[en] In the early 1980s, the US Department of Energy/Defense Programs (DOE/DP) initiated a project to develop a safe and efficient transportation system for defense high-level waste (DHLW). Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) provides a technical oversight and test support and General Atomics provides the design and safety analysis of the shipping system. The specific activities include designing, testing, certifying and fabricating a legal-weight truck cask system for DHLW canisters that are expected to be first produced by the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Plant (SRP) in South Carolina and later produced by facilities in Washington and Idaho. A truck cask was selected in order to provide a flexible capability for transporting vitrified waste to support a variety of expected experimental program needs. The first planned shipping campaign was to transport a limited number of DHLW canisters from South Carolina to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. However, changes in experimental program plans the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in late 1982, and the subsequent decision to have DHLW permanently placed in the eventual civilian repository resulted in revisions to the mission of the cask development program funded by DOE/DP. 15 refs