Stockpile stewardship in the light of national ignition campaign experience

ABSTRACTUncontrolled risk is inherent in any program that lacks a proven means for revealing improper system performance, and the U.S. Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) is no exception. The downside of uncontrolled risk has been illustrated by the outcome of the National Ignition Campaign (NIC), a part of the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Program that has long been characterized as a crucial adjunct to the U.S. nuclear weapons program. For most of its duration, the NIC utilized simulations and partial-system experiments at several facilities, adding full-system experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) only at the very end of the program. Uncontrolled risk was present in the program while those experiments were absent. That risk materialized when failure to achieve fusion capsule ignition was repeatedly and conclusively demonstrated in full-system experiments. For the SSP, the corresponding risk is that expectations concerning the safety, performance, and reliability of weapons in the stoc...