The Honorable Byron Dorgan 

Chairman
Senate Appropriations Committee
The Capitol, S-131
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Chairman Dorgan,

Taxpayers for Common Sense urges you to eliminate funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) requested this year by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Department of Defense. As you noted earlier this week, the RRW program raises important questions about the future of nuclear weapons, questions which won’t be answered by our current Cold War-era strategy. Until a new strategy is forged, committing funds to this program raises significant danger of dissipation and waste.

The request for these funds—which promises to be only a down payment on an exorbitantly expensive program—is predicated on an assumption that the reliability of the plutonium cores in U.S. nuclear warheads will erode over time. However, numerous experts, such as IBM senior researcher Richard Garwin and Princeton professor Frank von Hippel, have testified to the error in this assumption.

For the past 11 years, successive Secretaries of Energy and Secretaries of Defense have certified that the nuclear stockpile is safe and reliable. Six months ago, Jason, an independent panel of scientists and engineers that advises the U.S. government on nuclear weapons issues, concluded that the plutonium in the current nuclear stockpile has a shelf life of at least 85 years and that existing weapons will be reliable for a minimum of 50 years. There is simply no compelling justification for the development and production of new warheads at this time.

Though NNSA officials claim the RRW program will ultimately reduce the cost of nuclear weapons infrastructure, the pursuit of RRW would likely increase costs over the next 15 to 20 years as NNSA continues to refurbish existing warheads until their replacements are built. Finally, RRW production would also require expensive new plutonium pit production facilities. While a Department of Energy task force estimated in October 2005 the capital investment of “transforming” the nuclear weapons complex at $155 billion, in April 2006 the Government Accountability Office criticized that figure as too low, pointing out that “NNSA has had difficulty developing realistic, defensible cost estimates, especially for large complex projects.”

We urge you to reject this funding request at a time of enormous deficits, steep war costs and other taxpayer burdens that warrant more attention than another expensive nuclear boondoggle. If you would like to discuss this matter further, please contact me or Laura Peterson at 202-546-8500 ext. 114 or email.

Sincerely,

Ryan Alexander
President