Nuclear Weapons Cost Overruns Raise Serious Questions

August 20, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Leah Fae Cochran

Is B61 worth the cost? - Costs for the B-61 nuclear bomb’s life extension program have more than doubled - now up to $10 billion. “This raises some difficult questions,” for The Washington Post editorial board.

--”Who will be deterred by the refurbished B-61? Is the symbolism of deploying the nuclear gravity bomb in Europe worth the billions of dollars? Does it make sense to embark on a $10 billion program to refurbish a weapon that could be put on the table in negotiations with Russia a few years from now?” asks The Post. http://wapo.st/Pyho8g

--Think you have answers for The Post’s B-61 questions? Send a letter to the editor to letters@washpost.com. As always, keep it to 200 words or less.

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Reductions recommended - An assessment released by the State Department recommends “mutual unilateral reductions” of nuclear weapons by US and Russia below New START levels in order to incentivize Russia to scrap plans to build new ICBMs and to reduce the cost of modernization in both countries. Global Security Newswire has the story. http://bit.ly/PtOLcr

NIF set to miss ignition deadline - The likelihood that the multi-billion dollar National Ignition Facility will achieve ignition by the end of 2012 is “extremely low” according to a DOE report. NIF was supposed to achieve its goal during each of the past two years as well. This chronically slipping deadline has many experts questioning whether the NIF will ever achieve its mission - recreating the the complex physics of a thermonuclear explosion on a miniature scale. The David Perlman at The San Francisco Chronicle has the story.

--The NIF was estimated to cost $1.1 billion and be finished by 2002. When the facility was completed in 2009, it’s final cost was $3.5 bilion - with congress appropriating more than $450 million per year for the facility’s experiments. http://bit.ly/TPEY2X

Different clocks - Dennis Ross, a former Obama administration official, argues that Israel and the U.S. are on “different clocks” in terms timetables on Iran. The difference comes from varying military capabilities, the lack of a post-strike endgame strategy, and the US need to exhaust all options before a strike is justified in the international community.

--Ross offers four steps to synchronize Israel-US policy: a US proposal that allows Iran to keep a peaceful civilian nuclear program, discussions with the P5+1 on a plan if diplomacy fails, providing Israel with bunker-busters and other advanced weapons to extend their attack capabilities, and a commitment to support Israel in the case of a strike. Full article at The New York Times. http://nyti.ms/QP4SQA

Tweet - @AmbKennedy: As always, good sense from Michael Krepon "The time is right for ‘rules of the road’ in the cosmos" http://wapo.st/P985uN

Quote - “We may never know how close the attackers at Minhas came to actually stealing a weapon, or even whether that was their intention. But the mere fact that an al-Qaida-affiliated group got past the fence around a place where weapons terrorists have dreamed of possessing for years allegedly were stored should be enough to keep U.S. policymakers tossing their sleep at night,” writes The Baltimore Sun editorial board. http://bit.ly/ScQQwj

Curiosity’s Russian core - A few pounds of Russia’s finest plutonium-238 “hitched a ride to Mars on the back of Curiosity,” writes Geoffrey Brumfiel for Slate. During the Cold War arms race, the isotope was a waste product from U.S. and Russian efforts to gather plutonium-239 to form explosive cores for nuclear warheads. Other waste products sit at contaminated sites to this day.

--Brumfiel notes that this legacy of radioactive waste now does two things - explores space and leaves a radioactive mess back on Earth. http://slate.me/ScIBjP