Why Nuclear Weapons Need Attention

It isn't so much that they make an awfully big hole in the ground—that they do if you contact burst them—but if you don't make them the center of someone's attention, people get sloppy.

Look what happened in the Air Force when nuclear weapons became just another training requirement, rather than the paranoid focus of whole groups of people. When I say paranoid focus I am only half kidding. My last time working in a unit with a nuclear mission we had an inspection a month; and that was from people checking up on us. We inspected ourselves every week. It was very serious business to us.

Now we hear, from Mother Jones that by not making certain parts for ten years we forgot how. You might say, "That is a good thing." I would say it could lead to people stepping out and trying to work around the problem. One of the things about nuclear weapons is that the checklist and by-the-book procedures prevent accidents. Even if you have done it a thousand times, you have the checklist by your hand and open to the proper page.

In this case, it was forgetting how to make a particular material used in nuclear weapon production.

In 2007, as the government began overhauling the nation's stockpile of W76 warheads—the variety often carried by Ohio-class submarines—officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration realized they couldn't produce an essential material known as "Fogbank." What purpose this substance actually serves is classified, but outside experts have suggested that it's a sort of exploding foam that sits between the fission and fusion portions of hydrogen bombs. The Government Accountability Office reported in March that NNSA's effort to recover its Fogbank-making ability had resulted in a yearlong, $69 million delay in the refurbishment project. And a government official with knowledge of the situation tells Mother Jones that further Fogbank-related delays are imminent.

In this case we didn't have someone decide to develop, on his own, a work-around. But, it did cost the tax payers $69 million. In this day and age that is not a lot of money, except to those of us who are taxpayers.

Regards  —  Cliff