Luckily for him, there is one big, fat target with just that price tag, already sitting in Uncle Sam’s shopping cart, and it’s ripe for cutting: nuclear weapons. In 2010 Trump’s nemesis, then president Barack Obama, first proposed “modernizing” the U.S. triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons over more than three decades. Almost unnoticed outside of national security circles, the initiative’s $1-trillion sticker price has nearly doubled and, as American University national security scholar Sharon Weiner wrote last year, “is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.”
Conveniently enough for Musk, his new boss, Trump, called in January for talks on reducing nuclear weapons with China and Russia, while speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Tremendous amounts of money are being spent on nuclear, and the destructive capability is something that we don’t even want to talk about today, because you don’t want to hear it,” Trump said. “It’s too depressing.”……………………. more https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/elon-musk-can-find-his-usd2-trillion-federal-spending-cut-in-nuclear-weapons/
National missile defense advocates live in a world of magic and make-believe. Fantasy replaces science, assertions replace facts, and cartoon weapons replace real capabilities.
This enduring fantasy, however, has real-world consequences.
President Donald Trump’s pledge last week to build “a next-generation missile defense shield” that would “defeat any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland [with] space-based interceptors” has provoked a predictable reaction. Russia blasted Trump’s plan, detailed in his new executive order, “The Iron Dome for America.”
But no magic shield is going to protect the United States against nuclear attack.
An idea that never dies. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said on Friday of Trump’s plan that “it directly envisages a significant strengthening of the American nuclear arsenal and means for conducting combat operations in space, including the development and deployment of space-based interception systems.”
“We consider this as another confirmation of the US focus on turning space into an arena of armed confrontation… and the deployment of weapons there,” Zakharova added.
The Russian reaction could scuttle Trump’s stated desire to negotiate limits on nuclear weapons. If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always trigger efforts to overcome them with more missiles and other counter-measures—the well-known security dilemma.
Despite all the formidable technical and geopolitical evidence against such schemes, however, “faith in national missile defense never dies,” Washington Post columnist Max Boot observes.
It is no coincidence that Trump’s new order is lifted almost entirely from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 wish list. In the 1980s, the group championed President Ronald Reagan’s original dream to “put in space a shield that missiles could not penetrate—a shield that could protect us from nuclear missiles just as a roof protects a family from rain,” as he told a 1986 high school graduating class.
“Like Israel’s highly effective system of the same name, President Trump’s Iron Dome will provide an impenetrable defense for the American people that will bring peace through strength,” Heritage Foundation fellow Victoria Coates said. It “will fulfill President Reagan’s vision for the Strategic Defense Initiative laid out some four decades ago,” she added.
Doomed to fail. Trump’s executive order is a jumble of false claims and imaginary solutions. It begins by declaring that the risk of a missile attack “remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.” That would surprise most experts on existential risks. The climate crisis, the threat of new pandemics, artificial intelligence, and crippling cyber attacks are all at least as likely catastrophic events as nuclear weapons delivered by other means. But threat inflation has always been a key part of efforts to justify urgent action and massive investment.
Trump claims that “over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex.” Despite being utter nonsense, this claim has gone largely unchallenged.
While it is true that new technologies have increased the lethality of missiles, the missile threat to the United States has decreased dramatically. Arms control treaties and the collapse of the Soviet Union slashed the number of nuclear weapons and nuclear-armed missiles threatening the United States.
In 1985, the Soviet Union deployed 2,345 land-based and submarine-based missiles carrying over 9,300 nuclear warheads. That was the threat Reagan hoped to render “impotent and obsolete” with his missile shield.
Thanks to negotiated agreements, today’s Russia fields only 521 missiles, carrying 2,236 warheads. China’s land-based nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the United States have increased from around 20 in 1985 to some 135 today (carrying 238 warheads) and perhaps 72 single-warhead submarine-based missiles. In sum, the United States today faces roughly one-fifth the number of enemy missiles compared to 40 years ago and one-quarter of the nuclear warheads (728 vs. 2,365 missiles and 2,546 vs. 9,320 warheads). That is still a very dangerous threat but by no means a greater one.
Where arms control succeeded, missile defense technology failed.
None of the scores of systems developed by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and its successor organizations have ever come close to providing the imaginary shield that Reagan promised. National missile defenses did not work then. They do not work now. They will likely never work………………………………………
As it became clear that the space-based laser weapons Edward Teller told Reagan he could build were a fantasy, Reagan and subsequent presidents scaled down the program to try to get some kind of workable defense. But after spending over $415 billion over decades, all the United States has to show for the effort is 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California that can hit a cooperative target in carefully scripted demonstrations—about half of the time. Congress currently allocates $30 billion a year on missile defense and defeat programs, most run by the SDI successor, the Missile Defense Agency.
Not an iron dome; more like an iron colander. The major technical problems that remain unresolved—and eventually forced the cancellation of all SDI’s ambitious plans—are the same obstacles that have ruled out an effective ballistic missile defense for more than 60 years:
the ability of the enemy to overwhelm a system with offensive missiles;
the questionable survivability of space-based weapons;
the inability to discriminate among real warheads and hundreds or thousands of decoys;
the problem of designing battle management, command, control, and communications that could function in a nuclear war; and,
the low confidence in the ability of the system to work perfectly the first—and, perhaps, only—time it is ever used.
……………………………………………………………………“There is zero possibility of a comprehensive missile defense of the United States in the foreseeable future,” James N. Miller, who served as undersecretary of defense in the Obama administration, told Max Boot. “We are not going to escape mutual assured destruction vis-à-vis Russia or China.”
As shown repeatedly over the past 60 years, the only way to eliminate the threat of nuclear-armed missiles is to negotiate their elimination. Pretending that there is a magic shield that can be willed into existence will only make the problem of national missile defense worse. https://thebulletin.org/2025/02/the-national-missile-defense-fantasy-again/
First spotted by Bloomberg, Google has updated its AI Principles to remove an entire section on artificial intelligence applications it pledged not to pursue. Significantly, Google’s policy had previously stated that it would not design nor deploy AI technology for use in weapons, or in surveillance technology which violates “internationally accepted norms.”
Now it seems that such use cases might not be entirely off the table.
“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” read Google’s blog post on Tuesday. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights. And we believe that companies, governments, and organizations sharing these values should work together to create AI that protects people, promotes global growth, and supports national security.”
While Google’s post did concern its AI Principles update, it did not explicitly mention the deletion of its prohibition on AI weapons or surveillance. ……………………..
In an open letter that April, thousands of employees expressed a belief that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and requested that the company “draft, publicize and enforce a clear policy stating that neither Google nor its contractors will ever build warfare technology.”
The company’s AI Principles were the result, with Google ultimately not renewing its contract with the Pentagon in 2019. However, it looks as though the tech giant’s attitude toward AI weapons technology may now be changing.
Google’s new attitude toward AI weapons could be an effort to keep up with competitors. Last January, OpenAI amended its own policy to remove a ban on “activity that has high risk of physical harm,” including “weapons development” and “military and warfare.” In a statement to Mashable at the time, an OpenAI spokesperson clarified that this change was to provide clarity concerning “national security use cases.”
“It was not clear whether these beneficial use cases would have been allowed under ‘military’ in our previous policies,” said the spokesperson……………
Now Google’s revised policy has consolidated this list to just three principles, merely stating that its approach to AI is grounded in “bold innovation,” “responsible development and deployment,” and “collaborative process, together.” The company does specify that this includes adhering to “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.” Still, any mention of weapons or surveillance is now conspicuously absent. https://mashable.com/article/google-ai-weapons-surveillance-policy
because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.
In Tom Lehrer’s classic Cold War ditty, “So Long Mom,” a nuclear bomber pilot sings, “I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now.”
It’s darkly funny, because even though we don’t talk much about it, we all know it’s true. Planned or imagined, nuclear war scenarios rarely last longer.
But how much time have we got before then? How near is that threat of omnicide today?
The Doomsday Clock is a visual metaphor created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists back in 1947 to illustrate how close we are to global calamity from nuclear weapons and other looming threats to civilization as we know it. Originally set at seven minutes to midnight, in 2023 it advanced to 90 seconds to midnight, largely due to nuclear threats from war in Ukraine.
And Raytheon keeps pushing us closer.
In April 2020, Raytheon, with more than 12,000 local employees and the bulk of its research, development and production based here in Tucson, was awarded a sole-source contract to produce about 1,000 new nuclear-armed, air-launched cruise missiles. Known by the anodyne acronym LRSO (Long Range Stand Off), the missile is arguably both redundant and destabilizing in a time of disappearing nuclear diplomacy.
Not only that, but because of their work on both the LRSO and Tomahawk cruise missiles, Raytheon is now seen as the leading contender to produce even more nuclear weapons in the form of new sea-launched nuclear cruise missiles. This further escalation would represent a huge setback to hard-won nuclear arms control progress, when nuclear-armed Tomahawks were removed from submarines over 30 years ago.
Why aren’t we talking about it in Tucson? Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego and Rep. Juan Ciscomani all vote for U.S. nuclear domination. Only Rep. Raul Grijalva has spoken out for the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, now adopted by more than half the nations of the world. Despite near-universal condemnation of nuclear weapons by leaders of the world’s religions, we could use more local political and religious leaders speaking out against this blasphemous enterprise in our backyard.
It’s not as if it’s a military secret. The industry press has recently carried reports of LRSO flight tests, budget allocations, production schedules and more. Yet local media have not kept up.
Raytheon also has nothing to say. Usually, Southern Arizona’s largest employer and exporter is mighty proud of the panoply of products in their military portfolio. Their website is filled with fulsome boasts and lurid photos of deadly hardware. But the baddest boy of the bunch is missing in action. The nuclear-armed LRSO only pops up in a handful of financial reports. Raytheon’s original press release heralding the multibillion-dollar contract was posted on its website and quoted by the Tucson media in April 2020. But now it’s gone, simply deleted from its media archive.
Perhaps management has realized that there is nothing to be gained by crowing about their only product that, if used as intended, would be the instrument of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity (incomprehensible death and devastation, disproportionate civilian casualties, lasting contamination of land and water, etc.). Raytheon’s “products” are certainly nothing I’m proud of as a Tucsonan.
This is the same Raytheon/RTX that last November was fined nearly $1 billion for defrauding the government (i.e., the taxpayer) and paying multiple bribes to promote business with the government of Qatar.
Experts debate whether the LRSO is intended for a nuclear surprise attack, or just another layer of “deterrence.” But if it isn’t meant to be used first, that just makes it fit into plans for a full-scale nuclear war. All ninety minutes of it.
Shouldn’t we all pay more attention, and demand that our elected leaders resist this insanity?
The Trump administration has asked congressional leaders to approve a new $1 billion weapons transfer to Israel that will be funded by US military aid, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
The deal includes 4,700 1,000-pound bombs worth more than $700 million and $300 million worth of armored bulldozers, which the Israeli military uses to demolish homes and infrastructure in Gaza and the West Bank.
The request for the new arms transfer comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington and set to meet with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday. He’s expected to push for US support for Israel to restart its genocidal war in Gaza instead of fully implementing the ceasefire deal.
The Journal report said Netanyahu is also expecting Trump to push ahead with a massive $8 billion deal that President Biden notified congressional leaders about in early January. The report said some Democrats in Congress put a hold on the massive sale and that the Trump administration is now pushing congressional leaders to unblock it.
The $8 billion deal includes munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells. The Trump administration also recently released a hold on a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs for Israel.
Israeli officials suggested that the increased military aid was part of a deal to get Netanyahu to agree to the Gaza ceasefire deal. Trump’s envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, has said he’s pushing for the full implementation of the agreement, but the ceasefire is very fragile as Netanyahu doesn’t want to implement the second phase.
Wait, isn’t this the plot to the “Terminator” movies?
“There was a nuclear war,” a character explains. “Defense network computers. New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.”
It seems like either the execs at OpenAI have never seen it or they’re working overtime to make that premise a reality.
Don’t believe us? OpenAI has announced that the US National Laboratories will use its deeply flawed AI models to help with a “comprehensive program in nuclear security.”
As CNBC reports, up to 15,000 scientists working at the institutions will get access to OpenAI’s latest o1 series of AI models — the ones that Chinese startup DeepSeek embarrassed on the world stage earlier this month.
According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who announced the partnership at an event in Washington, DC, the tech will be “focused on reducing the risk of nuclear war and securing nuclear materials and weapons worldwide,” as quoted by CNBC.
OpenAI’s been making a huge push into government. Earlier this week, the Sam Altman-led company released ChatGPT Gov, a platform specifically designed for US government use that focuses on security.
But whether the company can deliver on some sky-high expectations — while also ensuring that its frequently lying AI chatbots won’t leak the nuclear codes or trigger the next nuclear war — is anyone’s guess.
The news comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI is in early talks for a new round of funding that would value it at a gargantuan $340 billion, double its previous valuation last year.
OpenAI also signed onto Trump’s $500 billion AI infrastructure deal, dubbed Stargate, with the plan of contributing tens of billions of dollars within the next year.
Whether the company’s o1 reasoning models will prove useful in any meaningful way to the researchers at the US National Laboratories remains to be seen.
But given the widespread dismantling of regulations under the Trump administration, it also feels like an unbelievably precarious moment to be handing over any amount of control over nuclear weapons to a busted AI system.
Washington | US President Donald Trump said he was willing to immediately start working on a new nuclear deal with Iran that allows the country to “peacefully grow and prosper”, seemingly softening his stance on the Islamic Republic.
“Reports that the United States, working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran into smithereens, ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED,” Mr Trump said in a post on his social networking site Truth Social on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT).
He didn’t give details on what such an agreement would entail, and Iranian officials haven’t yet responded to the post.
The US has long accused Tehran of using a decades-old civilian nuclear program to disguise ambitions to develop weapons, a claim repeatedly denied by Iran. The latest comments contrast with Mr Trump’s attitude in his first term, when he ordered a fatal strike on Iran’s most senior military general and prompted fears that the US would be drawn into war.
Mr Trump posted the Truth Social statement hours after signing a directive that calls for tough enforcement of existing sanctions. The move effectively revives his first-term “maximum pressure” strategy, including unilaterally quitting a landmark 2015 agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
Those measures weakened Iran’s economy but failed to thwart the country’s regional ambitions and instead triggered a security crisis in the oil-rich Persian Gulf that embroiled neighbouring Saudi Arabia and sent jitters through global energy markets.
Earlier, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Mr Trump’s maximum pressure strategy would continue to fail. “If the main issue is ensuring that Iran doesn’t pursue nuclear weapons, that’s already a firm commitment, Iran’s position is clear,” Mr Araghchi said in comments aired on state TV.
Oil prices fell as traders weighed concerns that a trade war between the US and China will hurt global growth against the possibility of further economic pressure on OPEC member Iran.
Withstanding the pressure
Mr Araghchi said Iran was already party to the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons – a post-war international agreement seeking to prevent the spread of atomic bombs – and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had years earlier issued an Islamic ruling forbidding them.
However, the world’s top nuclear regulator said last month Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium continued to grow. France, Germany and the UK asked inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency to prepare a special report in the first half of 2025 about Iran’s nuclear activities.
Clearly, a first-use nuclear strike carried out by the United States would constitute the ultimate act of war and a first-use nuclear strike conducted absent a declaration of war by Congress would violate the Constitution. And yet, as the law currently stands, a US president can launch a first strike of nuclear weapons in, as it were, a sacred vacuum where only he — and unfortunately it is still a he — is making that choice.
President Trump once again has sole authority to make a decision to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He can do so unilaterally, without consulting, getting permission from or even informing his defense secretary or Congress.
We are back on very thin atomic ice.
Not that anyone should ever launch nuclear weapons, whether they are allowed to or not, and no matter who approves it. Under what circumstances would there by any point in doing so? If it’s in retaliation, it’s already too late. If it’s a first strike, our own extinction is 15 minutes away.
But a trigger happy US president, whether literal or metaphorical, does not instill confidence that in a moment of who knows what kind of impulsive petulance, the nuclear button won’t get pushed. Despite Trump’s pronouncements in Davos last month that he wants to work with the leaders of Russia and China to “see if we can denuclearize,” something Trump says he thinks is “very possible,” there is no reason to be confident that a man who lied more than 30,000 times last time he was US president, really means what he says.
Anticipating that chaos is more likely to be Trump’s preferred modus operandi, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and his fellow Democrat in the House, Ted Lieu of California, wrote to then president Joe Biden last December 12, to urge him to make the change himself and mandate that a president must obtain authorization from Congress before initiating a nuclear first strike. No one individual, including the US president, should be able to start a nuclear war without congressional approval they said. They described current U.S. nuclear launch policy as “terrifying, dangerous, and unconstitutional”.
”As Donald Trump prepares to return to the Oval Office, it is more important than ever to take the power to start a nuclear war out of the hands of a single individual and ensure that Congress’s constitutional role is respected and fulfilled,” wrote Markey and Lieu in their letter to Biden. But Biden did not act.
Accordingly, two days after Trump’s inauguration, the pair put out a similar warning. “As Trump returns to the White House, we cannot let the power to start a nuclear war rest in the hands of a single individual,” they wrote, at the same time announcing the reintroduction of their The Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act.
The bill, if enacted, would restrict the first-use strike of nuclear weapons. The Constitution already gives Congress the sole power to declare war. Why then does the US president have the sole power to start what would be the most deadly and final war of all?
As the Markey-Lieu bill states, “The framers of the Constitution understood that the monumental decision to go to war, which can result in massive death and the destruction of civilized society, must be made by the representatives of the people and not by a single person.”
Given the hateful rhetoric and destructive decision-making already coming out of the Trump White House, passing this legislation has never been more imperative. As the statement from Markey and Lieu reads: “We must put guardrails on presidential authority to start nuclear war. We must never again entrust the fate of the world to just one fallible human.”
Clearly, a first-use nuclear strike carried out by the United States would constitute the ultimate act of war and a first-use nuclear strike conducted absent a declaration of war by Congress would violate the Constitution. And yet, as the law currently stands, a US president can launch a first strike of nuclear weapons in, as it were, a sacred vacuum where only he — and unfortunately it is still a he — is making that choice. (This last comment is not meant as an endorsement of Kamala Harris’s candidacy for US president but rather a mournful observation that it is high time the US felt able to elect a woman to that highest of offices.)
U.S. nuclear launch policy may indeed be “terrifying, dangerous, and unconstitutional”, but ANY nuclear launch policy is “terrifying and dangerous”, even if it is constitutional.
Despite the good intentions of this bill, to make us just a tiny bit safer and reduce the likelihood of a nuclear launch, it keeps us within a mindset that we COULD launch nuclear weapons and that under certain circumstances this might actually be a good idea.
Until we accept that using nuclear weapons under any circumstances would be an act of omnicide, gaining nothing for either side while resulting in a global catastrophe beyond imagining, we will always be one bad decision away from such an outcome, whether caused by a single mad despot or with the approval of a compliant cabinet and Congress.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Views are her own. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published later this year.
In a surprise mid-January announcement, the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) revealed it proposes to significantly increase the quantities of nuclear-grade plutonium to be stored at its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and to be trucked in and out of the lab on area roads and freeways such as nearby I-580. NNSA’s proposal would also allow riskier activities with plutonium than those currently authorized, and could allow increases of other nuclear materials at the Lab.
Livermore Lab is one of two locations designing and developing every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
The proposal announced on Jan. 14 also projects an abbreviated 30-day public comment period on the new Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement which must be prepared. Just a week later, NNSA announced that a virtual public hearing will take place on Wednesday, Jan. 29, from 6 – 8 p.m. PST.
NNSA’s announcement came just a year after a lengthy public process had been completed to disclose and analyze the environmental impact of the Lab’s activities during at least the next decade. In that process, some increases in plutonium-related activities and plutonium at the Lab were indicated, but far less than the “bomb-usable” quantities envisioned in the new plan.
Scott Yundt, executive director of Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (Tri-Valley CAREs), which monitors nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup activities with a special focus on Livermore Lab and surrounding communities, says the new proposal “increases both the likelihood and potential severity of an accident, or intentional destructive act, at the Livermore Lab.” He said some 90,000 people live within five miles of the Lab, which is closely surrounded by houses, apartment buildings, sports fields and schools. Over 7 million live within a 50-mile radius, identified in Lab environmental documents as the “potentially affected population.”
Yundt said the new proposal “skirts the intended purpose of the National Environmental Policy Act. The Lab was repeatedly asked in public comment sessions during the year-long Site Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) process if it was contemplated that the Security Category limits at Livermore Lab would change over the next decade to allow for increased quantities of plutonium and a return to the riskier kinds of nuclear weapons activities that used to occur there during the height of the Cold War. And the answer given to Tri-Valley CAREs and the public was a flat ‘no.’”
Yundt called it “unfortunate” that the new plan wasn’t included in the SWEIS process but is now being presented as a new, stand-alone environmental document: “This is exhausting for members of the public who are concerned about the Lab’s activities, forcing them to again engage and grapple with the cumulative environmental impacts of the Lab’s actions so soon. This feels like a deliberately induced whiplash.”
Livermore Lab has a dubious record both on maintaining security of nuclear-weapons-usable amounts of plutonium it has stored in its most heavily guarded facility, and on avoiding pollution of surrounding communities.
Tri-Valley CAREs Senior Adviser Marylia Kelley says the Lab “has already proven that it cannot keep weapons-usable quantities of plutonium safe.” Kelley recalled the scheduled force-on-force security drill the Department of Energy conducted there in 2008, to test the security of nuclear-weapons-usable amounts of plutonium stored in the Lab’s most heavily-guarded area, the “Superblock.”
While the attack wasn’t a surprise, the mock-terrorists were able to enter the Superblock, get the material they wanted, and hold their ground long enough to detonate a simulated nuclear “dirty bomb.” Additionally, a DOE team was able to take away some of the plutonium material.
Lab lost its Category II security
“This is how Livermore Lab lost its Category II security,” Kelley said, adding that removal of the Lab’s large stock of plutonium was completed in 2012, and the Lab currently holds a lower Category III security classification which limits the amount of nuclear material it can hold on-site.
Kelley called it “shocking and dangerous that Livermore Lab management and its overseeing agency plan to bring large quantities of deadly plutonium back to Livermore” because developments since 2012 have made it even less safe to have large quantities of plutonium there. The City of Livermore has a larger population now and has extended its boundaries so the plutonium would now be within Livermore City limits, and the Lab has recently ramped up its workforce.
“The bottom line is that more Lab employees and local residents could die due to a terror attack or serious accident,” she said. “We must ensure this does not happen.”
Adding to environmental concerns, both the Lab and its Site 300 high explosives testing range near the city of Tracy are federal Super-Fund sites, undergoing cleanup the government expects will not be complete until about 2060.
Though the U.S. hasn’t built new plutonium pits on an industrial scale since 1989, Congress and recent federal administrations have mandated that U.S. nuclear weapons must be modernized, and the NNSA has started plutonium production for newly designed nuclear weapons including the W87-1 warhead, designed by Livermore Lab to top the new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. New pits are being built at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and to provide a second site, a major retrofit is proposed for an existing facility at Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
At the end of September, a South Carolina District Court ruled in favor of a lawsuit by plaintiffs Tri-Valley CAREs, Savannah River Site Watch and Nuclear Watch New Mexico against DOE and NNSA. U.S. Judge Mary Geiger Lewis ruled in favor of the monitoring organizations’ contention that the government agencies had failed to “programmatically” evaluate the environmental aspects of proposed enhanced production of plutonium bomb pits.
Judge Geiger’s ruling requires NNSA to issue a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) analyzing the full impacts of its plutonium pit production plans across the nuclear weapons complex. Yundt said this should include the role of Livermore Lab, where this year’s funding for plutonium pit production has escalated by 50% over last year.
“The enhanced plutonium activities suddenly being proposed at Livermore’s Plutonium Facility should be included as part of the nationwide PEIS on plutonium pit production because it is a ‘connected action’ to producing new cores for new nuclear weapons,” Yundt said.
“That PEIS is the appropriate document for a thorough analysis of alternatives in conjunction with the pit production plans, in order to evaluate if this Livermore proposal is truly necessary, rather than producing a stand-alone Supplemental EIS focused solely on the Livermore site that may not include any analysis of the pit production mission, even though that is a driver for the decision.”
A rebirth of nuclear power is threatened in the United States. It stems from a combination of factors, including the U.S. government’s refusal to seriously address actually clean energy, the political and propaganda power of the nuclear weapons and nuclear energy industries, the poor quality of U.S. education, the sad state of corporate media, and the rise of a tech-firm oligarchy.
In the absence of actual intelligence, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are making grand plans to use nuclear energy to power their Artificial Intelligence installations. Even the site of the most famous (even if never properly understood) U.S. nuclear disaster, Three Mile Island, is making plans for courting new disasters, despite strong local opposition.
Why is nuclear power a bad idea?
The top six reasons might be these:
1. There is no solution whatsoever to the indisputable problem of nuclear waste disposal. 2. There is no solution to the risk of more Three Mile Island- , Chernobyl- , Fukushima-like disasters — or, if there is, it has not persuaded any private insurance companies to take the risk of insuring nuclear power plants. The people of the United States will foot the bill (not to mention the cancer deaths) from the next catastrophe — whether accidental or caused by an attack (nuclear plants being prime targets for terrorism/war).
3. Nuclear energy is not “green,” but slow, dangerous, expensive, and inefficient. 4.Solar, wind, and tide energy solutions have been progressing even faster in reality than has nuclear energy in propaganda. While the solution of lower energy use has always been staring us in the face, the solution of energy that is cleaner, safer, faster, and cheaper is now well established. 5. Drone warfare has predictably spread far and wide, turning every nuclear power plant into a self-imposed nuclear weapon. 6. The nuclear energy and weapons industries rise or fall together. The energy technology is used as a stepping stone to the weapons. The energy waste is used as material for Depleted Uranium weapons. Nuclear energy powers the submarines that carry the weapons. And military contractors are working to give the world the marvelous gift of portable nuclear reactors that can be brought into war zones — in an apparent effort to win a prize for the worst idea ever.
But dozens of U.S. cities and counties are nuclear-free zones.
No nuclear weapons or energy allowed. There is no reason that U.S. states cannot take the same step.Click here to tell your state legislators and governors, that now is a time for independence and wisdom: Tell them to make NY a nuclear-free zone.
Holloman Drone Training Base, Southern NM The largest drone training base in the U.S., where 700+ drone pilots and operators graduate annually! 16 years ago the American public started to become aware of the secret and very illegal assassin drone program. Soon afterwards the peace community mobilized against it, while the US Air Force top brass were bragging about what a tremendous advancement drones were, enabling our forces to destroy “enemy terrorists” without putting our troops at risk. As drone whistleblower Daniel Hale stated, drones “embolden commanders” making it easier for them to orchestrate more horrendous crimes against humanity.
16 years later Americans are forced to ask ourselves: Who are the real terrorists? Israeli and U.S. drones have been a primary weapon in the 16 month long genocidal seige on Gaza that has nearly completely obliterated Palestinian communities, killing tens of thousands of civilians, including over 700 infants, and leaving the survivors without adequate food, water, shelter or medical care. Homicide, Hospitalcide, Scholasticide, Ecocide, Urbicide, Medicide, Truthicide, Climatocide…the list is endless. This obscene aggression has expanded across borders into the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran and elsewhere. What will we do as Americans to halt this insanity?
The settler-colonial genocidal campaign in Gaza and elsewhere, using AI and remotely controlled drones to dominate the world has destabilized our world, as the first drone whistleblowers warned us 10 years ago. What will we do? “Silence is complicity,” warned the late, great Martin Luther King Jr. Let’s enter the belly of the beast:
Be Fearless Angelic Troublemakers determined to demilitarize our country and our planet together. Mother earth needs us now more than ever before. Join us at Holloman in April for all or part of the week: A week of persistent peaceful action to nonviolently resist, educate and promote GI resistance. Palestine will take front stage: NO WEAPONS or TAX $$ for GENOCIDE!
WE MUST DEMILITARIZE OUR SOCIETY. Time is running out. Join Our Organizing Team…help it grow! Check out our website for more info. Camping and Hotel Options available.
Trump’s executive order regarding the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and similar action against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, or Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) of 2021, could starve the Palisades zombie reactor of massive taxpayer funding requested by Holtec International for its unprecedented restart. Holtec is looking to various troughs of funding from both laws, totaling a shocking $8+ billion (with a B!) in mostly federal, but also State of Michigan, bailouts.
Palisades is located in Covert Township, just south of the City of South Haven, in Van Buren County, s.w. Michigan. It is immediately upon the beach of Lake Michigan, drinking water supply for 16 million people along its shores, including the City of Chicago.
Palisades was permanently shut down by its previous owner, Entergy, on May 20, 2022, supposedly for good. But Palisades took over the site, supposedly to decommission it, only to instead secretively apply to the U.S. Department of Energy and State of Michigan for many billions of dollars in taxpayer funds, to restart the more than half-century old, extremely problem-plagued reactor.
NIRS’s analysis of the IRA revealed that more than $380 billion (with a B!) in nuclear power subsidies had been authorized therein. The analysis also addressed additional billions of dollars in nuclear power subsidies contained in the IIJA.
Another $7.4 billion in federal funds, in the form of loan guarantees, for so-called “Small Modular Reactor” (SMR) design certification, construction, and operation, would come from the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and the follow on December 23, 2007 appropriations. Holtec has targeted Palisades for two SMR-300s (300 Megawatts-electric each), which would nearly double the tiny 432-acre site’s nuclear Mega-wattage. Holtec has also targeted Palisades’ sibling nuclear site, the closed and decommissioned Big Rock Point hundreds of miles north, in Hayes Township, between Charlevoix and Petoskey, likewise on the Lake Michigan shore. Whether Trump will order a freeze on these funds as well, remains to be seen.
Self-inflicted steam tube degradation, due to two years of neglect by the inexperienced and incompetent company, also puts in doubt Holtec’s late 2025 restart plans at Palisades.
The article quotes Beyond Nuclear’s radioactive waste specialist, Kevin Kamps:
Kevin Kamps, an activist with Maryland-based Beyond Nuclear who grew up near the plant, said that safety assurances are “very dubious, as [the] NRC is completely captured by the industry it is supposed to regulate.”
To learn more about Beyond Nuclear’s and our allies’ resistance to the Palisades zombification, see our one-stop-shop for related website posts, dating back to 2002:
NNSA has yet to satisfy Government Accounting Office best practice guidelines for the SRS pit project.
LANL itself has experienced numerous and serious safety accidents, including a plutonium fire, flooding, glove box contamination and a plutonium “criticality” accident, in recent years.
Why does the production of new plutonium pits take priority over cleaning up the hazardous legacy of previous pit production?
Last week U.S. District Judge Mary Lewis Geiger, South Carolina, faulted the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency for ignoring the National Environmental Protection Act and rushing plans to fabricate plutonium pit bombs at Savannah River Site, near Aiken, South Carolina.
Newly designed plutonium pits will serve as “triggers” for the next generation of nuclear warheads mounted atop Sentinel, the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missile, and for new submarine-launched nuclear weapons. Combined, these projects comprise major components in the trillion-dollar “modernization” of the U.S. strategic deterrence force.
Plaintiffs including Savannah River Site Watch, South Carolina Environmental Law Project Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley CAREs forced NNSA to halt construction on many phases of its plutonium pit facility near Aiken, SC, to hold public scoping meetings, solicit public comments, and produce a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement within thirty months.
Plaintiffs successfully argued that the plutonium pit modernization project was complex, involving diverse entities, was spread over wide geographical regions and therefore, by definition, required a “programmatic environmental impact statement, PEIS.
The proposed plutonium pit facility at Savannah River Site will reconstruct a massive 500-room partially completely abandoned building designed for the Mixed Oxide Plant. The spectacularly failed MOX plant would have processed old plutonium pits from de-commissioned US nuclear weapons per a nuclear weapons agreement with the Russians in 2000. Poor management and engineering revisions multiplied costs exceeding $7 billion when DOE finally terminated the MOX project in 2019. DOE recently paid the State of South Carolina an extra $600 million fine for failure to remove 10 tons of plutonium delivered to the MOX plant and stored at SRS. Ironically SRS is importing a different 10 tons of plutonium pits from the PANTEX pit storage site in Texas to manufacture new pits.
NNSA’s plan for plutonium pit production at Savannah River Site involves complex coordination between Los Alamos, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad NM, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in CA and the Kansas City National Security Campus, and therefor requires a NEPA “programmatic environmental impact statement”. NNSA refused repeated calls to perform the PEIS, which resulted in the successful lawsuit agreed last week.
NNSA has yet to satisfy Government Accounting Office best practice guidelines for the SRS pit project. GAO’s repeated calls for NNSA to create quality Integrated Master Schedules and Life Cycle Cost Estimates for its plutonium pit modernization program remain unfulfilled. These plans and guidelines establish best practices for building an efficient cost-effective project, something MOX consistently ignored, leading to its disastrous failure. Congress subsequently ordered NNSA meet these GAO parameters by July 2025.
Congress had mandated in 2019 that Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico manufacture 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030. Because LANL is a research facility, it has not produced any plutonium pits since 2011, and never at scale. It was unprepared to fulfill this Congressional mandate, authored by Senator John McCain. In response, NNSA then divided the plutonium pit project in two: Savannah River Site would produce 50 pits per year by 2030, and LANL 30 pits. SRS has never manufactured plutonium pits, though it did produce 10 tons of plutonium for pit fabrication at Rocky Flats, CO beginning in 1957. Thirty million gallons of highly radioactive wastes from that project, more than 200 million curies* of radiation, remain stored on- site at SRS, making it one of the most radioactive Superfund sites in the U.S.
Rocky Flats had produced one to two thousand plutonium pits per year for decades until it was closed in 1989. After whistleblower leaks, (see Jon Lipsky, James Stone) the FBI and EPA raided Rocky Flats discovering gross fraud and egregious violations of environmental regulations by contractor, Rockwell International. Rocky Flats was closed and will remain a superfund site into the far distant future.
Parts of Los Alamos National Lab, wedged on a tabletop mesa, comprises a superfund site with residual plutonium still found around the site and in surrounding canyons from operations and waste dumping begun in the 1940’s “Oppenheimer years”.DOE recently signed a consent decree with the State of New Mexico to assume greater responsibility for the clean-up of waste deposit wells and trenches that threaten nearby towns like White Rock, the San Ildefonso Pueblo and the Rio Grande River with radiological contamination. DOE paid New Mexico a $420,000 fine for mishandling hazardous wastes is 2024.
LANL itself has experienced numerous and serious safety accidents, including a plutonium fire, flooding, glove box contamination and a plutonium “criticality” accident, in recent years. The most recent 2023 safety report for LANL, operated by Triad LLC, showed improvement in its safety operations, though in that same year LANL was fined $420,000 by New Mexico for improper handling of hazardous materials.
Plutonium, Pu, is a man-made metallic element. It is highly toxic, highly radioactive, pyrophoric, (spontaneously ignites on contact with air) and fissionable. It is extremely challenging to produce, purify, mill, melt, mold, weld, control and store. All these processes have taken place at sites across the U.S. since the 1940’s and are now catalogued by DOE as “legacy hazardous waste sites”.
Because plutonium ignites on contact with air, it must be handled in “glove boxes”, self-contained hermetically sealed boxed filled with inert gases. Impervious rubber sleeves extend into the box, and workers slip their arms into these sleeves, then manipulate the plutonium through different phases of pit production. Any nicks or cracks in the rubber gloves can and have resulted in plutonium leaks, and serious illnesses.
Glove boxes and gloves for the plutonium pit project, in example, are already is short supply, demonstrating how integral and integrated every aspect of the plutonium pits program is, and how poor planning could disrupt the program; the basic tenant of the lawsuit against NNSA.
Training a skilled glove box worker at LANL can take four years. A shortage of skilled workers at LANL poses a regular challenge, one that will intensify as LANL workers will also train unskilled SRS workers. A shortage of workers at WIPP in Carlsbad NM has been a chronic problem despite significant wage increases from DOE.
Historically, sites involved with the production, refining, milling or fabrication of plutonium or plutonium pits for nuclear weapons have left a voluminous legacy of radionuclide pollution. Radioactive wastes generated in weapons production beginning with the 1940’s Manhattan Project, by statute, are destined for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, WIPP, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Because plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years and remains lethal for much longer, plutonium waste products trucked over millions of highway miles to WIPP are stored in vaults excavated into salt domes 2000 feet underground. While WIPP is the sole repository for defense department transuranic wastes, the Government Accounting Office cautioned that WIPP may not have the capacity to accept all the plutonium pit wastes generated at LALN and SRS. Timely removal of plutonium waste from SRS and LANL is crucial for uninterrupted pit production.
A fire in WIPP’s salt dome closed the facility for 3 years in 2014. A fire at LANL closed its operation for 3 years in 2013.
Both SRS and LANL will recycle surplus plutonium pits from the strategic reserve at PANTEX near Amarillo, TX. Currently 4000 reserve pits and 10,000 surplus pits waiting disposal are stored at PANTEX. Re-engineered pits from SRS and LANL will be returned to PANTEX for final assembly into W87-1 and W 88 nuclear warheads.
The rate of deterioration of plutonium pits, 30 or more years old, has concerned and motivated lawmakers to legislate a complete replacement of all 3,600 deployed and reserve nuclear warheads. Independent scientific groups like JASON and the Livermore National Lab have estimated that plutonium pits maintain their viability for 100 or even 150 years. Hardware within the nuclear warhead corrodes much more quickly than the pits themselves, focusing doubt on the race to replace the pits themselves.
The programmatic environmental statement ordered by federal Judge Geiger may resolve many questions posed by the rush to produce new plutonium pits. The pits produced at SRS and LANL will trigger new W87-1 nuclear warheads. What need is there for a new warhead when the old W87-0 has the same safety features? Why are SRS and LANL adopting an aggressive production schedule when the new Sentinel ICBM deliver systems is way over budget and at least a decade away from deployment? Why does the production of new plutonium pits take priority over cleaning up the hazardous legacy of previous pit production? Has any plutonium production site ever not become a hazardous waste site? Will NNSA slow pit production to engineer safety improvements instead of placing workers in risky dangerous situations? Do we really want to spend a trillion dollars and start a new nuclear arms race?
Note.
* A curie, Ci, is a measure of radiation per second, named after Marie and Pierre Curie. Exposure to even a few curies can be fatal.
The United States is estimated to have spent more than $400 billion on the kinds of antimissile goals that the president now says will provide “for the common defense.”
Star Wars is back, with an executive order from President Trump that the White House said “directs the building of the Iron Dome missile defense shield for America.”
The order, issued on Monday night, didn’t quite do that. It was more a vaguely worded set of instructions to accelerate current programs or explore new approaches to defending the continental United States than a blueprint for arming the heavens with thousands of antimissile weapons, sensors and tracking devices.
But two blocks away, on the same evening, the Office of Management and Budget issued a 56-page spreadsheet that detailed the suspension of funding for thousands of programs. They included most of the major U.S. efforts to reduce the amount of nuclear fuel that terrorists might seize, to guard against biological weapon attacks and to manage initiatives around the globe to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
The two announcements seemed to encapsulate the administration’s conflicting instincts in its opening weeks. Mr. Trump wants to build big and take the Space Force he created to new heights, even at the risk of new arms races. That effort has been underway since Ronald Reagan’s day, with only mixed results.
But in its drive to shut down programs it believes could be creations of the so-called deep state, the administration wants to cut off funding for many programs that seek to reduce the chances of an attack on the United States — an attack that could very well come in forms other than a missile launched from North Korea, China or Russia.
A judge paused Mr. Trump’s spending freeze on Tuesday, but the president’s intentions are clear.
Though Mr. Trump calls his plan the Iron Dome, it has little if any resemblance to the Israeli system of the same name that has succeeded in destroying small missiles that move at a snail’s pace compared with the blinding speeds of intercontinental warheads………………………………………………………..
Missile defense has long been a favorite topic for Mr. Trump, who has envisioned the project as the next step for the Space Force, which he created in his first term.
But it could also trigger a new arms race, some experts fear. And unaddressed in Mr. Trump’s new initiative is the threat of nuclear terrorism and blackmail with an atomic bomb, which might be smuggled into the United States on a truck or a boat. Many experts see the terrorism threat as far bigger than an enemy firing a single missile or a swarm.
In 2001, after Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government scrambled to get wide-ranging advice on how outwit terrorists and better protect Americans from the threats of germ, computer, chemical and nuclear attacks.
“The combination of simultaneously deploying a missile defense system of questionable effectiveness against any real threat” while “suspending operative programs against nuclear or bioterrorists, sophisticated cyberattackers or others” is a “terrible trade-off,” said Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama who now heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
“The Iron Dome reference conjures up the success of the Israeli missile defense, but that’s misleading given the relatively short-range missiles that Israel defends against and the small territory it needs to defend,” said Mr. Moniz, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with long experience in nuclear weapons ………………
Critics of the executive order say it is more a list than a program, and includes systems that have never panned out. In an interview, Theodore A. Postol, an emeritus professor of science and national security at M.I.T., called Mr. Trump’s missile plan “a compendium of flawed weapons systems that have been shown to be unworkable.”…………………………………………
The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.
A central campaign promise, the proposed $2 trillion-plus missile shield is, to experts, silly.
Donald Trump’s Republican Party platform, released in July, contains little in terms of tangible policy proposals.
But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the capitalization) “PREVENT WORLD WORLD III” by building “A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to execute, unnecessary, and hard to even comprehend.
Trump has vowed to build this Iron Dome in multiple speeches. It is among his campaign’s 20 core promises. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “MADE IN AMERICA,” creating jobs, as well as stopping foreign attacks.
“It’s dramatically unclear to me what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than just treating it like the insane ramblings of a senile old person.”
It may be more useful to consider an American Iron Dome as a bombastic businessman’s branding exercise, rather than a viable policy position, said Lewis: “The Iron Dome here has just become a kind of brand name, like Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.”
The Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and American weapons manufacturer Raytheon, has been a prized part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as the name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It’s more mobile: when a short-range missile reaches Israel’s airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to blow them up before they can touch the ground.
The Iron Dome’s functionality depends on Israel’s comparatively miniscule size and proximity to enemies. This makes it particularly hard to imagine a similar setup in the US, which is over 400 times the geographical size of Israel. Such an apparatus, national security analyst Joseph Cirincione estimated, would cost about 2.5 trillion dollars. That’s over three times the country’s entire projected military budget for 2025.
uch a system would also be unnecessary. As of now, there are no armed groups sending missiles toward the United States from within a theoretical Iron Dome’s 40-mile interception range. Such a system “couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July.
America’s pre-existent missile defense network, which has been in place since the Bush administration, is currently made up of 44 interceptors based in California and Alaska, geared towards longer-range missiles, such as those that could be fired from North Korea. But the system has performed abysmally in tests, despite Republicans generally claiming “it works,” said Lewis. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased missile defense funding since at least the 1990s.)
“This is why it’s so hard to make heads or tails of what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying that Canada is going to develop artillery rockets to use against North Dakota?”
nuclear-news 