• To assure long term confidence in the reliability of the nuclear stockpile

• Enhance security by using state of the art technology

• Improve the safety of the stockpile

• Help to develop a nuclear weapons infrastructure that is more responsive to the future needs

• Utilise and sustain critical nuclear weapons design and production skills

• Enable a reduced stockpile size by increasing confidence in the weapons production infrastructure

• Decrease the likelihood that a nuclear test will be needed

The development of the new warhead, it is claimed, will not involve any new nuclear testing. The programme will use modern manufacturing methods, improved analytical tools and other non-nuclear tests. It is claimed that the new Livermore design is based on components already tested and proved and therefore would not need to be tested.

The US Administration seeks to reassure Russia and China that this programme will only replace the existing warheads and therefore those countries have no reason to be concerned. It is also said that the new programme aims at reliability and safety and will use inert explosives unlike in the earlier programmes. However, the US very often begins its programmes with the assertion that it would contribute to strategic stability but does not take an indulgent view when another country follows suit.

The programme has evoked opposition within the US, particularly among the arms control community. The Congress has been funding the design effort since 2004 and it is not clear whether the Democratic majority in the Congress will make any difference in the funding of the future programme. Ironically enough, this new proposal comes at a time when four veterans of the Cold War, former Secretary of State George Schultz, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, both Republicans, former Defence Secretary William Perry and former Chairman of Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn, both Democrats, have urged in an article in The Wall Street Journal on January 4, 2007 “that a major effort should be launched by the US to produce a positive answer through concrete stages. First and foremost is intensive work with leaders of the countries in possession of nuclear weapons to make the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a joint enterprise. Such a joint enterprise, by involving changes in the disposition of the states possessing nuclear weapons, should lend additional weight to efforts already underway to avoid the emergence of a nuclear armed North Korea and Iran”. US legislative leaders have promised Congressional hearings on the issue of reliability replacement warheads programme. This issue provides a unique opportunity to urge the US to take it up with other states possessing nuclear weapons, to discuss the reliability of all nuclear arsenals, and whether there is any merit in the US enhancing the reliability of its arsenal ahead of all other countries.

This programme also comes at a time when President Putin, in his speech at the Security Policy Seminar in Munich, has voiced Russian concerns about the unilateralism of the US and NATO. This is also the time when China has hiked its defence budget by 17.6 per cent and has tried to imitate the examples of US and Russia in shooting down a satellite in orbit. Those countries could as well argue that their warheads too are of sixties and seventies vintage and therefore would need to be refurbished to increase their reliability.

Some observers suspect that the nuclear establishments are behind this move. Without this programme, there is a danger of some thousands losing their jobs in the three national laboratories in the US. The leaderships of those laboratories were successful in persuading the US Senate to reject in 1998 the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty sponsored by the US Administration itself.

If anything, these developments highlight the need for India to integrate itself with the international technology regime to improve and strengthen its own capabilities. They also teach us that in the international system there are no irrevocable pledges and strong nations can act on the basis of their national interests irrespective of commitments they make. India will not be able to exploit the situation arising out of US unilateralism unless it frees itself from international technology apartheid.

In 1998, in the US the nuclear establishment won a victory over the diplomatic one in the rejection of CTBT. Once again the US political and diplomatic establishments face a challenge from the nuclear establishment with the presentation of the reliability replacement warhead programme. Nine years later, after terrorism, Afghanistan and Iraq, one wonders whether the US political and diplomatic wisdom will prevail over the one-point agenda of the US nuclear establishment or succumb to its pressure and isolate itself because of its technological arrogance.

The writer is a senior defence analyst