Bulletin 276: Zoominar Wednesday 3 pm MST: Strategy discussion for disarmament activists; Congress punts pit deadlines to STRATCOM if DOE can't predict construction costs within 15%

December 13, 2020

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Dear friends and colleagues --

We hope you are all remaining well, and enjoying the holidays as best you can under these difficult circumstances.

1. We are going to host a Zoominar on Wednesday, December 16, at 3 pm Mountain time, to discuss disarmament strategy

Here are the coordinates:

Topic: Los Alamos Study Group - Strategy discussion for disarmament activists
Time: Dec 16, 2020 03:00 PM Mountain Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89231480932?pwd=Sms0Z05ZQlVxSzNTVWV2NE0yL0V2Zz09

Meeting ID: 892 3148 0932
Passcode: 707549

We had a pretty good discussion last time. There are some loose ends and correspondence we haven't responded to from that meeting, but we will in the next day or so.

This time we will have a Zoom "waiting room," as we had a few disruptive trolls last time.

In this past May's Update on US Nuclear Weapons Modernization for the International Disarmament Community we argued that U.S. empire, including its so-called "conventional" military, is the main overall barrier to nuclear disarmament in the world. We also cited evidence that the U.S. did not have a functioning democracy and said that it would not be possible to generate any effective single-issue nuclear disarmament movement in the U.S. We argued that the movement of resources from the military to human and environmental needs was a much better basis for organizing than nuclear weapons per se, in part because the military as a whole, rather than just the nuclear portion of it, is such a vast financial commitment.

The scale of the opportunity cost carried by U.S. citizens, in comparison to our so-called "adversaries," is staggering. The U.S. spends 11 times what Russia does on its military annually ($732 billion vs. $65 B, using SIPRI's numbers). This is 5 times as much per capita as Russia ($2,225 vs. $446 annually) and 20 times as much per square mile of territory (a staggering $193,000 per square mile per year for the U.S., i.e. $302/acre annually, vs. $9,900/sq. mile-year for Russia). China's overall defense bill is $261 B, but this is only $182/person per year.

Which of these countries has an out-of-control military sector?

We all knew the U.S. was highly militarized, but do citizens understand the size of the economic rent -- $5,785/household-year -- paid to our military-industrial overlords for the privilege of being part of a terrorizing and in some cases (Yemen) genocidal global empire?

Some say that this money is largely borrowed into existence, not actually paid in taxes, taxation being necessary primarily to keep inflation in check. True enough. But if so, why can't we spend just as much on critical environmental and human needs as we do on the military, and, just possibly, save this country and others? The answer will be some variation of, "We can't run up the deficit like that!" So politically there is an opportunity cost, a tradeoff, regardless of what macroeconomic view we may hold.

We need to press much harder for the opportunities we want and need in our cities and countryside and make it clear that we want cuts to the military. It won't be the soldiers coming home to no jobs who complain the loudest at such demands, but rather the contractors. There is now a defense spending reduction caucus in Congress; some 93 House members voted to cut spending last July.

These are some of the themes I am hoping we can discuss on Wednesday.

Meanwhile there is this interesting development:

2. Congress punts plutonium warhead core ("pit") production requirements to STRATCOM in FY21 defense bill if DOE can't nail construction costs within 15%

On Friday (12/11/20), the Senate joined the House in passing the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what are now veto-proof majorities in both houses of Congress.

Section 3114 (pp. 2541-2545 in the Conference Report) sets up a complicated scheme whereby the legal requirement to produce certain numbers of pits by certain dates (see also here) could be delayed by up to five years on the basis of a certification by the Commander in Chief of the U.S. Strategic Command (the CINCSTRAT) that the "deterrence missions" and "military effectiveness" of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal would not be degraded by a delay. These deadlines are statutory, so it would be up to Congress to formally change them on the basis of this military advice.

These deadlines, the main one of which the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA 2017, p. 2) and independent analyses (Institute for Defense Analyses) have said cannot be met, were written by the armed services committees. These committees are now seeking a politically-palatable way to get out of their own requirements. They are doing so by handing policy responsibility to the uniformed military, in yet another example of "Madisonian" institutions bowing to the "Trumanite network" (cf. Glennon, National Security and Double Government).

In our opinion there is no sound reason pit production cannot be delayed by at least five years and possibly much more, from even a hawkish perspective. From a disarmament-oriented perspective -- ours -- pit production need never be undertaken at all, even if a large nuclear arsenal were deployed for decades. We have argued that pit production in any timeframe is incompatible with the priorities needed for national survival. Humanity faces an existential emergency in which U.S. nuclear weapons modernization plays a severely deleterious role.

Returning to the new law, if independent cost estimates (ICEs) find that either of the two main multibillion-dollar, never-before-attempted, decade-long plutonium infrastructure projects now underway could cost more than 115% of DOE's preliminary estimates (the "low confidence" case), the CINCSTRAT may certify that pit production deadlines can be delayed. Alternatively the CINCSTRAT may decide that current production deadlines must stand.

Regardless of what the CINCSTRAT decides, if either of the independent cost estimates is more than 115% of DOE's estimate, DOE must either change the project in question or certify to Congress that its own cost estimate is accurate after all.

It is remarkable that the law requires preliminary cost estimates (those available at "Critical Decision One," in DOE parlance) to be this accurate.

These two projects are the "Los Alamos Plutonium Pit Production Project" (LAP4, DOE Project 21-D-512, pp. 193-198), at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to be complete in FY28, and the "Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility Project" (SRPPF, DOE project 21-D-511, pp. 199-205) at the Savannah River Site (SRS), to be complete in FY31 at the latest.

DOE has never completed any project of the scale and complexity of these two projects without large cost overruns and schedule slippage (pp. v-vi). This is also the pattern for "megaprojects" worldwide; only roughly one in a thousand megaprojects delivers the estimated benefits on the estimated schedule and within the estimated budget. NNSA's management of large projects is particularly fraught. NNSA and its predecessor program have never left the Government Accountability Office's (GAO's) "high risk list" for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in the latter's four-decade history.

The only way NNSA can avoid triggering military review of its pit production requirements is to make sure its preliminary cost estimates for both projects (which will be submitted to Congress two months from now) are large enough to encompass all the cost contingencies independent estimators might see. Doing this would almost certainly create "sticker shock," especially for SRPPF.

The law applies only to the two specific construction projects mentioned, not to supporting projects (e.g. nuclear waste management facilities, training centers, parking garages, office buildings) and -- most importantly! -- not to operational ("program") spending to prepare for pit production.

At LANL, most of the preparation for the pit production mission -- this year, about three-fourths of it; see slides 23 & 26 -- is in "program" spending, which has essentially no external visibility or accountability at all -- and is not covered by this new law. Another two hundred million dollars or more per year in construction are also not in LAP4 and hence not subject to this law's stringent cost certification either. Up to now there has not been even a preliminary cost estimate for LAP4. All this has given many parties the mistaken impression that pit production at LANL would be relatively cheap. The reality is otherwise (slides 28-31). Per pit, LANL pits would cost 6-10 times what SRS pits would cost and almost two orders of magnitude -- 100 times -- what NNSA has broadly claimed, whether or not NNSA's pit production deadlines are relaxed by up to five years.

Putting the requirements of this law together with project schedules, any CINCSTRAT decision and new DOE pit production plan would be due by roughly July of the coming year.

Very best wishes to all,

Greg Mello, for the Study Group

PS: There is still no fiscal year 2021 (FY21) funding bill for any part of the federal government, which is now operating on a one-week continuing resolution that passed on Friday. We we will learn the outcome of House/Senate funding discussions for nuclear weapons programs later this week.