Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [103]
A number of ominous signs suggest that nuclear testing might begin again before too long. The debate in the early 2000s about the new Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator warhead was an indication that the government was thinking beyond the test ban; before deploying the weapon, it almost certainly would need a test. Even though Congress strangled that program, it has blessed the Department of Energy’s campaign to design yet another warhead. The Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), as it is called, is supposed to obviate the need for nuclear testing because it would be a hardier device less susceptible to aging. It would be able to assure the reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal for decades without nuclear tests. The only problem is that the RRW would probably require a few nuclear tests before anyone was convinced of its reliability in the first place. It’s a paradox: to maintain the nuclear test ban, the United States might have to resume testing.
A debate is also ongoing about shortening the time it will take to prepare the Nevada nuclear test site for a resumption of underground tests. President George W. Bush tried to make the site ready to resume testing within eighteen months, rather than maintain the previous twenty-four-month lead time. But going to a higher level of readiness announced to the world that the nation was moving toward ending the moratorium, and this could hamstring American attempts to stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. Year after year, the president put money for eighteen-month readiness in the budget; year after year, Congress took it out. Even without the cash, though, the National Nuclear Security Administration, the organization inside the Department of Energy responsible for nuclear weapons, lists eighteen-month test-site readiness as an integral part of the stockpile stewardship program.
The stockpile stewardship program will soon reach a crisis point. Will the federal government be able to assure the reliability of the stockpile without testing nuclear weapons as the program originally promised? Or will it fail, forcing a resumption of testing, breaching the moratorium in place for over a decade? The move toward renewed nuclear testing is happening now, and NIF, if it helps with stockpile stewardship at all, will do so indirectly and in the distant future. The nontesting regime might well be in tatters by the time scientists get any benefit from the multibillion-dollar machine supposedly designed to uphold it.
NIF is the state of the art in laser fusion, yet it is a deeply troubled project. It is vastly more expensive than originally projected. Even if it works perfectly, it won’t keep the country’s nuclear arsenal working or the nontesting policy alive. For a decade, experts have questioned whether it would be sufficiently powerful to achieve ignition and breakeven—and if the history of laser fusion is any guide, NIF, like Nova, will fail to reach its goal. Yet NIF marches on. Laser fusion scientists won’t give up their decades-old dream to put a star in a bottle. And if they fail, as it appears they will, after spending more than $4 billion, there is little hope that they can sucker the government into building yet another bigger and better laser machine.
In 2002, five years after the United States abruptly left the ITER project, fusion scientists were about to get a serious case of déjà vu.
The American departure shook the ITER collaboration—and branded the United States as an unreliable partner when it came to international science—but the project limped along. Russia, Europe, and Japan continued designing an international fusion reactor. The plans they came up