nuclear-news

Over Budget and Delayed—What’s Next for U.S. Nuclear Weapons Research and Production Projects?

August 17, 2023,  https://www.gao.gov/blog/over-budget-and-delayed-whats-next-u.s.-nuclear-weapons-research-and-production-projects [Excellent diagrams]

The United States’ nuclear weapon stockpile depends on facilities that are, on average, about 50 years old. In fact, the processing of enriched uranium used in nuclear weapons is still conducted in an Oppenheimer-era facility built in 1945. These aging facilities pose safety and operational risks and cost taxpayers almost a billion dollars to maintain each year. 

Over the next two decades, the United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to modernize the research and production infrastructure on which the nuclear stockpile depends. Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our new report about the status of these efforts, led by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the challenges that have resulted in them being over budget and delayed.  

New infrastructure projects are important, complex, and expensive

NNSA is currently designing or constructing 23 major projects (each costing more than $100 million). Some projects will process nuclear components containing plutonium or enriched uranium, which are critical to the functioning of nuclear weapons. These projects are expensive and include three multi-billion dollar, one-of-a-kind efforts to build new or modify existing uranium and plutonium component production facilities in New Mexico, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Other projects do not involve nuclear materials and are less expensive, such as a $270 million project to build a high explosives laboratory and related facilities in Texas.

New projects will cost more and take longer to build than NNSA planned

As of March, NNSA’s projects that were in the construction phase collectively overran their cost estimates by over $2 billion and their schedules by almost 10 years. Some of the reasons for these increased costs and delays include poor management and planning, as well as COVID-19. Of the projects that are under construction, the multi-billion-dollar Uranium Processing Facility family of projects in Tennessee is responsible for a majority of the cost increases and schedule delays. These cost increases and schedule delays, as well as NNSA’s decision to refocus resources on higher-priority projects, led NNSA to propose placing two other projects (in Texas and South Carolina) currently in the design phase on hold for multiple years.

In addition, six projects in the design phase are implementing significant changes that may increase their cost and schedule beyond NNSA’s preliminary estimates. These include a project to modify existing plutonium processing facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

We’ve made recommendations to help NNSA improve its oversight of these projects

We have previously made recommendations that would help NNSA better manage its projects as well as the programs that will operate the completed projects to achieve agency goals. For example, we recommended that the NNSA complete a lifecycle cost estimate for establishing the agency’s capability for producing plutonium pits (the central core of a nuclear weapon), as this effort involves dozens of programs, projects, and other activities, including two multi-billion dollar projects and multiple other projects that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars. However, NNSA has not taken action on some of these recommendations. We have expressed concerns about the management of nuclear projects and programs since 1990, and NNSA acquisition and program management remains on our most recent High Risk List.

Learn more about NNSA’s projects, their statuses, and challenges by checking out our new report.

August 19, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ralph Nader: Develop an Exit Strategy for the Endless War in Ukraine

August 16, 2023, By Ralph Nader / Nader.org  https://scheerpost.com/2023/08/16/ralph-nader-develop-an-exit-strategy-for-the-endless-war-in-ukraine/

Russia’s criminal war in Ukraine intensifies as it grinds on, World War I style with heavy casualties on both sides. While President Joe Biden keeps repeating that NATO, mostly meaning the U.S., will expand military support for Ukraine “as long as it takes.” “As long as it takes,” is not a policy, it is deadly procrastination without any exit strategy.

Of course, Biden, who voted for Bush’s criminal war in Iraq as a Senator in 2003, along with hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, is experienced in “as long as it takes.” That invasion and occupation took over one million Iraqi lives, even more injuries and sicknesses and plunged Iraq into destructive chaos that persists to this day.

“As long as it takes” for a million Ukrainian lives lost and the comparable destruction of their country? For the war to escalate beyond Ukraine, into Russia and bordering countries?

Biden spends more time thinking about when he will say “Yes” to Ukrainian president Zelensky’s demand for more powerful weapons – Advanced Armored Vehicles, longer-reaching artillery, Abrams Tanks with depleted-uranium rounds. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warns such ammunition is “chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal.” The Harvard International Review reports “Depleted uranium may pose a risk to both soldiers and local civilian populations. When ammunition made from depleted uranium strikes a target, the uranium turns into dust that is inhaled by soldiers near the explosion site. The wind then carries dust to surrounding areas, polluting local water and agriculture.”

Biden also supports providing Ukraine with F-16s which take many months to learn to fly and he has already sent Ukraine cluster bombs to match Russia’s cluster bombs so as to further endanger Ukrainians, including children, for years to come. The New York Times reports, “123 nations – including many of America’s allies – have agreed never to use, transfer, produce or stockpile cluster munitions.”

The Biden Administration has no diplomatic strategies, no demand for an immediate unconditional ceasefire followed by top-level peace negotiations. This war is expanding and becoming more lethal each day. Provocations are also escalating as armed Ukrainian drones appear over Moscow and more Russian missiles target Ukrainian civilians.

Congress, ignorant of history’s lessons from wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and other military boomerangs of the U.S. Empire, rubber-stamp Biden’s demands without any thorough Congressional hearings to examine where this war is heading. Congressional Democrats did, however, make sure to block a proposed Inspector General’s Office to oversee the spending of tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars in U.S. military aid, watchdog corruption and investigate diversions of military supplies.

A culpable Congress is also going along with the Biden/NATO decision to put 300,000 soldiers “at high readiness” stationed in the countries on Russia’s borders and in Europe. Already, thousands of U.S. soldiers, modern artillery and warships are in that region.

Dictator Putin doesn’t have to stretch the truth far in his propaganda to alarm the Russian people. They remember the invasions by Germany in World War I and World War II that took more than 50 million Russian lives and that caused massive devastation in Russia, their country. They see a military alliance of Western countries, (NATO) including Germany, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Estonia, Romania and Bulgaria. They also see moves to include Ukraine.

In 1990 several Western leaders assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand. In 1991, when the Soviet Union started to formally dissolve and Soviet concerns about NATO increased. U.S. experts, including long-time expert George Kennan, warned of a red-line disaster. The Guardian notes that “Putin claims that [James] Baker, [former Secretary of State] in a discussion on 9 February 1990 with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, made the promise that NATO would not expand to the east if Russia accepted Germany’s unification.”

President Bill Clinton infuriated Russian President Boris Yeltsin by breaking with past U.S. assurances on NATO expansion.

As pointed out in a long Harper’s June 2023 article on Ukraine, “…at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washington’s proposal: “I was very sure . . . that Putin was not going to just let that happen,” she recalled in 2022. “From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.” America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),” concluding that “Russia will respond.” (Why Are We in Ukraine? By Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne).

Imagine the shoe being on the other foot, with Russia doing all this on our borders. Look how the U.S. reacted to 3000 lives lost on 9/11.

The media also hasn’t learned its history lessons. Coverage of the Ukraine War towers over its coverage of our illegal military invasions in the Middle East. Except they avoid reporting about peace advocacy by domestic and international groups.

While the New York Times’ readers are told about how domestic pets and athletes are faring in the Ukraine conflict, this newspaper of record ignores the voyage of the Golden Rule Boat, sponsored by Veterans for Peace, docking this year at ports on the west Gulf and eastern coast. The mainstream media ignored the rally by many peace groups on July 22, 2023, at Biden’s hometown in front of (Scranton, PA) the Army Ammunition Plant run by General Dynamics (See https://worldbeyondwar.org/scranton/).

Nor does the mass media probe the U.S. policy driving Germany into larger military budgets and weapons shipments to Ukraine, and ending the Nordic countries’ traditions of neutrality by bringing them into NATO. All these expansions provide huge business for the U.S. military-industrial complex, which Eisenhower warned us about. (https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address).

The expansions also scare the Russian public and increase popular support for the aggressor Putin and Russian troops. Roger Cohen’s long report in the New York Times on his trip through Russia shed some light on these feelings.

Our country should lead in peacemaking, in engaging the United Nations when its charter against offensive war is violated by any member country, and in observing our own constitutional mandates which reserve for Congress, not the Presidency, the power to declare war.

Instead, we expand a vast military budget (greater than the next ten countries combined, including China and Russia), operate military bases in over 100 countries, bristle with military threats or incursions in the backyards of many of these nations – in violation of international law, the UN charter (which we most prominently drafted in 1946) and federal statutes. All done in a bipartisan fashion, with astounding hypocrisy and self-righteousness.

Whether or not you are a veteran, I urge you to virtually attend the annual Veterans for Peace Convention on August 25 through August 27, 2023, to hear the views of people who abhor all wars in favor of stopping the slaughter and deliberately waging peace. (See, Veterans for Peace Convention Registration).

Otherwise, prepare for a war of attrition on both sides, which could last for years. Unless that is, it flares into a nuclear weapons war.

That should sober all hawks, including the consistent one in the White House.

August 17, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Racism and the choice to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Dehumanizing of “others” began but did not end with Japan

By Linda Pentz Gunter, Aug 13 2023, e https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/08/13/the-choice-to-bomb-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/

The debate about whether the United States “needed” to drop atomic bombs on Japan will likely be waged indefinitely. Was it to end the war, save American lives, test the bomb or send a message to Stalin?

Amidst all the theories, some of which are disputed and a few disproven, one over-riding motivation remains: racism.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a highly effective propaganda campaign was waged in the US to paint Japanese people as sub-human or worse. The Japanese were depicted as predators and vermin. During reporting from Iwo Jima, Time magazine, pronounced the Japanese people “ignorant” and went on speculate: “Perhaps he is human. Nothing. . . indicates it.” 

Today, the posters and rhetoric in circulation then would be considered abhorrent hate speech. But in the 1940s, it instilled enough revulsion in the American public to justify the annihilation of at least 200,000 human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And it was only the beginning. After World War II, the newly emergent atomic powers began testing their weapons of annihilation on Indigenous communities far away. The Americans bombed the Marshall Islanders; the British targeted Aboriginal lands in Australia and the islands of Micronesia; the French went to Algeria and then Polynesia; the Soviet Union chose Kazakhstan.

The Marshallese, like the Japanese before them, were characterized as subhuman. They were deliberately experimented on, to see what would happen to human beings living in a highly radioactive environment. This included returning the people of Rongelap to their atoll just three years after they were removed to make way for the enormous and disastrous Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954. They were returned, because, said, Merril Eisenbud, director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Agency’s health and safety laboratory, “That island is by far the most contaminated place on Earth and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”

Much of this was celebrated by the US military brass. The Marshallese victims of atomic tests were brutally denigrated as uncivilized, albeit they were, conceded Eisenbud in one his most appalling statements, “more like us than mice”.

The uranium needed for atomic weapons was mined in places such as the Congo in Africa, and on Native American and First Nations lands in North America. 

Today, France still gets at least half of the uranium needed to power its commercial nuclear reactors from Niger, although the recent coup there may have put that supply chain in jeopardy. But many of the people who mine it live without electricity and running water and suffer the health consequences of the radioactive tailings and waste left behind in their environment.

Of course, it’s not an entirely racist story. Atomic veterans the world over have struggled for recognition of their suffering and for compensation, largely unsuccessfully. Many experienced the tests directly. Others were sent in later to “clean up” the radioactive mess left behind.

In the US, citizens of Nevada and surrounding states were shocked to learn that their own government was willing to treat them like guinea pigs. The more than one thousand atomic tests carried out at the Nevada Test Site, situated on Western Shoshone land, contaminated communities across multiple US states.

Those communities were not warned or protected. Indeed, the Nevada tests were treated as something thrilling. Las Vegas even promoted them as some sort of bizarre tourist attraction. One postcard of the time depicts a massive mushroom cloud rising behind the “Desert Inn” in Las Vegas as an American family unpack their luggage. But the postcard was no mere fantasy. Photographs of the time show Las Vegas hotel guests around a swimming pool watching a mushroom could rise in the distance.

Still today, sickeningly, you can buy Fat Man and Little Boy earrings at the National Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.

The United States has never officially apologized — to the people of Japan, or the Marshall Islands, or New Mexico, where the first Trinity test took place, or Nevada and the neighbouring states. Nor has France for its part in bombing Algerians in the Sahara and French Polynesians in the South Pacific. The UK has neither apologized to, nor agreed to compensate, its atomic veterans for their exposures during atomic tests on Australian Aboriginal land and the Line Islands of the Pacific.

The dehumanizing of other human beings, mostly on the basis of what we erroneously call “race” (we are all the same “race”) is of course not restricted to the nuclear sector. Communities of color, at least in the United States, are routinely targeted by the fossil fuel and chemical industries and by industrial and inhumane factory farming.

In North Carolina, for example, where a large portion of the country’s horrendous hog factory farms are located — known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs — there are 10 million pigs, about one per person. However, these are concentrated in a handful of mainly African American counties. As the Rachel Carson Council describes it in its report, Pork and Pollution, in one predominantly North Carolina African American county alone there are 2.3 million hogs.

Addressing the fundamental crime of racism is an essential step if we are to eliminate the existential threats of nuclear war and the climate catastrophe now upon us.

This article is adapted from a blog entry originally published by Scottish CND and a subsequent webinar presentation for Scottish CND on August 8. For an essential deep look at racism and the nuclear sector, read Vincent Intondi’s excellent book, African Americans Against The Bomb.

August 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment