Peer Review and Design Competition in the NNSA National Security Laboratories (2015) / Chapter Skim
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4 The Future: Responding to Evolving Challenges
4 The Future: Responding to Evolving Challenges
Pages 39-52
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From page 39... ...
Moreover, as other nations pursue new designs or strategies that could constitute serious threat evolutions, the United States could find itself in a precarious security situation were it not to maintain nuclear weapon design, development, and production skills to address such evolving demands. During the Cold War era, the nation depended on an active program of designing and testing nuclear weapons because the threat from other nations was changing rapidly.
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From page 40... ...
NNSA is entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring unimpeachable confidence in the nation's nuclear warheads through its nuclear complex, consisting of the three national security laboratories, the test site, and the production plants. Today the technical challenges to carrying out this mission in the global environment described above are unprecedented: • For the near term, the average age of the warheads in the stock pile will continue to climb, increasing the challenge of surveil lance, meant to assure the physical state of the weapons, and for the annual stockpile assessments.
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From page 41... ...
, 2012, Managing for High-Quality Science and Engineering at the NNSA National Security Laboratories, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.; NRC, 2013, The Quality of Science and Engineering at the NNSA National Security Laboratories, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C. 2 Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, 2014, A New Foundation for the Nuclear Enterprise, November; NRC, 2015, Aligning the Governance Structure of the NNSA Laboratories to Meet 21st Century National Security Challenges, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C.
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From page 42... ...
Such frameworks codify best practices and in essence capture the insights gained during the days of nuclear testing, when laboratory staff saw the many ways in which nature confounded the best predictions of any single team of scientists and engineers. Codifying the peer review approaches developed in recent years with the insights from the days of nuclear testing can be very beneficial to future generations of weapons designers after the current generation has retired.
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From page 43... ...
The value senior leadership places on peer review provides a strong incentive for peer review among the middle management and staff. The committee notes that independent peer reviews are regularly used by laboratory directors to assess early design feasibility studies as well as to review surveillance and SFI results, even though such reviews are not mandated and may expend their limited resources.
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From page 44... ...
Conclusion 2: The innovations produced by design competitions during the Cold War, as well as the increased confidence in the safety and reliability of stockpile weapons resulting from current assessment processes such as the Independent Nuclear Weapons Assessment Process (INWAP) , illustrate the value of having inde pendent teams, using different approaches and methods, address ing common problems.
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From page 45... ...
The committee looked for instances in which peer review failed to find problems, but it did not find any clear examples of this. The three laboratories currently carry out high-quality, effective peer reviews of designs, development plans, and engineering and scientific activities.
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From page 46... ...
Conclusion 3: Although the RRW design study succeeded in pro ducing innovative weapon designs by the competing teams, its value was reduced because technical experts from the competing laboratories were not given the opportunity to critique one anoth er's ideas through interlaboratory peer review or to address criti cisms at the science and engineering level before the final designs were formally presented to NNSA and potential end users. Senior staffers from both LANL and LLNL told the committee3 that they support the concept of true design competitions as a necessary means of maintaining the laboratories' capabilities in nuclear weapons design.
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From page 47... ...
• There have been no full NEP design competitions since the 1992 nuclear explosion testing moratorium. Recent design studies have been good analysis and modeling exercises, but they did not result in the actual engineering and fabrication of compo nents and systems; thus, they did not exercise the complete set of skills required in the NNSA complex to design nuclear weapons that would be an effective deterrent, nor was the credibility of any design assessed by fabricating a device or by non-nuclear testing.
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From page 48... ...
Determining the best and most cost-effective approaches to resolving problems that arise during stockpile weapon surveil lance and Life-Extension Programs. Recommendation 4: In order to exercise the full set of design skills necessary for an effective nuclear deterrent, the National Nuclear Security Administration should develop and propose the first in what the committee envisions as a series of design competitions that include designing, engineering, building, and non-nuclear testing of a prototype.
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From page 49... ...
However, because of the constraints associated with the requirements for component reuse and compatibility with existing delivery systems, the committee's view is that the 3 + 2 program does not involve fundamentally new designs and therefore does not exercise the same NEP design skills as the "clean slate" design competitions recommended here. To the extent that the 3 + 2 program does turn out to involve extensive warhead redesign, it could fulfill in part the purpose of Recommendation 4.
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From page 50... ...
jointly develop a multiyear plan to design and build prototypes of nuclear weapons to further intelligence estimates with respect to foreign nuclear weapons activities and capabilities."8 Recommendation 4, which is aimed at the preservation of nuclear weapon design capabilities at the NNSA laboratories, is consistent with the spirit of these authorizations. Recommendation 4 calls for alternative design competitions that would be much more effective than the recent design studies, but it would entail costs.
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From page 51... ...
Other sponsors include the Department of Homeland Security, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In 2008, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman formally articulated a vision for the future of the NNSA laboratories as national security laboratories charged with conducting research and development to address a range of national security threats facing the nation.11 Several recent reports have noted the benefits that SPP brings to the nuclear weapons mission of the laboratories.
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From page 52... ...
These new sources of expertise could help broaden and diversify laboratory peer reviews, as called for in Recommendation 1. SUMMARY COMMENTS Implementation of the above four recommendations would help ensure that the most important asset -- a competent workforce with demonstrated skills and judgment -- is being developed and maintained and that all stakeholders (including our adversaries)
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