nuclear-news

New Mexico’s Nuclear-Weapons Boom

Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal.

Los Alamos is growing at a pace not seen since J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. 

New Yorker, By Abe Streep, December 27, 2024

“…….  Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which is once again rapidly expanding to supply the nation with nuclear weapons.

Los Alamos was built in secret during the Second World War—J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the lab there as part of the Manhattan Project. The town hovers high above the Española valley, on a handsome mesa called the Pajarito Plateau. Originally, the only way to access the enclave was through two gates. Today, it accepts visitors but remains a company town, housing many of the lab’s scientists and high-level staffers. The community has a population of about thirteen thousand, and boasts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of millionaires. In New Mexico, such wealth is rare. Española, which sits on the Rio Grande and is a twenty-five-minute drive away, has a median household income of fifty thousand dollars, a poverty rate approaching twenty per cent, and an entrenched fentanyl crisis.

…………………………………………………………………………………… In recent years, Los Alamos has been essential to a sweeping 1.7-trillion-dollar update of the country’s nuclear arsenal,……. The U.S. government has nearly five thousand nuclear warheads, close to two thousand of which are deployed inside submarines, bombs, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. It also has thousands of plutonium pits—the fissionable cores of those warheads—in storage. But the plutonium in the stockpile is aging. Despite statements from groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which argue that the arsenal remains sufficiently deadly to serve as deterrence, the government insists that it needs new warheads.

The nuclear-weapons overhaul involves facilities spread out across the United States. Its projects include fabricating new missiles, installing thousands of miles of fibre-optic transmission lines, building new computer centers at Air Force bases, and refurbishing the underground chambers where missileers control weapons. But Los Alamos is the only lab that is capable of actually producing the plutonium pits.

…………………………….. workers move radioactive materials into secure containers. Salaries range from sixty-six thousand dollars to nearly twice that amount………

New Mexico’s state budget is just above ten billion dollars. The federal government spends about as much money on just two laboratories: Sandia, in Albuquerque, which designs weapon components such as detonators, and Los Alamos. Kirtland Air Force Base, which stores nuclear weapons, has a budget of nearly two billion dollars. An underground nuclear-waste repository in New Mexico’s southern desert also receives federal funding; after a fire and an unrelated radiological release at the facility, ten years ago, the Department of Energy spent nearly five hundred million dollars on an update to its safety infrastructure. “It’s gone from being a company town to being a company state,” Zia Mian, the co-director of a program on science and global security at Princeton, said.

…………………….in many states, weapons production meant jobs. When Obama was working to secure congressional support for a nuclear-coöperation agreement with Moscow, Republican senators asked, in return, that he sign off on modernizing the country’s arsenal. He agreed.

……………………………………………………………………The lab is supposed to be building the capacity to produce thirty war-ready plutonium pits per year. So far, it has created just one, even as the budget has tripled. …………………….The treaty that Obama signed with Russia in 2010 expires next year, and it is not expected to be renewed. Last June, in an address recorded for the annual meeting of the Arms Control Association, António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, warned of the creeping threat of nuclear war. “Humanity is on a knife’s edge,” he said. In 2023, Russia de-ratified a landmark nuclear-testing-ban treaty, and in November, following Ukraine’s use of long-range American missiles, Vladimir Putin lowered his country’s threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump’s stance on nuclear weapons has been one of obsessive and reckless bombast. During his first term, Trump reportedly said, “If nuclear war happens, we won’t be second in line pressing the button.” He used social media to brag about the size of the U.S. arsenal and taunted Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. His Administration also signalled interest in reviving America’s defunct underground weapons-testing program.  In preparation for his second term, he has adopted Ronald Reagan’s old motto—“Peace through strength.” But his military aims have been difficult to pin down, and the views of his presumptive cabinet are scattershot. Sharon Weiner, a professor of foreign policy and global security at American University, said that Trump’s nominees appear “willing to violate norms and rules that have been in place for a long time.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., as fears about China reach a fever pitch, a sense of alarm is seeping into discussions about nuclear policy. During a recent panel, Robert Peters, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who once worked as a lead strategist for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, discussed the slow progress at Los Alamos with frustration. “Let’s waive the environmental regulations, blow up the mountain, pave it over, build a highway that you need to get there, fire everyone who’s not building warheads,” Peters said. Increasingly, politicians have advocated boosting the number of nuclear weapons—not just updating the existing ones. “The U.S. is embarking on a pair of arms races,” Jeffrey Lewis, a non-proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said. “You hear from both Democrats and Republicans that expansion is inevitable.”

In Los Alamos, it is widely acknowledged that, during the Manhattan Project, environmental concerns were not a priority. Nuclear waste was simply dumped in the ground.

This past August, a retired chemistry professor from Northern Arizona University named Michael Ketterer, who has studied nuclear sites around the West, announced that he had found what he called “the most extreme plutonium-contamination scenario” he has seen in an area close to Los Alamos. (The Department of Energy and the laboratory maintain that the radiation levels at the site are safe.) Worker-safety issues have also been a problem. 

the recent pressure to produce appears to align with a culture of haste. One of the oversight agencies that inspects the lab has published reports that reveal a concerning number of safety breaches………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/new-mexicos-nuclear-weapons-boom

December 31, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war