Avid Seinfeld fans may remember an episode in which Kramer subscribes to a fax menu service that calls to Elaine’s non-existent fax line. The screeching calls received at all hours cause Elaine to have get a new phone-line, and she is dismayed to find that this will put her in a new area code because 212 numbers have run out. She attempts to convince, first, the telephone company representative and, later, a potential date that it is not a ”new” phone number; it’s the same phone line, just different.

Those who are equally avid followers of the operations of government bureaucracy may not be surprised to find that elements within the government (in this case within the Department’s of Energy (DoE) and Defense (DoD)) have been having this same circular conversation (cast in the role of Elaine) with the Congress and the citizenry for quite some time. The subject of this conversation, however, is the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), which has raised the question of how much you can change a warhead and still call it the “same”.

While the Senate voted not to fund the program on July 10th, the RRW is an issue which is perennially down, but never dead. This week there is to be a report about the possibility of using pits (the pit is a sphere of fissile material [plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU)] that is compressed by high explosive “lenses” to create a critical mass) from existing warheads inside the RRWs.

The crux of the argument, putting aside issues of economics for a moment, is that Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) says that nuclear weapon states will make good-faith efforts to disarm. While the US maintains a clear policy that its nuclear arsenal will be necessary for deterrence into the foreseeable future, a number of US behaviors can be called a good-faith efforts to move toward disarmament. These behaviors include a reduction of nuclear weapon missions (e.g. getting rid of tactical nuclear artillery, surface naval nuclear weapons, nuclear mines, etc.), a moratorium on fissile material production, a monotonic decrease in the number of fielded weapons over recent years, and, critically important for our purposes, a moratorium on the production of new weapon designs. With tensions running high among non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) who feel that the regime is discriminatory and that the nuclear weapon states (NWS) are not doing their part either with respect to not hindering but rather assisting NNWSs, who are members of the NPT in good stead, to acquire peaceful nuclear technology or to disarm. After a completely unproductive 2005 NPT Review Conference, it is not a stretch to imagine an equally divisive 2010 Review Conference could lead to an exodus of NNWS parties from the NPT. Because of this potential for instability, virtually everyone realizes (including I suspect the RRW proponents at the DoE and DoD) that this is not a good time to backslide on the Article VI commitment. It should be noted that the British government has been fighting its own battles over ambiguous statements that initially led people to believe that there might be a modernization of their nuclear weapons (apparently they plan to update the weapon platforms [i.e. submarines], but not the actual warheads).

All of this has put proponents of the RRW in the position of making the tragicomic argument that the RRW is really the same warhead- only different. It is said to be the same in that it offers no new capabilities and is “largely” (what this means is unclear) built around the existing designs. In other words, the deviations from existing designs are just what are intended to make the weapon more reliable and robust. The increased reliability has a number of benefits, including potential benefits in the realm of nonproliferation. By having a more reliable warhead, one could argue that one will be able to further reduce numbers of deployed warheads because a small safety buffer would be required.

If the report shows that existing pits could be used, it could have several benefits for RRW supporters. The first is, obviously, an economic benefit. However, it might also give confidence that there would be a one – for -one exchange of RRWs. That is, if they are using common pits, and one warhead is built, then the old warhead that that that pit came out of is effectively decommissioned (this would certainly require verifiable destruction to count as a reduction for the purposes of other states.) It also might suggest that there really is very little design change. That is, if one can merely drop in such a major component as the plutonium or HEU core, then maybe there really isn’t a major design change. If the existing pits cannot be used, perhaps the RRW will have passed through the ninth of its lives. Ultimately it will prove exceptionally difficult to prove that anything is the same… only different.