nuclear-news

The Bunker mentality – U.S. nuclear weapons plans

The Obama administration is making generous concessions to the nuclear industry presumably, as alluded to above, to win votes from Republicans….ways to keep the “nuclear-industrial complex” humming along,

Seed of Destruction: Nuclear ‘Pits’, Foreign Policy In Focus , By Russ Wellen, June 21, 2010 “……The nuclear-weapons industry adopted the word “pit” for the weapon’s core, which is power-packed with the varieties of uranium or plutonium isotopes capable of a warp-speed chain reaction. Yes, it’s a seed for the a chain reaction. ……the pit instead serves as a cache for .. a seed of destruction……

A project for their production is pivotal to the Obama administration’s plans for nuclear modernization. In a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece titled Bunker mentality: Is NNSA digging itself into a hole at Los Alamos?, Greg Mello writes that “as part of the New START ratification package, the administration projects $16 billion in new warhead spending over this decade.” A beneficiary of the funding, if passed by Congress, would be Los Alamos nuclear laboratory, where — boring name alert — the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility for producing said pits would be built for a whopping $3.4 billion……. It “works out to $151,000 per square foot, or $1,049 per square inch.” Holy (watch your tax dollars go up in) smoke!….
there is already a surfeit of backup pits [which] will last for many decades to come. …………
Every aspect of the . . . project, from the mission itself to the practicality of the building design, should be questioned far more deeply than Congress has done to date.

The Obama administration is making generous concessions to the nuclear industry presumably, as alluded to above, to win votes from Republicans on the new START treaty and other disarmament measures, however tepid. In fact, one can’t help but wonder if the administration and conservatives have committed themselves to cooperation (respectable speak for “conspiracy”) in finding ways to keep the “nuclear-industrial complex” humming along, if at a diminished velocity from its heyday in the fifties to eighties.

Foreign Policy In Focus | Seed of Destruction: Nuclear ‘Pits’

June 22, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear costs, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear weapons, radiation, reactors