Newswise — The United States' thousands of nuclear warheads have the explosive equivalent of over 1 gigaton of TNT. It's an amount of energy that could literally move mountains, reroute rivers, alter climate, and result in the deaths of hundreds of millions or even billions of people, through fire, radiation, and starvation.
Like everything else on Earth, those warheads are getting older. But unlike anything else on Earth, that mere aging may have profound consequences for the national security of the United States. Most of the nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal date from the late 1970s and the 1980s and are now past or nearing the end of their planned lifespans. If nothing is done to maintain these hugely complex systems, they will in time fail, leaving the United States with no nuclear arsenal at all. Officials in the United States as well as the other seven declared nuclear powers are now grappling with a tricky and essentially unprecedented problem: What is the best way to sustain their nuclear deterrents?
Since the early 1990s, the prevailing view of nuclear weapons is that they are like other manufactured systems, such as cars and commercial jets. Their various components grow old, and eventually they will become nonfunctional. But that fate can be staved off by routine surveillance and maintenance and occasional replacement of parts or software. Such techniques have successfully extended the life spans of commercial airliners by decades.
But over the past several years, some high-placed U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have come around to a different view--that even with diligent inspection and maintenance, the current arsenal will soon become unreliable and will no longer have much deterrent value. The only solution, they say, is to design and build new warheads.
In the March 2009 issue of IEEE Spectrum, Francis Slakey and Benn Tannenbaum argue that the current program of "stockpile stewardship," with some modifications, will be sufficient to preserve the U.S. arsenal for the foreseeable future. It isn't necessary, and may even be counterproductive, they say, for the United States to pursue new warheads.
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