nuclear-news

Dose the US Need New Plutonium Pits?

Maintaining nuclear weapons is both dangerous and expensive.

 Inkstick, ALICIA INEZ GUZMÁN,  MARCH 4, 2024

Sprinkled across five western states, in silos buried deep underground and protected by reinforced concrete, sit 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each of those missiles is equipped with a single nuclear warhead. And each of those warheads is itself equipped with one hollow, grapefruit-sized plutonium pit, designed to trigger a string of deadly reactions.

All of those missiles are on “hair-trigger alert,” poised for hundreds of targets in Russia — any one of which could raze all of downtown Moscow and cause hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Except — what if it doesn’t? What if, in a nuclear exchange, the pit fizzles because it’s just too old? In that case, would the weapon be a total dud or simply yield but a fraction of its latent power?

Outwardly, at least, that’s the question driving a whole new era of plutonium pit production at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility in South Carolina……………………………………………………

Now, as the nuclear industrial complex awakens from its long slumber, the resumption of plutonium pit production has emerged as a deeply polarizing and political act. Anti-nuclear activists have accused the federal government of exploiting the uncertainty around aging to jumpstart a nearly $60 billion dollar manufacturing program. They assert that the real reason America has resumed the production of pits is for the purpose of introducing a new generation of warheads for a new generation of missiles — the first of which is the Sentinel, one of the most complex and expensive programs in the history of the US Air Force……………………………………………………..

“The issue of plutonium pit aging is a Trojan horse for the nuclear weaponeers enriching themselves through a dangerous new arms race,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear group based in Santa Fe. “Future pit production is not about maintaining the existing, extensively tested stockpile. Instead, it’s for deploying multiple new warheads on new intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

……………………………………………..America’s plutonium pits are also estimated to hold their power for a good 85 years, and some estimates give them decades more. Much of the current stockpile is about 40 years old, which suggests there is no looming crisis.

The mystery of pit aging has nonetheless been at the heart of numerous studies conducted over decades at LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In 2006, each lab released its findings to JASON, an independent and elite group of scientists that’s been advising the federal government since the Cold War, for review. JASON’s conclusion: “Most plutonium pit types have credible lifetimes of at least 100 years.” Half a dozen years later, researchers at LLNL were able to artificially age plutonium to 150 years. Those plutonium samples, researchers stated at the time “continue to age gracefully.”

But, come 2019, the political tide had changed. With President Donald Trump in office and a receptive Congress backing a plan to reinstate pit production, JASON was not convinced that enough studies on aging had been conducted in recent years. The group urged more studies. It also urged that “pit manufacturing be re-established as expeditiously as possible,” the brief report read………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Too Big to Fail”

The political machinations actually go back even further — to the 2010 concession that President Barack Obama made to a largely Republican bloc of Senators: arms control in exchange for a revival of the nuclear weapons complex.

“The deal was that in return for Senate ratification of the New [Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty], Obama would support a modernization plan that would modernize literally almost every aspect of the entire US nuclear arsenal,” explained Sharon Weiner, an associate professor at the School of International Service at American University.

At the time, the deal was heralded as a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. Today, experts look back on it as the beginning of a new era, a tectonic modernization of America’s nuclear triad — land, sea and air — now projected to cost close to $2 trillion over the next 30 years. That’s roughly the GDP of Canada.

Plutonium pits, of course, represent only a small fraction of the cost. That mind-boggling figure reflects a total reimagining of the nation’s entire nuclear program, complete with brand new ballistic missile submarines, 400 new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, tactical aircrafts, underground silos and 800 nuclear warheads.

The Sentinel program alone — cost, $131 billion — is a juggernaut. “I think this program has become too big to fail for an entrenched part of the military-industrial-congressional complex,” said Geoff Wilson, an expert on federal defense spending at the Independent watchdog, Project on Government Oversight.

And all of it together is being embraced in response to the same argument — that missiles, warheads, silos, and pits, nearly everything built during the Cold War — are getting too old. In a society defined by obsolescence, the language is potent.

……………………………………………………..A New Cold War

In the unthinkable scenario that a Sentinel is deployed, it would propel like a rocket beyond earth’s atmosphere and into space. As it reached its apogee, the missile would shed all its pieces and the warheads would descend toward their intended targets, half a world away.

For now, though, the Sentinel is barely a reality. The program is so complex and vastly over budget that some in the arms control community are calling for its complete cancellation. Experts question such a missile’s ability to deter China without provoking Russia. Other critics consider the plan to build new weapons as a dangerous return to the policies of the Cold War.

……………………………………even if all the timetables are met, intercontinental ballistic missiles will always be a “danger to the world as long as they are on launch-on-warning alert,” according to Frank N. von Hippel, senior research physicist and professor of public and international affairs emeritus with Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.

The risk of a false alarm is enough reason to “do away with the ICBMs altogether,” as he and others — presidents, retired commanders, and at least one secretary of defense, alike — have long campaigned to do. “An accidental launch is a major contributor to the overall probability of an all out nuclear war.”

That’s because a president would have no more than a few minutes to decide whether a threat is real or false. As President George Bush was famously quoted, that wouldn’t give him enough time to get “off the crapper.”

And once an ICBM is launched, there would be no way to stop it, von Hippel emphasized.

It’s not the weapons so much that are archaic, but the thinking behind them, according to Wilson of the Project on Government Oversight. ICBMs were born in a different age, as was the entire nuclear triad: “a Cold War relic that the military-industrial complex has worked overtime to retroactively justify.”

In the world of today, Wilson is skeptical that ICBMs will actually protect Americans. “Practically, these weapons are strategic dinosaurs.”………………………………………. https://inkstickmedia.com/does-the-us-need-new-plutonium-pits/—

March 9, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, USA, weapons and war