? So it's prudent for the country to spend some money to figure out, does the left road make sense? Maybe the left road is just life extending the Cold War, replicating the past for the next 20 or 30 years; or does the right road make sense, which is looking to input and improve some security technologies in the future?

That's exactly where we are. We're not at the point of saying, we're going to build a hundred RRWs, one RRW, a thousand RRWs--we're not at that point at all. We're nowhere near that point. We're at that point on deciding what path we're going to take. And that sometimes is a hard thing to see, even in our budget requests, because we have to very clearly lay out life extension versus RRW, and when people see RRW, I mean I like to call it a strategy versus a warhead. We're evaluating strategy; I digressed a little bit on the political side. But that's, I think, is an important distinction that isn't always understood, and that I appreciate and welcome any kinds of questions on that standpoint.

So politically, where we're at is, I've spent time with members, the Senate Appropriations Committee and Senate Authorization Committee, I've spent lots of time in closed sessions personally with members. Many times with Senator Feinstein, she's been wonderful in giving me time and allowing me to describe the details; Senator Nelson; Senator Dominici; Senator Dorgan, have all taken the time to really understand the issues at hand, and I think they have a pretty good understanding of what they've got before them. We're doing the same thing on the House side, Ms. Tauscher, and Chairman Tauscher along the same ways. And our last bid is to close with the House 2 subcommittee to make sure that they have the classified details. In fact, we're doing that this month, and that's actively happened. We've had one session already. We've got one more session planned, and my hat's off to these folks because they are taking the time. They are giving us time to understand the classified details. Clearly there's a lot of implications (inaudible) around that.

Q: Are you confident you're going to get the appropriation, the authorization and appropriation that you want?

A: I don't want to prejudge what's going to come out of conference or how things may happen. I'm confident that--

Q: So if you stepped up to the two-dollar window, you'd say, (inaudible) you're going to have the money?

A: I think at the end of this thing, given the opportunity, because again, we're not done with the House appropriation subcommittee just yet, but given the opportunity to explain the classified details, what other countries are doing, how this may or may not influence these other countries, what the technical details are, how that shapes the infrastructure--because that's a big piece of this. Remember we've got a 50-year-old, 60- year-old nuclear weapons infrastructure out there that we've been downsizing and, you know how it is when you have a 50-year-old house, you have to decide, do I want to replace the water heater, do I replace the water heater with the exact water heater and furnace when they built that house--

Q: At the end of all that, do you think that you're going to get the appropriation?

A: I think so, given the opportunity to explain it, I think we're going to get an appropriation that will allow us to start, do that analysis that I talked about--say, do I want to go down this left road or do I want to go down this right road?

Q: And so the second part of it--?

A: The second part of it, I think was the technical piece, was that right? OK

Q: The justification for it, what it will bring--?

A: From my standpoint, I think it's irresponsible for an individual in my position to advocate that we should go down a path without examining other options. In the last thirty, forty years since the Cold War stockpile was designed, a lot has happened. From a technical standpoint, we've got computers that are tens of thousands of times faster. These computers have allowed us to solve problems that we could never solve with 3 underground nuclear testing, and we now understand our Cold War stockpile much better. We know how it ages, and we understand how close our performance margins are in these stockpiles, and we also understand what it would take to ensure that we can design a warhead that has, what I would say, is modern, 21st-century safety and security features in the warhead itself. And our Cold War stockpile, it was very good at the time, I think it would be irresponsible to lock down those safety and security features, and there are varying degrees of them in that Cold War stockpile, but lock those down for the next 30 or 40 years. I think that's crazy.

Personal opinion is it's crazy to do that. I think it makes a lot of sense to evaluate on how we can bring our Cold War stockpile and how we can have the much smaller, modern, more efficient nuclear weapons stockpile with updated safety and security features in them. You can use the analogy of an automobile--an automobile in the '60s and '70s, sure it had seatbelts on it, but you know, I don't remember ever using a seatbelt in the '60s and '70s, those seatbelts were uncomfortable, they were hard to use, didn't have all- wheel disc brakes, didn't have safety systems, airbags, and notionally, that's what we want to do to the stockpile. Remember the movie "Mission Impossible," many of you like me probably remember the TV show "Mission Impossible," and in the movies of course that come out, the very beginning they all start off with, after the message has been delivered is, you know, "This message will self-destruct in five seconds," and then the thing doesn't blow up, it just kind of disappears, vaporizes. Well, those are the kinds of technologies that really exist; maybe back in the '60s and '70s when that TV show came out that was considered cool, but it's doable now, and that's what we want to bring into our stockpile. Somebody takes this warhead from us, heaven forbid, we want to make sure that's absolutely protected. In fact, some of those technologies make sense, we'd want not the exact technologies and vulnerabilities, but we'd want other nations, acknowledged nuclear weapons states, to have those types of features in their warheads and in their stockpiles. It only makes sense for global security to have that done, so--

Q: Speaking of underground explosions, what is the status and the level of interest in a training nuclear weapon, particularly if we put it in the context of manned tests (inaudible), and they're apparently putting a second underground facility there in addition to the centrifuge rooms, and I think (inaudible) from time to time, the amount of underground structures being built is increasing exponentially since '91, so can you help me understand anything about the status of (inaudible)?

A: There is no interest on my part to develop a warhead, the Department of Defense established the requirements, and I have no requirement, nor do I expect ever to see a requirement for a new nuclear warhead design penetrator capability at all. I don't expect that to happen politically. I'd be speaking a bit out of turn here with the Defense Department. The Defense Department hasn't even hinted that they want one of these at all, so I think that's off the table from my standpoint. It's not something we're planning 4 on at all or spending any energy on.

Q: Are you staying tuned into other peoples' nuclear programs?

A: Oh, absolutely. I'm quite familiar with--

Q: So tell me what's going on at (inaudible) with the new underground facility.

A: No. (Laughter.)

Q: (Question inaudible) But they being-- the Iranians.

A: We have indications that they have some activity there. I prefer not to go into the details of what's working, what's not, how many, well I can't go into the details--

Q: So is this associated with the centrifuge operation, or is it something different?

A: From my standpoint it's associated with centrifuge operations.

Q: Is there anything more you can tell us about it?

A: No, I don't think that there is, actually.

Q: Do you agree there are underground facilities, do you agree they're growing, you say there's no interest in penetrators but somebody's going to find out some way to go after them and it's either going to be non-kinetic or conventional?

A: I won't agree with all that.

Q: Tell me your version of it, then.

A: My version is that I'm focusing on the nuclear side, the nuclear piece of it, I have no requirement for an underground penetrator, earth penetrator, I don't expect a requirement for an earth penetrator, even given what I understand is going on. I have no, I'm not spending any effort at all in that effort on earth penetrator technology on the nuclear side. DOD, as you know, does have, does work on penetrator technologies. But from the standpoint of a nuclear design to address these types of problems, absolutely not.

One of the elements of the Nuclear Posture Review was this capability, idea of strategic strike, and within that strategic strike, part of that new triad, the triad that was described earlier this decade--there was a conventional piece and a nuclear piece. 5 Obviously my area is the nuclear piece. General Cartwright, as STRATCOM has been focused on obviously the whole triad, and the conventional piece of strategic strike is something that he has been interested in developing, and because what we recognize, I recognize politically and internationally that use of a nuclear warhead is a strategic decision. I mean it's clearly a strategic decision, hasn't been done obviously in many, many, many decades, and hopefully we'll never get to that, we'll never get to that point. So the conventional strategic strike piece could be something that we looked at to address problems in other countries, but I don't have any knowledge if that's actually happening specifically targeted to a (inaudible) facility (inaudible).

Q: Sir, where do you get a tie like that? (Laughter.)

A: A couple of places, actually. There's the Nevada Test Site Museum in Las Vegas

Q: (Inaudible).

A: No, it doesn't (Laughter.)

Q: How long in your mind will the US need to retain a nuclear deterrent? A lot of people in the great (inaudible) masses thought that in the wake of the Cold War, the non- proliferation treaty, we're going to go away (inaudible). We had Chuck Horner, US Air Force, saying nuclear weapons are a mistake, we should never have had them--they've complicated our lives tremendously. Looking into the future, when does your job and your stockpile go away?

A: My view--I think we're talking many decades in the future. Personal view is many decades in the future, and I appreciate the General's comment. I'm sure we'd all like to unplant the three that's been planted forty, sixty years ago, but we're not there right now. I can't go backwards and change the past--I can change the, I can help shape the future, we can all help shape the future, so my view, given the amount of material that exists in the world, I'm talking special nuclear material, the amount of weapons that we have in the world, and the need to have a balance, if you will, some level of balance from a security standpoint, that I think the idea of weapons going away in the next 10 years is very unrealistic. I think weapons going away many decades from now is something we ought to be working towards. And I think what we have both at what I can say unclassified and what I know from the classified standpoint on the size of our stockpile, that things are heading in the right direction. I think if we're going to maintain nuclear weapons over the next few decades, they ought to be weapons that reflect the environment of the next few decades versus reflecting the environment of the last forty, fifty years. And that's why I think we're at that point right now.

Q: But, expanding on that, and as you just discussed, (inaudible) technology that can 6 disable our weapons when they fall into the hands of bad guys, that of course really isn't the problem, nuclear weapons made sense when you had one state amassed against another state with these nuclear weapons. Now the most likely user of a nuclear weapon is going to be al Qaeda or somebody like that, and our nuclear forces against al Qaeda don't do much--there's no deterrence that works there, (inaudible). Has the merit or the logic of a nuclear deterrent faded since the end of the Cold War?

A: I don't think so. I mean, people forget that it's just not, certainly the future is a lot different than the past with respect to what we had, was a Soviet Union-US type of a balancing act situation. But people forget there are other countries out there. China's got a nuclear weapons program...

Q: Do you see us going into nuclear war with China?

A: I don't want to go to nuclear war with anybody, but I think the important thing to recognize is that what we want to do essentially is drive the number of warheads down. We want to secure nuclear materials, we want to track, make sure that we put in place technologies at our borders so we know where the materials are. Not only do we want to secure the materials, we want to get rid of nuclear materials on this earth.

It's a big job. We're spending close to 2 billion dollars on it right now and part of the program that I'm responsible for, the defense programs activities, are undertaking a massive effort to dismantle these Cold War warheads, take the uranium, consolidate it, take the plutonium out, consolidate it, fill the MOX plant, burn that stuff up, make it electricity right now and into the future for many, many decades in the future. We've got a lot of material. So my first job is to get rid of the nuclear material that we have right now, to secure the nuclear material that we have right now, (inaudible) in the non- proliferation area is to help on the international front in securing and bringing these materials together, and in the end, my view is that if we were driving numbers in the right direction, there's going to come a time when we either plateau out at that very low number across the world, and we establish the types of international treaties and verification protocols, where we can actually get these numbers down and then start chiseling those numbers down, but until we start aggressively working, and which we are right now, and start addressing these large amount of material right now, the world is a very unstable place.

Q: Accepting what Mark said, if I can jump in here, I think what you're saying is there's still a role for deterrence with regard to certain nations... A: No question about it.

Q: Russia, China, perhaps others.

7 A: Absolutely.

Q: So we haven't seen the end of days with respect to deterrence?

A: We haven't seen the end of days with respect to deterrence and we sometimes forget the role that the US nuclear deterrent plays, what we call the extended umbrella, if you will, of a deterrence against countries like Japan and maybe Turkey that count that have in many cases the ability to go forward and to develop their own programs. The US nuclear deterrent has helped in a non-proliferation standpoint kind of a, some might argue a strange way, but I would argue a very logical way, on preventing other countries to saying we don't need to build one because the United States has guaranteed that they're going to take care of us should this problem come on our soil. I agree the al Qaeda piece, or terrorist piece, they aren't necessarily deterred by large numbers of warheads. They say, well that's a state-to-state thing. We're all about non-state actors, but what's also clear is those non-states aren't necessarily motivated by, they're not just as appropriately, when they see us looking to build a secure, smaller, secure stockpile, they don't say "Aha, that's the reason why I want to build, get my hands on those things." They aren't motivated by that standpoint in my view.

Q: The technical aspects of an RRW; Part of the concern and resistance in Congress: to develop this thing you're going to have to do testing. Do you need to develop an actual warhead and all the conventional (inaudible), or can you take existing warheads, (inaudible) parts, and just apply these new securities?

A: Right now, but your point would be, for example, why don't you just take your '66 Chevy and put airbags in it? I mean I'm simplifying it, but security, safety, whatever the features are, why don't you take your W76 warhead and stick some features on it and then it's got that safety and security feature. In my view, one of the things that I feel and I think collectively most folks would agree with is that, if we can reduce the likelihood of a need to conduct underground tests and maybe ultimately get to a point, I don't believe we're there yet, but get to a point where we'd say we're going to take that off the table, right now you know it's the Administration's policy and it has been in the past to not conduct an underground test. But we'll always reserve the right to do so.

So in my view there are many reasons why we want to do RRW. There's that safety reason and security reason that you've described, and I'll get to your question, is in my view the reason that we're going to reduce the likelihood of the need to conduct underground tests and then there's the other reason which I feel is very important is I believe RRW will allow us to actually reduce the size of our nuclear forces, numbers I'm talking about, quantities of nuclear weapons, because it will demonstrate--what essentially what it will allow me to do, allow the Defense Department to do I should say, is to say, we no longer have to maintain this hedge of, you know, one-to-one or two-to- 8 one numbers of back-up weapons because we don't know about this Cold War stockpile that you all are maintaining so I want to keep some in my back pocket in case I have a problem here. If we can show that this reliable replacement strategy makes sense, and that we can actually do it, then that allows this Administration or future administrations, most likely, to be able to say, "Aha, I can take that all that stuff that's in my basement right now that I'm just keeping for the rainy day, just in case, in case the stuff that I have out on the street here fails and swap it out I can get rid of that stuff." And that would be a significant reduction in the number of warheads.

So back to your point, right now the warheads in the Cold War were designed to maximize explosive yield with a minimum amount of weight, because we wanted to have lots of these things, we wanted to throw them great distances, and therefore they were highly refined. And that was OK then because we knew we were going to constantly be changing these things out. Every decade and a half, we'd go off and say, hey, that weapon's getting old but I don't care anymore because I know I'm building a new one to replace it to follow right by, right behind and replace it. We haven't designed, we haven't done that in many decades right now and so therefore we're at a situation where those tight performance margins, in my view, are not acceptable out into the future, and because the volume and weight considerations, and adding these security features increases the weight and volume and it's not, you just can't take a W76 and add more stuff to it. There's no space in there. All that space is taken up, every ounce, every square inch of space in that aeroshell is taken up.

Q: Like an iPhone? (Laughter.)

A: Yeah, it's packed to the gills, essentially, but it's because it's so small. Now, we've got the 1700 to 2200 Moscow Treaty numbers. General Cartwright can look at different configurations, that means I can use a lot larger aeroshell, and what we can do is essentially use that volume and use that weight, the fact that the bus, we call the missile delivery system, doesn't have to throw as many of them and we can add those features. The size, conventional high explosives is a lot different than insensitive high explosives. You can pack it into much smaller volume, but it's a lot more sensitive. The IHE, insensitive high explosives, takes up a lot more space and it's heavier. That's OK, we don't care anymore because we've traded away all that extra space for safety and security features and the like. And one point I think you had a question on plutonium. Did you ask about the pit?

Q: (Inaudible) whether you needed to develop new pits and that's another (inaudible) nuclear weapons facilities (inaudible)--?

A: Right now, we're working with the Defense Department to figure out, besides the facilities are determined by how many units you want it to produce on a year-to-year 9 basis, the DOD knows that I'm interested in the smallest number possible there because that allows me to evaluate, but we got a lot more options, I don't have to build a capability to build 125 a year if I can get by with doing a number maybe half that, we can get by with not spending billions and billions of dollars on that. Just modernize some small capability and be done with it for the next--forever. So, I'm very familiar with that problem.

So we are planning on looking at how you can reuse a pit, and we got a lot of pits, let's face it. The pit of course is kind of the heart of the warhead from that standpoint. And many of these, I got to be careful about not going too far in one direction, but some of the things that I've talked about earlier when we talked about safety and security features directly associated with that part of the warhead. And therefore, to make the cut in our newer designs have some of those features, but in order to, in my sense, in order to take full advantage of it we do need to make some pits. I don't think they're a very large number, and then we're looking at also reusing pits that we have. Many of these pits we want to chop up, of course, and send into the MOX facility as part of that 34 metric tons.

But I mentioned earlier that a big part of the job we have in the NNSA is to focus, dismantle our Cold War stockpile--the ones that the Defense Department has already agreed to get rid of--take that uranium and plutonium and put it in a much smaller volume and put it in the right secure facilities, and ultimately look across at our future needs and decide, you know, are we doing enough on the nuclear security standpoint to make the world a safer place? You already know that we have our plan on the MOX facility is to put 34 metric tons through that, and ultimately turn that into a mixed (inaudible) fuel and burn that fuel up in white water reactors. I'm taking a very aggressive effort within stockpile of plutonium that we have to look at what else can we do? Can we add more plutonium into that mix without touching what the Defense Department requires in order to maintain a strategic reserve, a small strategic reserve of plutonium? I think there's a lot of room in there, and I expect that over the next few weeks we'll be making, essentially, some declarations from that standpoint that will further demonstrate that what we're not interested in is an arms race, we're not interested in adding more nuclear weapons. We're interested in the right-size nuclear deterrent for what we think the next few decades look like, heading in the right direction ultimately to this point where maybe there'll be some time, I don't know, it's hard to predict, about three, four, five, six, seven decades out into the future that these things do disappear. But right now I don't see them disappearing.

Q: You didn't answer the question about can you develop a new warhead without test?

A: Oh, OK, thank you, I'm sorry. I appreciate that. Yes, absolutely. I described some of the tools earlier, the computing tools that are much different now. We've got some 10 experimental tools, we will have the (NIFF?) online in 2010 and the dual-access radiographic hydrotest facility, Los Alamos, fully online in 2008, that's (inaudible). We have (JAT) we have gas guns and we have this computing power. So we've solved problems that we haven't been able to solve in the past, with respect to margins, why did that--we conducted over a thousand tests and we got a lot of data and some of those tests didn't go so well, and in fact, those are the great tests, because those are the tests where you can try to understand what happened. And we've actually solved some of those problems, so my standpoint, there's probably four main reasons why we think we can certify RRW without underground testing.

First is, the RRW design will have a primary performance margin that's significantly higher than just about anything else we have in the stockpile. Primary performance margin is the amount of energy that you have to have in the primary in order to drive the secondary to make the warhead work. If your primary only has X number of kilotons of yield, it will never make the secondary work and you wont' have a nuclear weapon. You'll have an explosion, but you won't have a nuclear weapon.

If the primary explosion is of the right performance level, you'll have enough energy to make the secondary work and you will have a nuclear weapon. So the margin that we talk about is the amount of yield coming out of the primary over and above what you need to drive the secondary. The more margin you have, the more likely it's going to blow up, the less likely you will need to conduct an underground test in order to be assured that the weapon will work.

The RRW design, the primary has been tested, and that primary is a primary that--and I'll go back to my (inaudible), so margin's the first reason, the second reason is test history. That primary on the RRW is essentially comes from, it's been tested in the desert on an earlier stockpile--it's basically the same primary that we've tested and has been in our stockpile. So we have full confidence that that primary works--there's no question about it. In fact, we know exactly how much margin it has and we know the secondary is of the similar family that had been tested in the stockpile. And we know what kind of yield it takes to drive that secondary. And so we're very confident, based on that second reason, is that test experience. The RRW design is firmly embedded not only on the primary-secondary level, but on the high explosives themselves and test history, firmly embedded. That was the reason why I picked the Livermore design as the proposed design that we ought to study. I made that decision and I made it based primarily on the firm test history. I did not want us to stray from that. I did not want the question of testing to certify to ever come up, and it'll come up of course, but to ever be a question, to me that was an inviolate view.

The third reason is experience, designer experience. We have weapons designers in our program right now that have conducted nuclear tests. Three to five to seven years from 11 now that folks won't be around. They'll be retired, may have passed away, but those designers' experience is a really important facet of that, and for both Los Alamos and Livermore was basis for how they went and moved forward. Los Alamos had a good design, was a bit more innovative, and I wasn't as interested in straying too far out of the box on this.

And the last piece is tools, our stockpile stewardship tools, which we will require over the next year or two as we study this RRW strategy. Is it the right strategy? So it's the margins, it's the test data, it's the experience of the designer, and it's tools. Those four things together give me great confidence that we can certify RRW without testing.

Q: Just to follow up on that, if the nuclear (inaudible) have great confidence, does the national command authority in the military share that--to what degree is their pitch back? I see a great Tom Clancy novel (inaudible) these guys are not convinced that the failure to test has been inadequate. What sort of reaction do you get from the using community?

A: I've gotten mixed reaction, but I've also gotten reaction, everybody who I've talked to, or everybody who my lab directors have talked to, after they understand, not just what I'm telling you on an unclassified session, but what they get on a classified session, I don't know of a single person that says, "Oh, well I didn't know that. That's great. I feel much better about that now." It's a matter of communication; it's a matter of getting to the using community. I can tell you the individual that speaks for the using community, General Cartwright, and you've probably talked to him, he's a four-star Marine, he's going to be leaving STRATCOM and going to be Vice Chief. He's one of the chief users, understands all the details, and feels very confident about that. But it's a matter of communicating, I think.

Q: Question on test readiness. Should the decision be made that it is necessary to return to underground testing--how long would it take? And are you satisfied with that--do you think that (inaudible)--?

A: I think way too much is given into the X and Y on number of months on this. Let me start by saying there's no requirement to conduct an underground test, I want to make sure that's on the record. I mean, you've seen it and I've seen it, people sometimes underestimate the ability of this nation to turn to and seeing the Navy (inaudible) ships work which is, hey, the nation's got a need, we're going to go meet that need, we're going to get the job done. I think too much thought gets put into the place of, well you got to do it in 18 months or 24 months or 36 months. The nation can conduct an underground test if it needs to. The real question is, from my standpoint, again, I'm a technical person, and that is, it's not just a matter of shaking the ground for me. I mean, why would you do a test? Well, because you've got a perceived problem in the stockpile. Well, 12 the test part is a lot easier than building the diagnostics necessary or the instruments necessary to pull the data out of the test in a way that you're sure that you're going to get the amount of data necessary that you say, I solved the problem. I made some change, I solved the problem. So in many cases to figure that out, requires, well I got to go through some scenarios. OK, let's go through a scenario where the high explosive has turned to powder, for example. Therefore, I got to make a change and the like. So we want to build a diagnostics--and many of these tests, by the way, we don't have to conduct an underground test to do. We can do just about, we can do a lot without conducting an underground nuclear test.

Q: What is the current level?

A: Right now, 24 months is what we're saying that we think we can--if we had to conduct a test to resolve a technical problem there's 24 months.

Q: (Inaudible)?

A: Yes, sir, yes sir. Absolutely.

Q: Just a quick follow-up to Mark's question earlier--what would a nuclear weapon for the future be designed to do, especially with irregular threats and that sort of thing? (Inaudible) What would the next generation nuclear weapon, what do you want it to do?

A: I don't want to seem (inaudible) or anything, I don't know. I mean, my standpoint is, my view, a nuclear weapon is a strategic tool, a weapon of last resort. Deterrence has worked for many years and so people say, well, weapons are bad. Yeah, I agree, any instrument that kills, you can say it's bad, but man is man and man will always, you know, we'll always have these tensions. So my sense is the current stockpile that we have right now is a deterrent weapon, and in likely, a smaller, future stockpile I hope remains to be a deterrent weapon. I know I'm not being specific, I'm not telling you where we're going to kill that target because not only is that out of my lane, I can't even predict what that future could be, so I don't want to see that--

Q: But it's not optimized for counterforce or countervalue?

A: No. But it's a good question because an RRW is not designed, the RRW strategy is not a strategy that we propose in this Administration to add new capability at all. It's a replacement capability, it's got the same form, fit, and function, the same delivery platform.

Q: So it's a 21st-century warhead based on a 20th-century model (inaudible)?

13 A: That's the strategic model, not technical. Yeah.

Q: Effects are the same?

A: Effects are the same, yes.

Q: Competition question if you go beyond RRW-1 to RRW-2? (Inaudible.)

A: In my view, yes, because what we got out of the RRW competition, figure out does the strategy make sense, was a lot of innovation on the part of both laboratories that we're seeking to take the functionalities that we wanted; safety, security, reduced likelihood of testing, and come up with their view of the best package on how you could do that. And what we got was great ideas on how we could not make a new weapon for a new capability, but how we could design a replacement weapon that had those features as the preeminent activities. In the past when a nuclear weapon was designed in the Cold War, yield and weight were up there. You don't trade those things off, no, I want X kilotons and it can't be bigger than this much weight; whatever you scientists can do at your laboratories, make it happen. Other features were not as important.

We've kind of turned the tables and said, you know, bigger, we want the safety and security and the performance, performance margin piece, which is this reduce the likelihood of the test, be on top of the equation. And that gives you a lot more ideas, and I don't believe that we've exhausted those yet. In addition to the point earlier Otto made, we also would say, because I'm worried about cost. Because I go up to Congress and defend the program, put together the right program based on cost. I don't expect the country to want to spend more money on the nuclear weapons program out in the future. So my view is that things have to come from within, and so my view is cost is a factor, particularly the cost associated with, do I need to build a plutonium capability that drives me a certain direction or not? Or do I try to take advantage of what the country's invested billions of dollars' worth over the last four decades or so, take advantage of those materials. My preference is the latter, I mean, because I actually can think I can put together a program that does that. I believe the former is a program that will work, it could work technically, won't work politically.

Q: I'm wondering how much your complex 2030 concept is predicated on being able to move forward with the RRW, stated differently--can you create the smaller, more secure nuclear weapons infrastructure in the country and then track a new cadre of scientists and engineers without RRW?

A: I think I can but it's harder. A couple of examples might be the best way to describe that. RRW, one of the features of RRW is this safety feature, insensitive high explosive, the detonators are different but they're a lot less sensitive to electrostatic discharge, for 14 example, so the efficiency of the complex goes up by an order of magnitude. In other words, by a factor of 10, and how much work I can get done goes up by a factor of 10 by having warheads in that system that are RRW-like, if you will, in other words insensitive high explosive, the safety features built in. and therefore that drives lots of things, I can dismantle the Cold War stockpile a lot faster, I can move the material, consolidate the material faster, not have to maintain these huge armories, and get stuff down to the MOX plants in South Carolina faster.

The complex in my view changes faster in a smaller, reducing the nuclear footprint on the country, much faster with an RRW-like concept. Does that mean I can't drive, I can't stay on that left road, the LEP strategy road, and get a modern, smaller complex? No, absolutely not. I would do that anyway. Assuming RRW never came up, never even thought of the idea that we would want to have a safer stockpile out in the future, we're just going to LEP, Cold War ourselves out into the future. I think we can still have a smaller complex. I think it's a matter of degree. During the height of the Cold War, we had over 20 sites around the country. We had 70 million square feet. We had over 55,000 workers in the nuclear weapons program. Now we're down to eight sites, talking about 35,000 square feet, and we have half of the workforce. I think we can push, our complex 2030 vision will push us down another third, actually, on almost all fronts. Probably still have eight sites but the footprint will be a lot smaller, the workforce is going to be smaller. I think RRW allows us that footprint to be much more efficient and will allow me to not have to invest in a heavy metal capability to make certain components. There's a radioactive heavy metal that we use in our stockpile that I'd have to rebuild in the next five years, rebuild that capability.

If I know I'm going to RRW I don't have to do that--beryllium, for example, I'm going to have to invest in a beryllium capability in this country or at least maybe the person that follows me. Right now we've taken it off the table because we anticipated a year ago we don't like beryllium--it causes berylliosis, people get sick, there's a liability on the taxpayers. We spent over 2 billion dollars in medical and compensation costs to tarmac workers that have been hurt by--and beryllium is one of those metals that has been recently discovered to be a carcinogen. I'd like to get beryllium out of the stockpile permanently forever. Or we can say we don't care about that, we don't mind the liability. That's a risk we're going to have to take, and we'll just do the LEP strategy; that's the examination process that I think we want to take place in the next year or two on the RRW strategy.

Q: (Inaudible)

A: Oh sure, yeah, good point. You know, the designers design, if the nation wants to have a capability, and again, this is, and so the nation wants to have a capability over the next few decades; and want us to attract a strong workforce they need to do their work. 15 And I believe it's a bit harder to attract designers that are in what some could call a more of a caretaker mode than in a doing-your-job type of mode. One thing that I think is important to mention, I want to make sure everybody understands, is that the nuclear weapons program certainly has a group of workers out there that are geared towards what I would call the defense programs piece, but there are capabilities at our laboratories and the intelligence field and the non-proliferation field, detector technology, nuclear weapons incident response, which is our group of folks that go out to bring in material and in case of an improvised nuclear device we'd disarm this thing, that all comes, all that capability comes from the nuclear weapons program. It's a foundational piece. If the foundational piece goes away, our ability, our nation's ability to respond on intelligence analysis, our nation's ability to respond on non-proliferation technologies that need to be deployed around the country, are severely impacted, and I don't think in a good way. And that's a piece that wasn't even evident to me until I took a trip a few weeks ago with Senator Nelson and explored that particular piece of it as well.

Q: (Inaudible) discovered something in the stockpile that's caused you, especially when you talk about wider performance margins, that has caused you to have some doubts about weapons in our stockpile. I know that's classified but can you possibly tell us about things you're discovering that gave you great (inaudible) about not coming up with a new replacement weapon?

A: I won't talk specifics, but what I will say is, I'll state the obvious; the weapons age, on average a year for every year we had to go out, that's clear; that we know materials change as things get older, they oxidize, they off-gas, they corrode, which is oxidizing. They change. We have a very robust, I guess I hate that word but, we have a very strong surveillance program and annual assessment process, one that General Cartwright does in STRATCOM and parallel with what we do on the laboratory side, and then we bring those together and we peer review each other. What we've been noticing is, you know, we're going to have to get our hands into these warheads and work on them. And that life extension strategy we're going to have to, that's the real McCoy.

And so the stockpile stewardship is working, we are able to look at things, find out we have some concerns, address those concerns through life extensions or what we call limited life component exchanges. So the stockpile is safe and secure, but it causes us to say, you know, over time, I mean this is the real key, is that sustainability over a long period of time, I'm talking decades out in the future, are we fooling ourselves to say that twenty years from now, ten years from now, there won't be issues where some future President or some future Secretary of Defense is going to have to be faced with this question of, balancing the political risks and the international risks of that versus what do we say about the deterrent. So I'm personally concerned.

Q: Other countries may not be updating their arsenals (inaudible)--is there any reason 16 to think they would take an American design to disable weapons?

A: We would never give them our design, but we would--the engineers can talk about certain principles without getting into design. I can say, yeah, the principle of being able to isolate the signal from reaching the detonator, is a principle. And there are different ways to do that without ever getting into design or the principle of having a material, you know, Mission Impossible, you know, kind of vaporized or something like that. There's lots of things you can talk about a principle without getting into the details of the design but let each nation, and we work with other countries, and we have weapon safety and security exchange agreements with Russia. We know these countries are working on their stockpiles. In fact, I think we're the only country that's not considering this approach. So from my standpoint, not having us examine something that we know other countries are doing, not that we want to do what other countries are doing, that's not necessarily the right thing, but we feel it's the right thing. The world is a safer place when all warheads have these features in them. The best place (inaudible) to start on what we can start is our stockpile. And that's what I'm proposing is that we look at the question of, should we start this with our stockpile or not?

Q: ... like a used car? Some involved in the weapons community compared to an old version of the W89 with a few new tricks? What do you say to that? And what do you say to people who have doubts about developing a new (inaudible), that some people are not all that convinced?

A: What I would say is, and I'm not sure what the used car analogy you're referring to. The idea is, from the used car standpoint is, the idea behind a reliable replacement strategy is that it is, first of all, replacement. The word isn't there by accident. It's to not add new capability. So if somebody says, we're not going to take that '66 Mustang and bore it out and take it from a 289 to a whatever cubic inches. That's not what we're doing. We're going to leave the heart of that thing in one spot and we're going to put brakes on that thing that really work or security features on there so nobody can steal it, you know the clicker button on your key that allows you to instantly lock your car from a distance. Those don't change the function of the warhead, the performance function, the original reason why you had a warhead to begin with, which is yield on target, for example. So that's why the used car thing kind of kicks in. That's probably why people use that used car kind of analogy to this thing.

But I firmly believe what I said earlier in response to people that say, well, how can you build this thing without testing it. You know, the whole idea of the margin, we know the margin is greater. It's firmly based on test data, but the experience of the designers is a key part of this thing, and the stockpile stewardship tools that have solved problems that underground testing never solved, that were mysteries, it's like unknown mysteries of the weapons program--we solved those with our stewardship tools. And we have been 17 solving them with our stewardship tools. And it's worked. It's actually incredible, but it came at a cost. The RCIW, that's kind of the next logical phase within stockpile stewardship. We're maintaining our stockpile, we're doing it without underground testing it, and we're doing it because we've invested a lot of money in building these tools.

Q: (Inaudible), but you've got to convince them that you have a better idea of what the future stockpiles are going to look like in terms of numbers and size and etcetera, on a broader scale, because they don't want to invest a whole bunch of money in this RRW before you do that. Can you do that? (Inaudible) dispose plutonium of the 34 metric tons. If you do that, would you want the Russians to increase their amount?

A: Yeah, the 34 metric tons, I would always want the Russians to increase....

Q: (Inaudible)

A: That would not be part of the demand, we would do that unilaterally but it would also put us in the position to be able to engage in a way, the 34 and the 34 is clear. There's a link there, we want to drive as much as linkage and commitment to get rid of 68 tons of plutonium, but we also feel that, you know, we want to get in a leadership position here globally, and look at what minimum do we need to do, and then what more can we do from a leadership standpoint. Your first question had to do with I think the policy piece....

Q: (Inaudible) --that you shouldn't proceed with RRW until you get a better idea--.

Q: A couple of points. One is, we will be, we're working very hard with the Defense Department and the State Department and the NNSA to come up with a joint paper on a nuclear weapons policy. That was a point that came up clearly in some of the report (inaudible) that we saw, that's our point No. 1.

Point No. 2 is the idea that, we're not building RRW, we're figuring out whether this is a strategy that's worth pursuing. You can't proceed with making decisions without data. You can't make a decision without data. I keep emphasizing, I emphasize the point, but sometimes it's a hard one to understand. I have to be able to show to members, first of all to prove it to myself, and prove it to the Administration, then show members of Congress that an RRW strategy allows us to do this, an LEP strategy allows us to do that. Here's how it impacts the complex. There's nothing saying, you have to finish all this data before you start working on that set of data on how big the complex should be. And so there are plenty of opportunities and the way we move forward with RRW is the next phase is the development-engineering phase. We don't proceed to that phase because we won't this year, we won't have enough time, because we'll spend the next year studying 18 this thing, but we can't proceed to that phase until we get authorization and appropriation to do so, and I won't even propose it unless I'm confident that this cart before the horse question gets addressed. I tried to Mr. Visclosky about that personally and it ties into this whole question of whether you need a 125-pit per year capacity in the country or whether you can get by with a smaller one. As I mentioned earlier, the requirement comes from the Defense Department, the top-level requirement, but sometimes there's many ways to get to that requirement. If I can get to that requirement in a way that doesn't get us down a track where we're making large investments, that's one of my jobs--let's put it that way.

Q: Do you think you can get him to change his mind? Because he's pretty firm that he doesn't want RRW (inaudible) unless you have some very specific numbers that you haven't produced yet?

A: I think that, in my view, that he's given me the opportunity to make my case this month already once, and again later on this month. And I'm looking forward to it. I think what I want to make sure that he understands, and I think he does--he's a smart man and he understands that decisions have to be made with data and I want to make sure that he has the data and I have the data that we can move forward.

Q: Is it really still an open question in your mind whether it's a necessity to go forward with RRW? I know you said that there's no decision made, but is it an open question really?

A: Well, no, what's an open question right now is how much benefit that RRW can bring. I think it's clear that the current, that to not evaluate this and to not consider it would be, I won't call it criminal, but I would call it irresponsible of someone in my position to not try to understand what value this can bring. I personally believe in the technical data that I've reviewed on RRW that can bring this. But that's why we want to move forward because I think the country needs a bit more data to be as convinced as I am. And my job is to bring that data to the table.

END TEXT

19