January 2007
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The View From HQ

Dimitri Kusnezov

Sitting in airports and planes is risky beyond the obvious dangers now in the news. Uninterrupted time to think may lead to new ideas. Instinct instructs us that when we hear Washington has some new ideas, the result must be bad. After all, ideas suggest change, which is inherently disruptive.

Today the notion of predictivity is on my mind as I am leaving the V&V 2007 meeting in Los Alamos. Predictivity is on my short list of overused, ill-defined words. Washington maintains a full lexicon of such words—a fair number of which find their way into common usage. Despite its ambiguities, the concept of predictivity spurs some thoughts regarding change in the nuclear weapons complex.

The nuclear weapons enterprise, which I believe is still coasting on post cold-war momentum, is in need of re-evaluation. We face the increased “virtualization” of our world in decades to come. To prepare ourselves for the unforeseeable future, we will need to develop a virtual milieu that is conducive to exploration of ideas with sufficient integrity so we can respond when, and if, technological surprises arise. When sufficient technical data are unavailable, predictivity will become essential—our sine qua non.

The new ASC 2020 Roadmap emphasizes the need for predictivity. Emphasizing predictivity and technology as underpinnings, I would like to remove critical phenomenology from the simulation codes in three-year cycles. For us to embrace the need for predictivity, we will need to forego the old, tired rationale, “that’s the way we always have done it.”

The Thermonuclear Burn Initiative (TBI) illustrates my point. I initiated this just over a year ago, to provide a long-term, unconstrained intellectual environment with resources to allow researchers to step back and question traditional approaches to problems of great interest. Today, this initiative has become an exciting computational science leadership effort. If you are not acquainted with it, you should be.

We need more ideas along the lines of the TBI. I will continue to think strategically about such issues, at airports and other “quiet” places. I particularly welcome your thoughts and specific suggestions that have not yet been considered or tried to help us move forward.