rational defense

In addition to attempting to give definition to the outside parameters of a defense debate — even if the operational capabilities that actually define those parameters are classified — there is also the matter of understanding internal technical restraints that prohibit the ways in which outside parameters are addressed or confronted.

The distinction is an important one, when understanding exactly what the wider public does not — and cannot — know in specific and concrete detail. The contribution of, for example, Tom Stefanick’s Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy or Air Power Australia is largely in defining the operating environment and demands that will be placed on a new technology or weapon system in the real world. Stefanick takes the nature of the environment and the limitations that the operating environment imposes in order to argue a larger point about the implications of a doctrinal choice to target Soviet ballistic missile submarines. Carlo Kopp and his associates at Air Power Australia define the future operating environment in order to argue that the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is insufficient to meet Australia’s needs. This is not to oversimplify or argue that Stefanick and Kopp have not also made contributions in other regards. But their emphasis has been to argue against a particular doctrinal or procurement choice (respectively) based on wider outside parameters.

But another class of consideration that is equally important to properly estimate and account for is internal technical and capability limitations.

This can at times be forgotten when the debate is taking place in the United States, where the technological edge — if not a generational lead — is percieved as the rule (if not always in practice). But other countries deal with this problem on a much more regular basis. With limitations in terms of funding, development timeline and existing technical capacity, there may not always be a technological solution to the problem. At the very least, the operating environment or the defined objectives can easily force new constraints on the problem and require sub-optimal counters and solutions.

The perfect example of this is the debate about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

The challenge in this case is not that the American nuclear enterprise does not have the technological know-how or the institutional knowledge necessary to design a first-rate and fundamentally new nuclear warhead (though it has nevertheless lost most of those who had first-hand experience with weapons design in the days of extensive nuclear testing — and the rest are on the cusp of retirement). The problem with such new weapon design is that it requires nuclear testing to develop and certify — something few are interested in — and almost no one is advocating for.

This is in part because the current modern nuclear weapons design is exceptional. In terms of its mission, the late two-stage thermonuclear warhead is exceptional. With highly accurate guidance and yields — sometimes selectable — in the 100-500 kiloton range (ten to twenty times or more the strength of the Hiroshima bomb), these modern weapons are sufficient to impact and ensure destruction. Even in the case of a pinpoint target like a specific missile silo, even if the silo is so hardened to nuclear attack that it cannot be destroyed directly through destructive force, the crater from the blast is thought to potentially be sufficiently wide enough to encompass the silo and its below-ground structure, depriving it of its very foundation. This is known as crater-death.

With such accuracy and destructiveness already achieved and the drive of intellectual and resource investment over the course of nearly half a century that made these designs possible, improvement in the post-Cold War world becomes a much more subtle — and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, much less urgent — matter.

But in the case of the RRW and the American deterrent, the defining characteristics of the requirement have already been made clear (if not explicitly):

1.) the desire to sustain, in one form or another, a decisive U.S. nuclear deterrent indefinitely
2.) to do so without full scale nuclear testing

These defining characteristics place immense constraints on the possible technological solutions. Without nuclear testing to certify new design changes or to continue to sustain a high degree of confidence in the existing arsenal indefinitely. Both of these routes almost certainly eventually implicate the Pentagon in nuclear testing, despite the impressive simulations and modeling that some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are undoubtedly capable of achieving.

The decisive constraint is the the existing design work — design work only achieved as the highly refined product of half a century of nuclear development that included not only the immense investment of resources, intellectual capital and money but extensive nuclear testing. This is not an RD argument for a renewal of testing. But the long-term solution in this case is rooted in the internal, technical limitations that a moratorium (in practice if not in legal effect) on nuclear testing carries with it.

RRW — or a fundamentally similar concept under a different name — would take existing design work and combine it with what remains of Cold War-era design and development experience and move to expediently refine existing designs. This refinement would be extremely conservative and limited tweaks in order to maximize long-term sustainability, maintainability and reliability along with the latest safety features.

While these have always been design considerations, they were not all the highest priority during the Cold War, especially when the continual development and fielding of replacement warheads was ingrained in the process. The best chance of doing this is the current moment, when the nuclear enterprise both still remembers (as an institution) the era of warhead design and testing as well as having accrued a great deal of first-hand experience with sustainability issues through the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs that have helped maintain the arsenal since the Cold War.

While the debate will undoubtedly rage over the next few years about the proper way to sustain the American nuclear arsenal, the debate must begin with the understanding of the internal constraints that leave very little maneuverability or options if the underlying objectives are sustainment and the avoidance of nuclear testing.

In 1987, Tom Stefanick published Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy. In it, he attempted to question a tenet of American naval strategy during the Cold War: the targeting of Soviet ballistic missile submarines and, more importantly, the implications of that doctrinal choice. During the Cold War especially, the tools of naval strategy — everything from sonar capabilities to the shape of a submarine’s propeller (known as the screw) — were deeply classified. Nevertheless, through research and analysis, certain parameters of a problem can be defined and intelligent questions can be asked. Based on those parameters, Stefanick was bold enough to ask whether, in the outbreak of war between the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact, would the loss of some of the Soviet strategic fleet (especially a precipitous loss) actually serve to further escalate the situation and thus increase the likelihood of a full-blown nuclear exchange, in part because Soviet second-strike capability had been degraded.

There are, of course, a mountain of suppositions in any World War III scenario during the Cold War. There was — and is — no way to answer that question for certain. Weighting heavily on the other hand are very compelling military imperatives that argue for the targeting of ballistic missile submarines — one of the most survivable platforms for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The comparative advantage of American submarine technology allowed the U.S. Navy to target Soviet boomers while American missile boats were comparatively safe from Soviet attack submarines. But it was a fair question for Stefanick to ask, even if his work at the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense Disarmament Studies may have brought certain ideological presuppositions to the table — and even if defining the parameters of his question was daunting and produced a book that is more than half appendices (appendices that make for particularly good open-source resources, it so happens). Indeed, my copy of his book was first owned and read by someone in the office of the U.S. Commander of Naval Forces, Japan.

It is this very sort of debate that RD considers essential and upon which it has been founded.

When it comes to debate about the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) these days, discussions tend to quickly descend into heated debates about performance parameters that are mostly classified.

Air Power Australia (APA) has attempted to provide the same sort of reasoned parameters for this debate that Stefanick did for his. Through its extensive website and broad analysis, APA has given some much-needed definition to the recent debate in Australia over whether the JSF program in which Canberra has long been a partner is really the right choice for Australia’s strategic needs. While it has established a reputation of hostility towards the F-35 (one grounded in its own analysis), it has attempted to take what information is publicly available and used it to model and make estimates about operational capabilities and performance envelopes in order to compare them to the missions that the new aircraft will be expected to perform (in this case, one of the major concerns for Australia has been the proliferation of late-model Su-30MK “Flanker” series fighter jets to not only China, but Malaysia and Indonesia).

Indeed, in what originated with a comment to a post about one of APA’s recent analyses on Ares, Bill Sweetman composed a rather exceptional post today that highlighted the deep need for debate. He pointed out that the “JSF business plan, if fulfilled, results in a virtual fighter monopoly in the West and its allies.” This gets to the root of the problem. Lockheed Martin stands to make over a trillion dollars on U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps orders alone — not to mention what promise to be extensive overseas sales. The program itself will essentially lock foreign buyers into a long-term service and support arrangement with Lockheed Martin. Very real and deeply entrenched interests have a great deal at stake. So does the American taxpayer. Compounding this, Sweetman points out, is that there has been no track record of success since the F-117 Nighthawk (he points out the prohibitive cost overruns of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber and concerns about maintenance, sustainability and life cycle costs with the F-22 Raptor.)

RD does not argue that every performance parameter and capability of a weapon system be unclassified. That is neither necessary nor prudent. But given the delays and problems with realizing the JSF program so far and legitimate and widespread questions and concerns from expert cicrles about the viability, applicability and necessity of the production-version of the aircraft, Sweetman parts with exactly the right sentiment:

If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you’ve got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or “trust me, but it’s secret.”

No nuclear weapons were tested in 1997 — only the second year since mankind detonated its first atomic bomb in 1945 that no testing took place. The 1990s saw what has proven to be — in effect — the end of Cold War-era nuclear testing. In 1998, of course, India and Pakistan both carried out a series of nuclear tests. But since that year, there has been only a single nuclear detonation: North Korea’s in 2006 (and the seismographic data from that test was not indicative of even a rudimentary nuclear device).

This has profound implications for the future of the world’s existing nuclear arsenals.

What has now become the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (founded in 2000) has argued, along with the current administration, that the current Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs are not sufficient for the long-term maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal, and that there is a mounting need for what has been dubbed the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). While there remains a need for a clear, concise and compelling articulation of the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century, there are very real constraints in play.

The concept of RRW is not about designing a new weapon tailored for the 21st century, but rather making carefully calculated tweaks to existing warhead designs in order to enhance reliability and maintainability and maximize sustainability and safety considerations.

The modern two-stage thermonuclear warheads currently in the arsenal are extraordinarily complex things. They are the product of literally hundreds of nuclear tests — both full-scale tests and even more subcritical experimentation (including hydronuclear and hydrodynamic techniques) — and are thought to contain non-spherical primaries, a particularly complicated design. These warheads were designed in the last days of the Cold War, and were designed to maximize accuracy and what is know as yield-to-weight ratio — maximizing the destructive power per pound, an important consideration for weapons to be mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At that point, these warheads were configured for use in multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, with multiple warheads mounted on a single ICBM.[1]

The U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise uses some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to run simulations and model the impact of age and time on the current arsenal. But ultimately, these Cold War-era warheads were designed in a paradigm of regular testing and ongoing weapons development. New weapons were expected to eventually replace them so indefinite shelf life was not a design consideration.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have stretched these designs, and there is no doubt that the current arsenal remains credible. This confidence is one of the most important considerations for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The nuclear weapons a country fields must be reliable and proven in order for both the government itself and other countries alike to have a high degree of confidence in the credibility of the deterrent itself.

But while the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have certainly achieved this objective (and could likely continue to do so for years to come), a degree of uncertainty and prudence has required the maintenance of two warhead types for each delivery system so that, in the event that one design is found to have an irreparable problem, it can be replaced without affecting the status of the American deterrent. This has resulted in many more warheads being kept in a reserve status than would otherwise be the case.

The question about how America prepares to sustain a nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future — i.e. indefinitely — is reaching a critical juncture. The engineers that have first-hand experience with nuclear weapons design and testing are approaching retirement age. Their personal and intimate knowledge about the smallest and subtlest design choices made in the current weapons architecture will soon test the institutional knowledge of their labs, and something will almost certainly be lost.

As attractive as it might be to think about scaled-down warhead designs or articulating a mission before the design process might begin, the reality is that the ultimate goal has already been articulated: a sustainable deterrent without further nuclear testing. The implication of that goal is a decisive constraint that defines the weapon to be built. It is, simply, the very weapons with which the current engineer pool — both the elder engineers that actually designed the warheads and the next generation that has come up learning the finer points of sustaining them — has the most intimate experience, and more pointedly the experience of working to sustain and extend service life. These are the most modern warheads in the arsenal and are equipped with the most advanced safety features.

This underlying design is the inescapable choice for a country that intends to sustain its arsenal indefinitely without testing. And if that is the goal, the way to maximize the chances for success without testing is to allow the nuclear weapons labs to design and build new warheads now based on the articulated objectives of the RRW program.

While total disarmament is a nice conversation to have, the geopolitical reality is that there remains a deep uncertainty about the future threat environment, and while reductions in the nuclear arsenal are absolutely in the cards, so long as America intends to forgo testing, the warheads of that arsenal are necessarily constrained to only modest and conservative tweaks to the designs of the warheads currently in the arsenal.

Ultimately, there are almost certainly — even necessarily — limits to what the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can accomplish because of the considerations that informed the original design of the warheads currently deployed. The finer points of this are obviously both classified and best left to the engineers themselves. But these underlying considerations make RRW (or a similar program under a different name) the path most likely to maximize the long-term sustainability of the arsenal and minimize the chances of further testing. But the problem with RRW, aside from the public distaste for it, is that the question has already been delayed for years and the way to both set up RRW to succeed and to maximize the chances for its success is to push forward as soon as possible.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can probably continue to do the trick for a decade or more. But at some point, a new design will likely become necessary. The further down the road that this point is reached, the more familiarity with the existing designs and the more first-hand experience with actual weapons design will have been lost.

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1 The exception to this is the cancelled MGM-134 “Midgetman” light ICBM, which was to be armed with a single Mk-21 reentry vehicle — the same multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle mounted in sets of eight to ten on the LGM-118A Peacekeeper heavy ICBM.