Peter Fanta, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear matters at the Department of Defense, has said the U.S. should shift its focus from updating delivery systems toward modernizing nuclear warheads, Defense News reported Tuesday.
Fanta told the audience at the Nuclear Deterrence Summit that DoD and the Department of Energy should collaborate to come up with engineering and manufacturing capabilities to develop updated warheads by 2040s in order to keep pace with potential enemies’ technological advancements.
“How do we as DoD send a demand signal into DOE to say: ‘This is what we need’? We start looking at robustness, margin, penetrability, survivability, communications within weapons,†he said.
“We start looking at the internals of the weapons as well as the delivery systems. … We start looking at what we can do to make them hard by design, flexible by design and able to put them into a new system when we decide what that new system is,†he added.
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