Lightning Environments for Modern Stockpile-to-Target Sequences

• Published in: Military operations research (Alexandria, Va.) Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 5 - 22
• Main Author: Kaye, Anthony B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Military Operations Research Society 01.01.2022
• Subjects: RESEARCH PAPER
• ISSN: 1082-5983; 2163-2758

The Department of Defense and Department of Energy use the stockpile-to-target sequence (STS) to define both normal and abnormal environments a nuclear weapon may experience and their associated requirements. Requirements in the STS should be based on the best scientific understanding and traceable to their original sources; some environments (e.g., lightning) should be uniform across the entire stockpile. During the development of the W80-4 STS, it was noted that the lightning requirements in the most recent STSs were different from system to system and were not traceable to source scientific analysis. This paper examines the existing lightning literature in order to establish the basis for lightning requirements, evaluates the validity of current requirements, and leverages this opportunity to strengthen source traceability and commonality across the entire stockpile to develop a new set of proposed lightning requirements. A new requirement for lightning polarity (i.e., a new environment) that drives significant changes to the requirements for peak electromagnetic field strengths and gradients is also identified; the new electromagnetic field gradients exceed the limits established by the current version of MIL-STD-464C (Department of Defense, 2010).