Stockpile Stewardship and the Reliable Replacement Warhead: Socio-Technical Repair in the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex

The end of the Cold War created great uncertainty about the future of U.S. nuclear weapons design laboratories. But the laboratories emerged from this crises with new work to do and budgets largely intact. We use the metaphor of socio-technical "repair" to describe how institutions alter technologies and social practices in order to adapt to change. An initial repair strategy, the Stockpile Stewardship Program, sought to transform weapons knowledge with a focus on modeling and simulation, but took a conservative approach to maintaining weapons in the stockpile. A more recent approach, built around the proposed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW), places less emphasis on the development of new knowledge, but seeks to transform the stockpile by redesigning weapon components with long-term stockpile storage in mind. The emergence of RRW as a credible repair strategy reflects significant change in the knowledge and culture of the nuclear weapons community and in the political relevance of nuclear weapons in the era of Stockpile Stewardship.