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The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs

“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.”

The risk of a false alarm is enough reason to “do away with the ICBMs altogether,……. “An accidental launch is a major contributor to the overall probability of an all out nuclear war.”

Are America’s plutonium pits too old to perform in the new Cold War? Or are new ones necessary?

by Alicia Inez Guzmán February 28, 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.

Plutonium is widely known as one the most exotic elements in the periodic table. Trace amounts of it have been identified in the earth’s crust, though all of what’s now used for America’s nuclear weapons is manmade. For decades, these pits were cast with plutonium and other materials at a breakneck pace, installed in warheads and strapped into missiles that were regularly upgraded and modernized in an escalating arms race with the Soviet Union. Plutonium pits were never intended to grow old and senescent.

“We never worried about aging,” said Siegfried Hecker, former director of LANL and one of the world’s leading plutonium experts. “Because bombs were supposed to be out there for a dozen years or so.”

It’s been almost 40 years since America’s Cold War pit factory at Rocky Flats near Denver was raided by FBI agents and closed due to environmental crimes — among them, releases of radioactive effluent into nearby waterways. In that time, pit production went largely dormant, the USSR collapsed, arms reductions treaties were signed, stockpiles reduced and underground testing ceased.

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 U.S. Air Force.

The Sentinel ICBM has the capability to carry three separate warheads, each with its own target. Earlier versions of America’s missiles could and did have such capabilities and the option has remained available, but with post-Cold War weapons reductions, the number of warheads per missile was also reduced — one warhead, one intercontinental ballistic missile. As the U.S., Russia and China barrel toward a new Cold War, the U.S. will likely eschew such a convention in a matter of years.

“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.”

But to hear Hecker and his colleagues tell it, the question of pit aging is as scientifically vexing as it is political. Plutonium, to its most studied acolytes, borders almost on the mystical, its properties as capricious as the human body. It can be brittle or soft under some circumstances or turn to powder when heated in air. It can disintegrate at room temperature. It can bombard itself with radiation and mar its own internal lattice structure. It can even heal that damage within fractions of a second, if not over the course of several decades.

According to Glenn Seaborg, former chair of the Atomic Energy Commission and the chemist credited with first synthesizing the element for use in weapons, plutonium is “so unusual as to approach the unbelievable.”

This quality means that even the most knowledgeable experts are reluctant to commit themselves to anything definitive when it comes to a plutonium pit’s long-term prospects. Does it last 50 years? One hundred? Is it comparable to a human body, whose bones weaken and whose mind is vulnerable to dementia? Or is it actually impervious to entropy?

“It is difficult to quantify how much the properties of a plutonium pit will change over time,”…………………………………………………………………………………………..

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.

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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.

…………………………………………………………. America’s warheads have also been regularly surveilled since the late 1990s, leading even the most cautious scientists to vouch for their reliability. In 2000, Raymond Jeanloz — a professor of earth and planetary science and astronomy at University of California, Berkeley— found little evidence that defects in those warheads increased significantly with age. His statistical models, based on data culled from LANL and LLNL, showed that such defects, if any, accumulate at the glacial rate of one percent per quarter century…………………….

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.

As for the plutonium pits, LANL is behind by at least four years; Savannah River by at least six. Indeed, to meet the projected quota demanded for future weapons could take decades.

But 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.”…………………………. And once an ICBM is launched, there would be no way to stop it

March 4, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | - plutonium, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment