National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Nuclear Weapons Programs Slated for 53% Increase

To help pay for this, nonproliferation and cleanup programs are being cut by 5%, science by 14%, cybersecurity and emergency response by 25%, and energy efficiency and renewable energy programs by 74%.

the NNSA’s Total Weapons Activities. If passed by the Senate as well, so-called reconciliation could cut more than $800 billion from Medicaid and terminate environmental justice and climate change initiatives.

 June 3, 2025,   Jay Coghlan,  https://nukewatch.org/nnsa-nuclear-weapons-programs-slated-for-53-percent-increase/

Santa Fe, NM – Topline budget figures for the Department of Energy (DOE) have been released under the headline of “Unleashing a Golden Era of Energy Dominance and Energy Innovation and Protecting the Nation.” But as a baseline, 65% of the Department’s proposed $46 billion budget is earmarked for its semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In turn, more than 80% of NNSA’s proposed FY 2026 funding is for its nuclear weapons research and production programs, with a 25% funding increase over FY 2025.

But that is not all. The Trump Administration is adding another $4.8 billion from so-called “reconciliation” funding, bringing NNSA’s “Total Weapons Activities” to just under $30 billion. Taken together, this is a 53% increase above FY 2025 for NNSA’s nuclear weapons research and production programs. To help pay for this, nonproliferation and cleanup programs are being cut by 5%, science by 14%, cybersecurity and emergency response by 25%, and energy efficiency and renewable energy programs by 74%.

According to DOE’s “Budget in Brief”:

“The FY 2026 Budget Request [for NNSA’s nuclear weapons programs] funds execution of six simultaneous warhead modernization programs, including the warhead for the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) and the B61-13 variant, while coordinating with DoD to plan for future systems; [and] continue restoring and refurbishing production capability, including the capability to produce 80 pits per year as close to 2030 as possible…”

What this means is six “Life Extension Programs” or “Modifications” that are extending the service lives of existing nuclear weapons by decades while giving them new military capabilities. This includes a new nuclear warhead for a new Sea-Launched Cruise Missile, a class of nuclear weapons that George H. Bush retired at the end of the Cold War. It also includes a new ~300 kiloton variant of the B61 gravity bomb (the Hiroshima bomb was ~16 kiloton). In contrast, warhead dismantlements are at their lowest rate since the end of the Cold War.

In addition, it means the pending production of the first new design nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. First on deck is the W87-1 warhead for the new, budget-busting Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile. The second new design is the sub-launched W93 warhead, which is primarily for the United Kingdom. Key to their production is the expanded manufacturing of plutonium pits, the fissile cores of nuclear weapons. According to congressional testimony, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) will produce W87-1 pits and the Savannah River Site (SRS) W93 pits.

The Los Alamos Lab currently claims that it will demonstrate the “capability” to produce at least 30 pits per year by 2028, delayed from the statutory requirement to physically produce 30 pits in 2026. SRS’ plutonium pit facility is on track to cost ~$20 billion (the new World Trade Center cost less than $5 billion). Production of at least 50 pits per year at SRS is unlikely any time before 2035, which could prompt LANL into “surge” production of more pits. The independent Government Accountability Office has repeatedly stated that NNSA does not have credible cost estimates for pit production, its most expensive program ever. The DOE and NNSA and its predecessors have been on the GAO’s “High Risk List” for project mismanagement and waste of taxpayers’ dollars since 1991.

Further, the need for expanded plutonium pit production to begin with is not clear. In 2006 independent experts concluded that pits last at least a century (their average age is now around 42). NNSA has avoided new pit life studies since then. There are already at least 15,000 existing pits stored at the agency’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, TX. In addition, new design nuclear weapons cannot be full scale tested because of the international testing moratorium, thereby perhaps eroding confidence in the stockpile. Or new designs could prompt the US to resume testing which would have severe international proliferation consequences.

The House of Representatives recently passed the huge budget reconciliation bill that adds money to the NNSA’s Total Weapons Activities. If passed by the Senate as well, so-called reconciliation could cut more than $800 billion from Medicaid and terminate environmental justice and climate change initiatives. Military spending would increase to around $1 trillion per year while domestic programs are crippled. Finally, as much as $4 trillion in tax cuts for the ultra-rich could be put into place.

Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch, commented, “More nuclear weapons won’t give us more security as our nation is being hollowed out. We are approaching the 80^th anniversaries of the atomic bombings. It is way past time for the nuclear weapons powers to honor their obligations under the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty to negotiate verifiable nuclear disarmament instead of keeping nuclear weapons forever.”

Sources:

     DOE’s FY 2026 “Budget in Brief” at https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/doe-fy-2026-bib-v4.pdf

     DOE’s FY 2026 “Appropriation Summary” at https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/doe-fy-2026-budget-approps-summary-v1.pdf

Release of the full FY 2026 budget justification is not yet scheduled. By law the annual Congressional Budget Requests are due the first Monday every February.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico was a co-plaintiff in a lawsuit that forced the NNSA to complete a nationwide programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium pit production. The public has an opportunity to submit “scoping” comments on issues that should be included. Comments should be emailed to PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov by July 14. For more please see www.nukewatch.org

June 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Dutch Parliament Says ‘Nyet’ To NATO Defense Spending Plan Amid Chaos Of Geert Wilders Pullout

Zero Hedge, by Tyler Durden, Wednesday, Jun 04, 2025

NATO aims for its members to spend at least 3.5% of their GDP on defense, but those dreams of NATO expansion – at a moment the proxy war in Ukraine is becoming dangerously close to entering hot war between the West and nuclear-armed Russia – are dying.

Dutch parliament on Tuesday slapped down a proposal to increase defense spending to 3.5% of gross domestic product (GDP), key to NATO’s capability targets, in a non-binding motion.

While it doesn’t have legal force at this point, this makes clear parliament’s opinion, unleashing deeper tensions among NATO allies, and as the Trump White House exerts pressure to rapidly raise collective defense.

This comes at an ultra-sensitive political moment, given that as we reported earlier Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders pulled his Party for Freedom (PVV) out of the coalition that governs the Netherlands.

This sets up the likelihood of new elections after the man dubbed the “Dutch Donald Trump”, withdrew the PVV, related to immigration policy failure. 

According to the latest developments, Prime Minister Dick Schoof has just announced that he would offer his resignation from the Netherlands’ ruling coalition while continuing in a caretaker government, setting the stage for a likely snap election:……………………………………

………………………………………………………….In the background is the fact that Western populations are ‘war weary’ and don’t want to see escalation of NATO force strength in Ukraine. Trump himself is facing a revolt among conservative pundits on the American domestic front, as some European leaders, particularly Hungary’s Orban, are warning of a protracted conflict in Eastern Europe if the West and warring parties don’t climb down the escalation ladder soon. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/dutch-parliament-says-nyet-nato-defense-spending-plan-amid-chaos-geert-wilders-pullout

June 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear Proliferation’s Next Iteration

Henry Sokolski, May 2025, https://npolicy.org/nuclear-proliferations-next-iteration/

The world is about to experience the second iteration of nuclear proliferation. The first era began in 1949 with Russia’s first nuclear weapons test. It ended in 2002 when North Korea set off its own first device. Nuclear weapons spread, but slowly. Most would-be bomb-makers – South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Iraq, Taiwan, South Korea, Libya, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Sweden, Italy, Romania, Australia, and Syria – gave up their weapons projects. Only nine completed and kept them (the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea).

It’s unclear if we’ll be as lucky with nuclear proliferation’s next iteration. Poland, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Japan will tell the tale. If any go nuclear, others — Egypt, Algeria, the UAE, Vietnam, Australia, Ukraine—will surely be tempted.

Two other headaches compound these concerns. The first is the prospect that states will target reactors in war and release dangerous amounts of radiation. The war in Ukraine serves as a poster child. Recent Chinese, North Korean, and Israeli threats to bomb their neighbors’ nuclear plants suggest Kyiv’s predicament is not a one-off.

The second concern is increased interest in nuclear weapons sharing. NATO states, Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, and Russia have all expressed an interest in either hosting or placing weapons on other nation’s soil. This practice, which was so popular during the 1950s and 1960s, will stress U.S. friendships and alliances if renewed.

There are several factors behind these developments. One is the erosion of American security guarantees and the augmentation of Chinese, Russian and North Korean nuclear arsenals. Yet another is the emergence of precision guided munitions and their use against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. Finally, nuclear supplier nations are pushing the wholesale export of “peaceful” nuclear reactors, all of which are potentially bomb program building blocks. The key markets include the world’s most war-torn regions (e.g., Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South and East Asia).

All of this should raise concerns. Instead, governments have either ignored or denied these developments.

States have used nuclear plants to make bombs and targeted them in war. Nuclear power advocates downplay these worries. New, smaller reactors, they insist, will be extremely safe and proliferation resistant. However, some of their favorite reactor designs use or produce materials helpful to make bombs. China, Ukraine, Taiwan and Japan have publicly fretted about the military vulnerability of their plants. The U.S. and most other governments, though, are quite silent.

Then, there’s nuclear sharing. The United States largely got out of this business. It pulled thousands of U.S.nuclear weapons from South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Okinawa, and most of NATO. But in 2023, Russia went the other way: To intimidate NATO and Ukraine, Moscow re-deployed nuclear weapons to Belarus.

Polish officials took notice and asked the United States and France to forward deploy nuclear weapons on Polish soil. South Korea’s hawkish political party leadership made similar demands, as did Japan’s former prime minister, Shinzo Abe. All of these requests reflect a deeper, not-so-secret desire to acquire bombs of their own. The latest public U.S. response to these allied requests, however, has been to dismiss them.

And what might unfold if these nations go nuclear?

We may soon find out. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and his lieutenants have warned that the Kingdom must go nuclear if Iran gets a bomb. With any bad luck, Tehran and Riyadh could be the first of several new Middle Eastern nuclear dominos to fall.

One could imagine other new nuclear entrants. Australia once had a nuclear weapons program. So did Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Iraq. It’s also conceivable that Vietnam, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, which are all developing peaceful nuclear energy programs of their own, might exploit their civil programs to get bombs.

Why should one care? The short answer is the world may go off the rails. As Henry Kissinger explained:

“If one imagines a world of tens of nations with nuclear weapons and major powers trying to balance their own deterrent equations, plus the deterrent equations of the subsystems, deterrence calculation would become impossibly complicated. To assume that, in such a world, nuclear catastrophe could be avoided would be unrealistic.”

This volume peeks at this not-so-brave world.

NPEC designed and hosted two nuclear games. The volume features their after-action reports. The first game has China goading North Korea to get South Korean proxies to attack reactors and spent fuel ponds at South Korea’s Kori nuclear plant. These assaults prompt radiological releases and massive South Korean and Japanese evacuations. They also make military sense: They tie down and distract the United States, Japan, and South Korea from fending off a Chinese military assault against Taiwan. Beijing is pleased.

NPEC’s second scenario answers a more dire question — how might a nuclear-armed Israel and Iran face off in a crisis? Both have waged massive aerial wars against one another (twice in 2024). Some of these strikes targeted nuclear facilities. Would Israel ever use its nuclear weapons against Iran? Might Iran retaliate in kind? The game concluded the answer is yes.

The volume also features detailed analysis of what Russia’s military has gained from targeting Ukraine’s nuclear plants and supporting electrical supply system. This analysis also examines the military advantages of temporarily disabling such facilities rather than damaging them and releasing significant radiation.

It also explores five additional questions. What does international law and military science recommend to discourage dangerous assaults against nuclear plants? What does the history of Israel’s nuclear weapons acquisition and modernization tell us about these weapons’ possible use? What legal sanctions might their use trigger? What does unclassified modeling reveal about the radiation nuclear plants might release if attacked? How effective might nuclear strikes be against nuclear plants and materials?

This volume tries to tease out the answers. Its purpose is to prompt others to weigh in.

To read the full book, click here. To purchase a hard copy, click here.

June 6, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why we should worry about nuclear weapons again

Washington Post , by Jon B. Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda,3 June 25

The Cold War prospect of global annihilation has faded from consciousness, but the warheads remain.

ver the past 30 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the prospect of nuclear war has faded from the American consciousness. With the end of the Cold War, films depicting the last days of humanity, such as 1959’s “On the Beach,” or the 1983 TV drama “The Day After,” largely disappeared from the Hollywood playbook. Schoolchildren no longer hid under their desks during practice drills to survive nuclear war.

But the weapons never went away. While thousands were scrapped and nuclear inventories were significantly reduced, many other weapons were put into storage and still thousands more remain deployed, ready for use.

Now, they and the dangers they pose are making a comeback.

The last nuclear age was defined by two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union — poised to destroy one another in less than an hour. They both kept nuclear weapons locked and loaded to deter the other by threatening retaliation and certain destruction.

Today’s global nuclear landscape is far more complicated and, in many ways, more precarious. More countries and more advanced technologies are involved. Weapons can fly farther, faster, from more places. Information, accurate or false, can move even more quickly. Autocrats and extremists hold positions of power in nuclear-armed countries. Nuclear threats, once taboo, are now increasingly common. And the last nuclear arms control treaty still in force between Russia and the United States expires in February.

Many of the most dangerous ideas from the Cold War are being resurrected: lower-yield weapons to fight “limited” nuclear wars; blockbuster missiles that could destroy multiple targets at once; the redeploying of a whole class of missiles once banned and destroyed by treaty. On top of this, countries are testing new ways to deliver these weapons, including nuclear-powered cruise missiles that can fly for days before hitting their targets; underwater unmanned nuclear torpedoes; fast-flying, maneuverable glide vehicles that can evade defenses; and nuclear weapons in space that can attack satellites or targets on Earth without warning.

Our organization, the Federation of American Scientists, was created by the same people who invented the atomic bomb at Los Alamos to ensure that when policy was made, it was informed by science and technical facts. For 80 years, we have sought to promote public accountability and transparency about nuclear arsenals. Relying only on unclassified information, including satellite imagery and government data, we maintain the world’s most accurate publicly available estimates of the world’s nuclear arsenals.  Now that the nuclear threat has roared back to life, we believe it is our responsibility to provide accurate, nonpartisan information to help reduce the risk of nuclear disaster. We underestimate that risk at our collective peril.

“At this moment in human history,” the Nobel Committee said in announcing last year’s Peace Prize, “it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.” The prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, an association of survivors of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in wartime.

The numbers

Nine nations now have nuclear weapons: Russia, the United States, Britain, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Together, they possess more than 12,200 nuclear warheads, located at approximately 120 sites in 14 countries. More than 9,500 are militarily active or deployed, ready for use. Roughly 2,100 of those are on high alert and can be launched in minutes and reach any point on the planet in less than half an hour.

Russia and the U.S. have long been the dominant nuclear powers. Today, nearly 90 percent of all warheads belong to them…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The total power of the warheads in the nine nuclear-armed states is an inconceivable destructive force: equivalent to more than 4.8 trillion pounds of TNT — or more than 145,000 Hiroshima bombs. A single U.S. strategic submarine can carry enough warheads to destroy any country, and detonation of a few hundred weapons could propel enough dust and soot into the air to block sunshine, cool the atmosphere and halt crops from growing — “nuclear winter.” Such a sequence of events would lead to worldwide famine.

In her 2024 bestseller, “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” Annie Jacobsen draws on scientific research to describe a postapocalyptic world in which cities and forests burn, temperatures plunge, lakes and rivers freeze, crops and farm animals die, toxic chemicals poison the air, people succumb to radiation poisoning or disease. “Only time will tell if we humans will survive,” she writes.

Everyone makes mistakes

The next nuclear age will bring severe new tests. Without restraint, nations will be building ever more nuclear weapons, and the chances of mistakes or miscalculations will grow.

and the chances of mistakes or miscalculations will grow.

Each of the nine countries’ leaders and the systems they use to control nuclear weapons will have to get every decision right every time. Deterrence theory relies on the assumption that decision-makers are rational actors…………………………………………………

Time to wake up………………………………..

The future…………………

Without working treaties, legal limits or a mutual agreement to cap their forces, both the United States and Russia could double their deployed nuclear arsenals in a year or two without building a single new weapon. Each country could simply move several hundred warheads out of storage and redeploy them on missiles, bombers and submarines. ……………………..

While buildups proceed, nations are becoming more secretive about their nuclear weapons. During the first Trump administration, the U.S. reversed nearly a decade of transparency measures and refused to declassify the size of the American nuclear stockpile — a previously annual practice during Barack Obama’s administration. Britain immediately followed suit, in a highly out-of-character move from one of the most transparent nuclear-armed states. Our organization advocated that the Biden administration declassify its arsenal numbers, which it did in 2024 — a practice Trump will undoubtedly roll back.

………………………………………………………………………..Surviving this new nuclear age will require the constant and informed attention of leaders, policymakers and engaged citizens alike. 

………………………..In the early 1980s, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in Europe and the United States to demand a nuclear freeze. These mass movements, coupled with the vision of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, ended the last arms race.

Without renewed public pressure or political will, the world is condemned to live under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. We deserve better. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/us-russia-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-danger/

June 5, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment