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August 29, 2024 Bulletin 349: Please help us gain organizational and business endorsements to our national call to halt plutonium pit production Permalink for this bulletin (please forward!). Previously: Bulletin 348: Sentinel rumors, Jul 26, 2024 Dear friends and colleagues -- We've been out of the office for the past week and finally are now able to provide one or two important updates. These are going to come in multiple short Bulletins, like this one. The key "action item" is the THIRD one in this Bulletin. First, we'd like to direct your attention to the slide decks from two recent talks we gave in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, on Aug. 6 and 19, respectively:
We looked primarily at the background to the title question, as you will see. ******* Second, in passing and as regards the above-mentioned Sentinel rumors, the Wall Street Journal edged slightly closer to what we believe to be the true situation in an Aug. 26 article ("U.S. Nuclear Missile Silos Need Modernizing, but Fixes Aren’t Coming Soon," paywall). We have not had time to root out the original but this RT follow-on article quotes the WSJ as saying:
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Third, support is building to stop the plutonium warhead core ("pit") production project at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). We hope you will help us stop this project, by helping us gain endorsements from organizations and businesses to the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production." Individual endorsements are also great. We've explained why halting LANL pit production is important many times, in many ways. This time, I am going to emphasize the inextricable link between LANL pit production and the controversial new silo-based missile system ("Sentinel"). The LANL pit factory, on which construction is slated to continue until at least 2032 at a total cost of about $22 billion, has but one assigned product: pits for the W87-1 Sentinel warhead. This new warhead is not really necessary for Sentinel, as there are plenty of existing modern, accurate, long-lasting W87-0 warheads to equip Sentinel missiles. The W87-1, and LANL pit production, are necessary only to deploy "extra" warheads on Sentinel -- up to two "extra" warheads per missile, beyond the single warhead deployed today. Only LANL will produce pits for these "extra" Sentinel warheads. At full loading, a 450-missile Sentinel fleet could deploy 1,350 warheads, up from 400 today, assuming LANL could make 850 pits or so. It can't, but the idea is to make as many pits as fast as possible, no matter the human, environmental, and fiscal cost. Said differently, the only purpose for LANL pit production -- as opposed to technology demonstration and training -- is nuclear rearmament via the Sentinel system, rearmament beyond the quantitative limits set by New START, which expire on Feb. 4, 2026. LANL pit production has tons of problems. You can read about some of them in this detailed briefing and elsewhere here. We know LANL pit production will fail. Many people do. As one senior government official said to me (paraphrasing), the real question is when -- and with what consequences. Thanks to your help, the tide is beginning to turn. Locally, pit production is increasingly contentious. In Congress, draft legislation now includes requirements for NNSA and GAO to study and report on some of the intractable logistical problems at LANL, which Congress is finally beginning to see. The crash pit production program at LANL, which is not at all necessary to maintain U.S. nuclear weapons, is however necessary to shore up well-placed doubts about the preeminence of U.S. military power. How can the U.S. even pretend to be an empire without a way, right now, to make all-new nuclear weapons? In such a view, pit production in South Carolina in the mid-to-late 2030s is nowhere soon enough. Unfortunately there are still quite a few organizations and academics who think, or claim to think, that LANL is a dandy place to make pits -- all the pits, in fact. In what enduring facilities, they never say. They claim to oppose Sentinel but they do not do so consistently or thoroughly. If we only had to oppose NNSA, the nuclear weapons contractors, and the national security state, the political problem would be a lot easier. We'll win, but we'd rather win sooner. An early demise -- as opposed to the inevitable later demise -- to industrial pit production at LANL would be a heavy blow to U.S. nuclear weapons ambitions. It would basically put paid, in the short run, to any real nuclear arms race. The next decade is quite crucial in that regard, just as the nuclear hawks say. Halting LANL pit production in favor of the technology preservation and training mission LANL previously had is quite doable, given the overwhelming problems facing industrial operations at LANL, a remote and uniquely ill-suited site for such a mission. For all these reasons it is very important for national and regional organizations who seek arms control, or nuclear disarmament, or more climate-friendly national priorities, to join us in opposing this factory. The most elementary and easiest form of this opposition is to endorse the "Call for Sanity, Not Nuclear Production." Locally, organizational and business support is crucial. The more visible support there is, the more we can all do. Opposition is growing. Please help grow it faster! ******* Fourth (and finally today), a strong case can be made that nuclear rearmament (and therefore LANL pit production, among other violations we might allege) are illegal. As a reminder, the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entered into force in 1970. All NPT states parties have an obligation to negotiate nuclear disarmament per Article VI: Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. Taking that obligation and other law into account, in 1996 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) unanimously found (p. 45) that "[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control" (emphasis added). For many years, we and many others argued that failure to negotiate disarmament in good faith was a breach of U.S. NPT obligations. Now something different, and something more, is happening. The U.S. is taking a number of concrete steps, including but not limited to a crash pit production program at LANL, to rearm -- that is, to increase the number of deployed nuclear weapons, without any negotiations whatsoever. We discussed briefly some (not all) of the escalatory steps the U.S. is taking in recent talks, ("Will the 2024 presidential elections alter the course of the new nuclear arms race?, Part II." (Part I is here.) Relevant U.S. provocations of Russia in particular continue on a weekly basis. Please see our Ukraine page for more, e.g. Larry Johnson's 8/27/24 summary of recent Russian statements. U.S. citizens have essentially no idea of what is being done in their name. If maintaining nuclear weapons indefinitely was an NPT violation -- and we still think it is, especially given what has followed from it -- deploying and making additional nuclear weapons is something worse. We believe the U.S. is explicitly violating the NPT, the most important legal cornerstone of global nuclear security, by its acts, by its explicit plans and threats, and in the utter lack of good-faith negotiations so evident since at least 2021. Where is the venue in which this violation could be tried, you may ask? In the streets, in the newspapers, in congressional offices, and in your own conversations with those still sitting on the proverbial fence. Let's all wake up, please! Best wishes, more coming soonest, Greg |
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