A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays and exacerbated concerns about the Energy Department’s ability to maintain the United States’ strategic deterrent.
The program involves a type of warhead known as the W-76, which is used on the Navy’s Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the U.S. stockpile. The refurbishment program is aimed at replacing thousands of parts that have aged since the bombs left the factory 20 to 30 years ago.
Although the nation’s nuclear weapons are functional and reliable, the W-76 issue represents one of the most serious setbacks in the nuclear-weapons program at least since the end of the Cold War, several experts said.
At issue with the W-76, at least in part, is a classified component in the original weapon that engineers and scientists at the Energy Department’s plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., could not duplicate over the past several years.
The component, known by the code word “fogbank,” is thought to be made of an exotic material and is crucial to a hydrogen bomb reaching its designed energy level in the microseconds before it blows apart.
“I don’t know how this happened, that we forgot how to make fogbank,” said Philip Coyle, a former deputy director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
