(The following op-ed by Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, first appeared in Defense News on March 5, 2007.)
Following the end of U.S. nuclear testing a decade and a half ago, some scientists and policy-makers worried that the reliability of U.S. nuclear warheads could diminish as their plutonium cores age. They claimed it would take a decade or more to see if the nation’s weapon laboratories could maintain the existing stockpile of well-tested but aging weapons without further nuclear blasts.
Such concerns led many senators to withhold their support for ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1999.
Time has addressed the skeptics’ concerns. For more than a decade, a multibillion-dollar Stockpile Stewardship program has successfully maintained the existing U.S. nuclear arsenal in the absence of testing. As the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. military strategy has diminished, there has been no need to test new types of nukes.
But now, the Bush administration is asking Congress to fund an ambitious effort to build new replacement warheads, which it claims is needed to avoid plutonium aging problems that could reduce weapon reliability. (Read More)