Are the labs developing new nuclear weapons?
Robinson: That depends on how you define “new.” If we take a warhead off the shelf that we designed and tested in the past, and then put it on a new delivery vehicle, is that a new nuclear weapon? We will probably have to manufacture new copies because we produced only a few originally, but it is not a new design, nor will we need to test it. I can categorically state that no one is proposing returning to nuclear testing. The main point is that the world is not static. Over the past decade, nations have gone to school on our conventional military capabilities, and many of them have adopted a strategy of moving their high-value targets out of our reach by locating them in deeply buried tunnels and inside mountains. If you want to know who the main culprits are, just look at which nations are buying these huge tunnel-boring machines. You’ll find that North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Libya have all built a lot of underground facilities. We keep having to relearn this lesson that the world is
