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November 12, 2023 Bulletin 333: In-person & webcast discussion this Thursday 11/16/23 of the new plan being briefed on Capitol Hill to increase U.S. nuclear forces Permalink for this bulletin (please forward). Simple home page. Detailed home page. Previously: Bulletin 332: Mark your calendars: Nov. 16 forum on the proposed U.S. program to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal, centrally reliant on LANL's proposed "pit" factory Oct 26, 2023 Dear friends and colleagues -- Before proceeding to the important single subject of this short Bulletin, we believe it is important to acknowledge -- and in our collective actions prioritize our response to -- the ongoing mass murder in Gaza now being conducted by Israeli Defense Forces, with the full support of the United States. Chris Hedges sums up the situation. What will we do? The answer will be etched in history, and in our identity as a nation. In late 2010, President Obama agreed to a wide-ranging plan to modernize the entire nuclear weapons establishment in negotiations with Senate Republicans over the ratification of New START. That plan involved the serial modernization or replacement of every single U.S. nuclear warhead factory, warhead, and delivery system. Since 2010 this plan has gradually evolved and expanded, and of course it has also greatly increased in cost. Now, a radical increase in scale and pace of modernization, along with an increase in the size of nuclear forces, is being proposed by an influential bipartisan group appointed by Congress, as laid out in the The Final Report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States (Oct 2023). It was recently presented to the Senate (video) to general acclaim ("Bi-partisan support for strategic posture report in Senate Armed Services Committee hearing," Exchange Monitor, Oct 19, 2023). This report makes the claim that unless the U.S. greatly increases its nuclear weapons efforts along with other strategic system acquisitions over the 2027-2035 period, "deterrence" vis-a-vis Russia and China will be lost. As regular readers of these Bulletins will know, that happens to be the period of time in which Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is expected to make all the new plutonium warhead cores ("pits") for what these authors hope will be an expanding U.S. nuclear arsenal. Absent new pits from LANL, no altogether new warheads will be possible.
There is much else of importance to pass on to you -- and to ask from you in return. You can see some of the more important updates on our detailed web site, including recent news media, letters to New Mexico activists, and the more technical information to be found on our pit production page (regarding Los Alamos and more generally; see featured content especially, and regarding the Savannah River Site). Many of you may be interested in this recent expose (with which we had a lot to do): "Chess, cards and catnaps in the heart of America’s nuclear weapons complex, Searchlight New Mexico, Nov 8, 2023). Please come or tune in on Thursday if you can. Greg Mello, for the Los Alamos Study Group
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