ABSTRACT
Concern about design follows from fear that ongoing design work could lead to new ways to exploit nuclear energy for making war. Achieving a thermonuclear device, and reducing it in size for convenient delivery, is much harder design and engineering tasks. But a basic weapon, of either uranium or plutonium, is "easy" to design. The new design would lead to weapons much like those already extant. A country pursuing systematic design of this sort could just as well make weapons of an old, familiar type. The program is hyped as an alternative to retaining "hedge" stocks of nuclear weapons, but it addresses only a fraction of reasons advanced for the "hedge." The designers expect to learn a great deal during the course of the program, as they practice science with new tools; some of what they learn would bear on new weapon designs.
