Memorandum from Professor Richard L Garwin
1. On 4 December, Prime Minister Blair announced
in Parliament his Government's decision to replace Britain's four
Trident ballistic-missile submarines with a successor fleet. He
asserted that the service life of these submarines can be extended
to only 30 years, which would mean that the submarines would have
to be retired in 2023 (Vanguard), 2025 (Victorious),
2026 (Vigilant), and 2029 (Vengeance). [44]
(a) Richard L Garwin is a member of the US
National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences,
and the Institute of Medicine. He has received the National Medal
of Science and the Enrico Fermi Award, as well as RV Jones Award
in Scientific Intelligence. For many years he chaired for the
President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) the Antisubmarine
Warfare Panel, the Naval Warfare Panel, and the Military Aircraft
Panel. He served for many years also on the Strategic Military
Panel of PSAC. He is a long-standing consultant to the Los Alamos
National Laboratory and the Sandia National Laboratories and is
currently involved with assessments of the US nuclear weapons
program. He continues to be active with contributing to and assessing
defense technology both independently and as a member of the JASON
group of consultants to the US Government.
(b) Philip E Coyle is a Senior Advisor to
the President of the World Security Institute, a Washington DCbased
national security study center. He is a recognized expert on US
and worldwide military research, development and testing, on operational
military matters, and on national security policy and defense
spending. From 1994 to 2001, Mr Coyle was Assistant Secretary
of Defense and Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, in the
Department of Defense, and the principal advisor to the Secretary
of Defense on testing and evaluation of US military systems. During
the Carter Administration, Mr Coyle served as Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Defense Programs in the Department of
Energy with responsibility for nuclear weapons research, development,
and testing. Then and at various times in his 33-year career at
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California,
he supported the United Kingdom SSBN program and the development,
testing and evaluation of nuclear warheads with the UK.
(c) Theodore A Postol, physics and nuclear
engineering. Professor of Science, Technology and National Security
Policy in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.
He served as staff for the Congressional Office of Technology
Assessment Study on MX Missile Basing. He then assumed a position
as scientific advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations where he
dealt with questions of future strategic deterrence and missile
defense. After leaving the Pentagon, Dr Postol helped to build
a program at Stanford University to train mid-career scientists
to study developments in weapons technology of relevance to defense
and arms control policy. In 1990 Dr Postol was awarded the Leo
Szilard Prize from the American Physical Society.
(d) Frank von Hippel is Professor of Public
and International Affairs at Princeton University and co-founder
of Princeton's Program on Science and Global Security. He has
contributed to the US nuclear-policy debate both by his independent
assessments and as Assistant Director for National Security of
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is
co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials.
2. In this Comment we explain why we believe
it likely that the Vanguard-class submarines can safely
and economically be operated for 40-45 years rather than 30. This
would not only save funds for other defence needs but would provide
valuable flexibility in the decision whether or not to maintain
the nuclear deterrent for another 40 years beyond 2035, to build
smaller SSN-size strategic submarines for a smaller long-range
ballistic missile, or to introduce new technology to the submarine
design and build process. We touch also on the question of the
submarine industrial infrastructure, the pace of manufacturing,
and the skill base for Britain's nuclear submarines. Finally,
we observe that the security of the UK, like that of the US, is
more imperiled than supported by the existence of nuclear weapons,
and that the elimination of nuclear weapons, or at least of national
nuclear weapons, is a possibility. [45]
3. Given that the service lives of US Trident
submarines were extended in 1998 from 30 to 44 years, [46]one
obvious question is whether the UK could do the same. (In 1998,
the oldest US Trident, the Ohio, was 17 years old,
three years older than the Vanguard is today.) Also the
US Tridents spend approximately two thirds of their lives
at sea with two crews for each submarine while the UK requires
that only one out of four of its Tridents be at sea at
any time. The lower usage rate of the UK Tridents might
be expected to increase their life expectancy relative to the
US Tridents.
4. The White Paper on The Future of the
United Kingdom's Nuclear Deterrent submitted to Parliament
by the Secretaries of State for Defense and Foreign and Commonwealth
Affairs (hereafter Defense/Foreign Affairs, for short) argues,
however, that a life extension is not possible for Britain's Tridents:
"We have undertaken detailed work to assess
the scope for extending the life of those submarines. Our ability
to achieve this is limited because some major components on the
submarines - including the steam generators, other elements of
the nuclear propulsion system and some non-nuclear support systemswere
only designed for a 25-year life. The submarines have been, and
will continue to be, subjected to a rigorous through-life maintenance
regime and we believe that, by revalidating those components,
it should be possible to extend the life of the submarines by
around five years." [47]
Since the UK Tridents are still relatively
young, however, it may be that improved management of their water
chemistry could drastically extend the steam generator lives.
The US has a major R&D program in that area whose results
could presumably be shared with the UK. [48]More
fundamentally, we are skeptical that the submarines "were
only designed for a 25-year life". More likely, they have
a "minimum design life" of 25 years and are likely to
be operable for a much longer time. A similar misunderstanding
was prevalent about the longevity of US nuclear warheads, with
some arguing that because experience with the core of the nuclear
weapon primarythe sealed metal "pit"was
limited to, say, 45 years, one needed to plan and operate pit-manufacturing
plants to provide replacement pits as a 45-year echo of the original
build. The US Science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program has
recently determined that pit lifetimes are at least 85 years,
as announced by the US National Nuclear Security Administration
(NNSA). [49]Since
the pit is the most specialized part of the nuclear weapon and
the element most critical to its performance, it is of great significance
that its life exceeds 85 rather than 45 years. This certainly
does not imply that the entire nuclear warhead will remain operable
for 85 years, but the remainder of the warhead is more readily
testable and replaceable. The lesson for the submarine replacement
program is that continued monitoring of the submarines in service
may show well in advance that the service life, with proper maintenance
and corrective action, can much exceed the 25-year minimum.
5. In particular, replacing the steam generators
and other limited life components should not be casually dismissed
as an option if it would allow a 10 to 15-year extension of the
UK Trident submarine service lives and a corresponding
deferral of the replacement decision. It is a routine if major
operation to replace steam generators in civilian nuclear power
plants. A proper evaluation should be made of the cost of access
through the Trident hulls and replacement of their steam
generators, if that is required.
6. Major refurbishments in the Trident
submarines are routine and replacements of major systems are assuredly
involved. As the Prime Minister stated to Parliament on 4 December:
"Our deterrent is based on four submarines.
At any one time, one will be in dock undergoing extensive repair
and maintenance, usually for around four years."
The Vanguard spent three years in refit
at the Devonport Naval Base including a new reactor core between
2002 and 2005, ie between year nine and 12 of its life. The Victorious
began refit in 2005, the 10th year of its life. [50]The
new cores should be longer lived, [51]so
it is not clear when the next major refit would be scheduled.
7. The Prime Minister stated that the cost
of building four replacement submarines would be £15-20 billion.
The real discount rate used for UK indexed gilt-edged bonds by
the UK Debt Management Office is 2.5%. A delay in this expenditure
by 10-15 years would be worth about £5 billion. Alternatively,
extending the lifetime of the submarines from 30 to 40 or 45 years
would reduce the annual capital cost by £150-200 million
per year. Obviously, the possibility of such life extension is
worth in-depth study.
8. Our experience is that it is useful to
challenge statements such as those made in the Defense/Foreign
Affairs White Paper. For want of deep analysis of the options,
real national military capability often takes second place to
parochial service and contractor interests.
9. For example, in the 1960s when one of
us (RLG) chaired the Military Aircraft Panel of the US President's
Science Advisory Committee, the US Air Force was arguing that
the B52 could not operate much beyond the 1970s because of the
accumulation of metal fatigue in its wings, and for other reasons.
The B52, of course, still operates 40 years later, as a result
of life extension programs.
10. At the time, the US Air Force was arguing
for a replacement aircraftthe B70 and then the Advanced
Manned Strategic AircraftAMSAwith the claim that
an aircraft with somewhat higher subsonic speed would not be as
vulnerable as the B52 to the Soviet-supplied surface-to-air (SAM)
systems that were spreading around the world and that were, in
fact, operating at that time in Vietnam.
11. Detailed discussion with the Air Force
revealed that the relative invulnerability of the newer aircraft
depended on the assumption that the SAM-2 system needed to track
the aircraft for a much longer period before launch than we knew
to be the case.
12. Indeed, the United States did build
two new strategic aircraftthe B-1 and the B-2, and similar
lawyerly arguments were made in favor of each of these. The B-1,
in particular, was for the strategic role in competition with
the B52 and with the cruise-missile carrier, since it was finally
recognized that it was both inefficient and too vulnerable to
have an aircraft make the rounds to deliver a dozen or more strategic
nuclear weapons against individual targets in the heavily defended
Soviet Union. Instead, long-range strategic cruise missiles would
be launched from aircraft outside or near the border of the Soviet
Union, in order to be able to carry out the retaliatory strike
and allow the aircraft system to serve as a component of the strategic
deterrent.
13. Congressional testimony exposed the
Air Force assumption that the cruise missile carrier would spend
one hour (alternatively, two hours) flying along the border of
the Soviet Union to release its 40 or so cruise missiles; the
ballistic-missile submarines launch their missiles undersea at
a 15-second cadencea much more difficult task. The problem
was resolved by equipping the old B-52 with air-launched cruise
missiles that allow it to launch from outside defended areas.
In addition, the Air Force discovered that the strategic cruise
missile could actually be carried internally by the proposed B-1
bomberdespite Air Force early antagonism to the cruise
missile.
14. As a further example, imminent improvements
in Soviet antisubmarine warfare similarly were cited as the reason
why it was urgent to proceed with the Trident submarines because
the larger submarines could carry larger missiles with intercontinental
rangehence a much larger ocean operating area. When one
of us (RLG) testified in support of an extended-range Poseidon
missile to be deployed in the existing Poseidon submarines, the
US Navy countered that the accumulation of hull corrosion and
metal fatigue in the Poseidon submarines strictly limited their
life in any case.
15. This led RLG to write a letter to the
Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Engineering, and
Systems to try to obtain a straightforward definitive answer as
to the "compelling argument" that submarine hull corrosion
and metal fatigue required the urgent replacement of the Poseidon
submarines.
16. RLG's letter to David E Mann and his
reply are attached. Mann's reply was that, in fact, an intensive
monitoring program had shown that hull corrosion and metal fatigue
of US strategic submarines were not major problems and, further,
that to the extent they occurred, there were low-cost, effective
solutions.
17. We cite this not because we believe
that the Naval officers who had given the false statements were
lying, but rather that, for years, they must have been ignorant
of technical reality. The same may be true of the authors of the
UK White Paper on The Future of the United Kingdom's Nuclear Deterrent.
18. That UK Government White Paper does
not cite metal fatigue and hull corrosion as life-limiting factors
for the UK Trident submarines. It simply indicates that (pp 9,
10)
"...some major components of the submarinesincluding
the steam generators, other elements of the nuclear propulsion
system and some non-nuclear support systemswere only designed
for a 25-year life
There have been some suggestions that
we should replicate US plans to extend the lives of their Ohio-class
SSBNs from 30 to over 40 years. A substantial life extension of
this kind would need to have been built into the original design
of the Vanguard Class and into the subsequent manufacture, refit
and maintenance of the boats. Unlike with the Ohio class this
was not the case."
In systems designed conservatively to ensure
a minimum life of 25 years, it is common to find from experience
that the system or component can be operated safely for a much
longer time; often it is the advent of smaller, cheaper options
that cause the scrapping of equipment, as is certainly the case
with computers. Here, however, the replacement would carry the
same large missiles and fulfill the same mission, so that the
benefits of newer technology are minimalor at least unstated
in the White Paper. Certainly, a much more detailed consideration
of the options than is offered in the Defense/Foreign Affairs
White Paper would be required to make a judgment between a life-extension
program and a program for building new submarines.
19. In our experience, until these matters
are properly prepared for outside review, they are not adequately
formulated for inside decision makers. We see no reason why questions
such as the possibilities for control of the corrosion of steam
generators cannot be fully discussed in public. As for the "other
elements of the nuclear propulsion system and some non-nuclear
support systems... only designed for a 25-year life" not
otherwise detailed in the White Paper, these are surely replaceable
in case surveillance shows the need to do so, and it is only a
matter of cost-to-replace compared with the proposed program for
replacement of the fleet itself.
20. Beyond the potential cost savings in
choosing life extension of the Vanguard fleet over total
replacement of the submarines, there is great merit in postponing
the initiation of a replacement program even if that were to be
the ultimate choice. The Trident D-5 missile is greatly oversized
for its current loading that averages three warheads for a missile
that can accommodate 12 and in US SLBMs the average is now down
to 6. [52]To
permit the delivery of a single warhead, it is likely that some
of the UK missiles are fitted with a single warhead and some with
considerably more than the average of three. Because of the enormous
evolution in computer technology and the miniaturization of guidance
systems, there is the opportunity to use small, single-warhead
missiles of range comparable with the Trident D-5, but those missiles
would need to be developed, together with a potential suite of
appropriate countermeasures to ballistic-missile defense systems.
A resulting major benefit would be the much smaller strategic
submarine that could be operated by the much smaller crew enabled
by modern information technology; the UK could consider a fleet
of 6-8 such submarines that would permit keeping two at sea at
all times. For instance, a version of the Astute class SSN might
be built as an SSBN with the small, single-warhead missiles. A
hasty commitment to a simple Vanguard replacement would foreclose
such an opportunity.
21. Parliament has recently published a
report on the manufacturing and skills base for the UK's SSBNs.
[53]Industry
has stated and the Government seems to accept that an interval
of 22 monthsa rhythm or "drumbeat"is the
minimum rate needed to maintain a healthy nuclear-submarine design
and production base in the UK. The Royal Navy now operates the
four Vanguard SSBNs and nine SSNs (two Swiftsure
and seven Trafalgar), with three Astute SSNs in
the pipeline. If the program would maintain a pace of one ship
every two years, then with a 30-year operating life, there would
be 15 submarines in the Navy; with a 45-year operating life there
would be 22 ships. The pace demanded by industry does not seem
to be compatible with the funds and planning of the Government,
but one does see a lack of motivation to extend the operating
life.
22. The explicit premise for the continuation
of the Vanguard programeither by life extension
or replacementis that the submarine is invisible and invulnerable
in the open ocean. With the end of the Soviet Union and of committed
enmity between East and West, there is no longer the deep-seated
fear that Soviet science and technology would put the patrolling
SLBMs at risk of preemptive destruction, but the USand
we presume the UKhas intensive programs to evaluate the
possibility that Russia or other states will be able to use satellite
observations or other approaches to track or to detect the submarines
at sea. Another potential vulnerability arises from the surreptitious
attachment to the submarine hull of a tracking aide as the submarine
leaves port, and the fleets must exercise constant vigilance to
avoid this.
23. The purpose of the UK SSBNs is evidently
very different from what it was during the Cold War, aside from
the simplistic statement that it is to prevent the destruction
of the country and to guarantee security. Against whom could the
"strategic nuclear deterrent" effectively be oriented?
This is, of course, the central question, which is difficult to
answer at a time of international confusion about the future of
nuclear weapons. A decade delay in the replacement decision might
produce a clearer answer.
24. With conservatives and liberals alike
(for example see footnote 2) now calling for renewed effort towards
the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom
has a unique opportunity for world leadership as it considers
the role and value of its nuclear force. An unnecessary and premature
decision to build new submarines could lock the United Kingdom
into a more costly and dangerous future for the next 50 years,
while a decision to extend the life of its existing submarines
opens a variety of options for the UK.
25. To maintain the UK security it is essential
that the future of the nuclear deterrent be decided with full
consideration of the options and of their cost, in view of the
other needs in the defence budget. The White Paper is only a start
on that process. As we have indicated above, much more remains
to be done, both within the Government and in Parliament.
10 January 2007
44 These are the commissioning dates given at http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/vanguard
plus 30 years. For some reason, the Prime Minister's statement
has the retirement dates one year earlier. Back
45
"A World Free of Nuclear Weapons," by George P Shultz,
William J Perry, Henry A Kissinger and Sam Nunn, Wall Street
Journal, 4 January 2007. Back
46
See eg Nuclear Posture Review, Submitted by the
US Department of Defense to the US Congress, 31 December 2001,
p 42, excerpts available on globalsecurity.org Back
47
The Future of the United Kingdom's Nuclear Deterrent,
White Paper presented to Parliament by the Secretary of State
for Defense and the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth
Affairs, December 2006, para 1-3. Back
48
See eg, the US Department of Energy discussion of this
program in the justification of the naval reactors portion of
its proposed Fiscal Year 2004 budget: "Maintaining steam
generator integrity over the full service life, especially as
we extend the service life of ships, requires improving understanding
of high temperature corrosion processes, assessment of potential
causes and corrective actions, and development of alternative
water chemistries which can inhibit or abate corrosion. Trace
impurities become highly concentrated by the boiling process in
areas of low flow and form deposits. The concentration of impurities
in these deposits can become corrosive and threaten the integrity
of the unit. Development work focuses on evaluating corrosion
mechanisms, devising methods to locate and remove deposits, minimizing
input of impurities, and evaluating and testing water chemistries
and corrosion inhibitors for benefits and drawbacks to ensure
they mitigate the consequences of impurities over the life of
the plant," http://www.mbe.doe.gov/budget/04budget/content/nvlreact/nvlreact.pdf,
p 818. Back
49
"Overall, the weapons laboratories studies assessed that
the majority of plutonium pits for most nuclear weapons have minimum
lifetimes of at least 85 years." (NNSA Press Release, 29
November 2006, at www.nnsa.doe.gov) Back
50
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/vanguard/ Back
51
Rolls Royce indicates that its new reactor core design "lasts
the entire life of the submarine, eliminating costly mid-life
refueling," http://marine.rolls-royce.com/nuclear-reactor/ Back
52
Robert S Norris and Hans M Kristensen, NRDC: Nuclear Notebook,
US nuclear forces, 2006; January/February 2006, pp 68-71 (vol
62, no 1) http://www.thebulletin.org/article-nn.php?art-ofn=jf06norris Back
53
House of Commons Defence Committee, The Future of the UK's
Strategic Deterrent: the Manufacturing and Skills Base, Fourth
Report of Session 2006-07, 12 December 2006. Back
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