Replace five single points of failure with one?

http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=NUKELABS-10-05-05&cat=WW: “Consolidate nuclear-bomb-making plants, panel says

By JAMES W. BROSNAN
Scripps Howard News Service
October 05, 2005

WASHINGTON - An advisory panel is telling the Department of Energy to consolidate its nuclear-bomb-making facilities into one isolated, secure site to make a new generation of warheads.

The recommendation from the Energy Advisory Board, if adopted by the administration and Congress, would mean a loss of jobs from some of the nation’s historic weapons laboratories, including Oak Ridge, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.

The report also questions why the department needs three expensive supercomputers, Red Storm at Sandia, Q at Los Alamos and Blue Gene at Livermore.

The nuclear-weapons complex is now spread among five different facilities, including the three design labs, Sandia and Los Alamos in New Mexico, Livermore in California, and two production facilities, the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.

‘All of the production elements are quite old and antiquated and we propose that all should be replaced,’ said David Overskei, chairman of the board’s Nuclear Weapons Complex Infrastructure Task Force and president of Decision Factors Inc. of San Diego.

Overskei said the threat of espionage dictated that the complex be spread out in the 1940s and ’50s, but now the threat is terrorism.

Destroy any of the ‘five single points of failure’ and ‘you have lost the ability to produce a nuclear weapon,’ said Overskei.

Even a ‘partially successful’ terrorist attack on Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, the Y-12 plant or the Pantex site ‘may cause collateral damage’ to the surrounding civilian populations, the report said.”

Fascinating. But in a proliferated world, all assets must be distributed assets. The politically unpalatable right answer is to make the nuclear weapons production complex muiltiply redundant. Tough sell!

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