Saturday, November 2, 2013
"3+2" is in trouble with both the customers and Congress (House and Senate). There's been a now public proclamation by the USAF that they plan to retire the B-83. This will leave only the W87 as a LLNL system - So is this enough to justify keeping LLNL primarily as a nuclear weapons lab?
http://www.nti.org/gsn/article/cost-concerns-could-prompt-new-look-warhead-modernization-plan/
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Don't you guys also have the W80 that you stole from LANL?
It wasn't "stolen." It was given freely as an act of generosity to a lab that had nothing going on, in an effort to preserve the time-honored "competition."
Don't forget LLNL also stealing the W78 Life Extension Project (LEP) from LANL.
I have to agree with the Navy on this one. Don't mess with the design that was fully tested. That's the road to untold problems (and astronomical costs to the tax-payers to fix the problems).
When certain active materials no longer exist, or are prohibitively expensive to produce or deal with environmentally, there is no choice but to change the design. That means underground test (vastly less expensive and vastly more definitive) or billions spent on computer simulations without end, resulting in no real confidence in safety, reliability, or performance. Plus, it keeps a trained nuclear design/testing cadre in place. It is time for the design labs to step up and admit that they always knew "stockpile stewardship" without testing would fail, but supported it because it was the only way to get funding to survive.
Post a Comment