Pope Francis' address on Peace, Hiroshima, Peace Memorial, 11/2419

The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral, as I already said two years ago. We will be judged on this. Future generations will rise to condemn our failure if we spoke of peace but did not act to bring it about among the peoples of the earth. How can we speak of peace even as we build terrifying new weapons of war?
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Indeed, if we really want to build a more just and secure society, we must let the weapons fall from our hands. “No one can love with offensive weapons in their hands” (SAINT PAUL VI, United Nations Address, 4 October 1965, 10). When we yield to the logic of arms and distance ourselves from the practice of dialogue, we forget to our detriment that, even before causing victims and ruination, weapons can create nightmares; “they call for enormous expenses, interrupt projects of solidarity and of useful labour, and warp the outlook of nations” (ibid.). How can we propose peace if we constantly invoke the threat of nuclear war as a legitimate recourse for the resolution of conflicts? May the abyss of pain endured here [in Hiroshima] remind us of boundaries that must never be crossed.

The arms race wastes precious resources that could be better used to benefit the integral development of peoples and to protect the natural environment. In a world where millions of children and families live in inhumane conditions, the money that is squandered and the fortunes made through the manufacture, upgrading, maintenance and sale of ever more destructive weapons, are an affront crying out to heaven.
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Convinced as I am that a world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary, I ask political leaders not to forget that these weapons cannot protect us from current threats to national and international security. We need to ponder the catastrophic impact of their deployment, especially from a humanitarian and environmental standpoint, and reject heightening a climate of fear, mistrust and hostility fomented by nuclear doctrines. The current state of our planet requires a serious reflection on how its resources can be employed in light of the complex and difficult implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, in order to achieve the goal of an integrated human development.

After laying a wreath to the Nagasaki bombing’s victims, the pope said the arms race creates a false sense of security, poisoning international relationships. He described nuclear weapons as wasteful and environmentally damaging.

“In a world where millions of children and families live in inhumane conditions, the money that is squandered and the fortunes made through the manufacture, upgrading, maintenance and sale of evermore destructive weapons are an affront crying out to heaven,” Francis said.

By saying that nuclear weapons should not be stockpiled for deterrence — a stance he first outlined in 2017 — Francis has gone further than his predecessors. The only other pope to visit Japan, John Paul II, said during the Cold War that deterrence could be “morally acceptable,” so long as it was a step toward disarmament.

"Pope’s World Peace Day message: 'Every war is a form of fratricide'," Vatican News, Linda Bordoni, 12/12/19)

Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for the Celebration of the 53rd World Day of Peace, 1/1/20: "Peace as A Journey of Hope: Dialogue, Reconciliation and Ecological Conversion"

Peace and international stability are incompatible with attempts to build upon the fear of mutual destruction or the threat of total annihilation. They can be achieved only on the basis of a global ethic of solidarity and cooperation in the service of a future shaped by interdependence and shared responsibility in the whole human family of today and tomorrow.
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We cannot claim to maintain stability in the world through the fear of annihilation, in a volatile situation, suspended on the brink of a nuclear abyss and enclosed behind walls of indifference. As a result, social and economic decisions are being made that lead to tragic situations where human beings and creation itself are discarded rather than protected and preserved.

From a Los Alamos Study Group grant proposal, Spring 2019

Mission and History

Since 1989, the Los Alamos Study Group has worked for nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, social justice, and economic sustainability – mutually-reinforcing aims that map directly onto the converging crises we face, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Throughout this time, we have contributed thoughtful popular and policy leadership on Department of Energy (DOE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) weapons laboratory and warhead issues, in which we have considerable – in some respects unparalleled – expertise. We have conducted hundreds of public meetings, and hundreds of briefings on Capitol Hill. We are strictly nonpartisan and factual, and we anchor policy details in a broad historical and technical perspective. We focus on practical outcomes. We have wide technical, legal, and public education experience as well as strong academic and work histories in science, engineering, law, and organizing. We draw on a wide range of other experts as needed. We have been quoted in thousands of newspaper articles and interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs. We have won environmental, civil rights, and freedom of information lawsuits. We have blocked major nuclear warhead infrastructure projects at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in which efforts we have had to work against the arms control community and the New Mexico delegation. We were named one of the nation’s “top ten small green groups” in 2011 and one of eleven “favorite groups” in 2013 by Counterpunch. Our analyses of U.S. nuclear weapon modernization have been significant contributions at Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) review and preparatory conferences and other international fora since 2015. We were early supporters of, and significant participants at and between, all international fora leading to the successful creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNWs). Since the beginning of 2018 we have been working with the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security (PSGS) on issues related to plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production, a long-time focus of ours.

We have led dozens of public workshops on energy and climate policy and related economic viability issues, and in 2017 devoted much of the summer to training young people in energy and climate policy intervention. Everything we do, in Congress and elsewhere, is informed by these concerns and our expertise in them. We seek to further leverage our knowledge, government access, and media relationships in these pressing national security issues.

Today our independent, nonpartisan, principled, broadly-informed voice is more important than ever as our society attempts to navigate through unprecedented political and environmental upheaval. This will intensify. The previous “normal” order will not return. We began with a mission of assisting in the reordering of nuclear weapons policy after the Cold War. A new Cold War is now underway. We seek to help end that war, in the context of preserving human society and a living planet. To do this, considerable leadership and training from outside the present centers of power appear necessary. We can, and to the best of our ability will, provide this.

Project Description (excerpts)

…More broadly, the Trump Administration is intent on breaking through three decades of hesitancy and “red tape” to start building nuclear weapons in quantity and in parallel, using multiple shifts as necessary. Lavish funding has been provided to the weapons labs, production plants, and underground surrogate test site in Nevada. Some production lines are already working three shifts per day. One plant has doubled its staff. Even now, a decade before the first new pits are to be used, confidence in industrial pit production by 2026 (30 pits/year [ppy]), rising to “80+” ppy by 2030, meaning 103 ppy average and up to 158 ppy in a single year, is essential to maintain this hard-charging pace. STRATCOM is therefore maintaining a “laser focus” on this program, as its commanding general (Hyten) said this week in the Senate.

…The only warhead “requiring” new pits is the so-called W87-1, the newest name for the Obama-era “interoperable warhead” – now no longer “interoperable” between ground- and sea-launched systems but much the same warhead. W87-1 program costs including pits are currently estimated at about $30 billion. All W87-1 components are to be new-made. The missile, to be built in the $85-$150 billion Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program, will be entirely new. The reentry vehicle (Mk21A) will be of new design – in part to enable MIRV capability (with 3 warheads). This is seen as essential in the event of collapse of strategic arms limitations, which some in the White House now seek.

There is no technical need to make new pits at this time to preserve a large, diverse nuclear stockpile. This fact has however not been fully persuasive under either the Bush, Obama, or Trump administrations, or in Congress, because sooner or later a large arsenal does require a real pit factory – and the Russians have one. With each passing year, “later” turns increasingly into “sooner.” NNSA estimates a new capability cannot be realized before the early- to mid-2030s, but DoD still projects having enough pits in hand to begin W87-1 production in 2030. At the moment this contradiction is unresolved. For its part LANL has not been able to run even a stable pilot program in 22 years, with billions of dollars.

Twenty-five years ago it was possible to envision a small enduring pit production capability based in existing LANL facilities. Now, LANL’s facilities aren’t “enduring” any more, and building a small newcapability isn’t feasible anywhere including at LANL, given the size of the “enduring” stockpile or anything like it.

…For a host of reasons, LANL cannot do the industrial pit mission. Possibly no site can, a nightmare for stewards of the apocalypse. Fortunately, the W87-1 is a grotesquely expensive and unnecessary program, all the stated “advantages” of which – sans MIRV capability – can be reaped far more simply and cheaply by merely using extra W87 warheads already available in sufficient quantity to arm all the GBSD missiles. We and many others oppose GBSD itself.  

…The Gordian Knot which must be cut and cut deeply is the US arsenal itself, as part of a broader reorientation of national security policy. Given the converging crises we face, US national security policies are not compatible with national, let alone human, survival. We must articulate this and convince others with respected voices to do so as well. …Beyond stronger declarative policy, we seek to move funding from “050” national security accounts to climate change mitigation and adaptation and the resilient, just energy transition they require.

Creating the present impasse in plutonium pit production has been a cooperative effort involving many parties – witting and unwitting, willing and unwilling – over decades. We are now at the moment of truth, the crisis we have built towards, the kairos. The temptation to actively or passively approve some sort of “Goldilocks”-sized pit production capability – not actually a choice any more – would waste this crisis. It must be resisted in favor of a fundamental transformation of security policy toward human and environmental sustainability, including deep cuts to the nuclear arsenal. This is the nuclear policy lodestar around which many diverse efforts should now gather.

All executive branch and diplomatic efforts to decrease tensions and pave the way for future agreements should be supported, and we will use every available media opportunity – many more are offered than we can respond to –  to do so. We will continue to articulate, in Congress, in the popular press, and elsewhere, the reality of the unavoidable “Great Transition” before us. Any “green new deal,” we have said and will say, must involve reorientation of national security policies, and not just for fiscal reasons….