LANL still has responsibility to monitor Russian nukes after treaty suspension, lab head says

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Feb 27, 2023

Greg Mello, published comment:

Thank you for keeping on top of this and writing it up, Scott. This event was, as all such events are, a "modified limited hang-out," in Watergate terms. Very modified and very limited. The laboratory treats citizens like subordinate children that can't possible have any need to know what is actually going on. This is structural, so I don't mean disrespect for the staff who work to put these things together. A radically bright dose of sunlight would improve NNSA's operations at LANL. Two comments:

1. Russia has suspended implementation of New START, and says it will abide by the quantitative limits of the treaty, but did not withdraw from it. The treaty expires on Feb. 4, 2026, and there is a lot of fence-mending to do between now and then if this last arms control treaty between the two countries is not to die with no replacement. The headline is correct re "suspension" of the treaty. Their [Russia’s] reasons for doing this do make sense, from their perspective. We have been warning about this for some years now.

2. It was hard to formulate the "what is the value of LANL pits" question in a way that would elicit a concrete response, given classification boundaries and political sensitivity. Thank you for including the issue.

The now-expected production delays at LANL push its pit production out in time, closer to the expected startup of a much larger production facility at the Savannah River Site, which is a necessary facility if the U.S. is to maintain a nuclear arsenal, given the inadequacies, poor safety and reliability, and the age of LANL facilities.

From other sources, we know that the SRS facility, which is and will be brand new and built to much higher safety standards, and is about five times the size of LANL's old production facility ( which also has other plutonium missions), will be able to make much more than "50" pits per year all by itself. There is also the possibility of running a second production shift there, as pointed out by the site manager two weeks ago in a talk. That might approximately double production from whatever the greater-than-50 pit baseline production is, according to prior DOE studies.

From the arms control perspective, not rushing into an arms race would be a good thing. While Dr. Mason is correct that LANL pits will be used in the Sentinel system, he neglected to mention that the initial warheads to be fielded on that system already exist and are "safe" and reliable for a long time to come, as NNSA defines these terms. There are enough of these existing modern, well-studied, "safe" warheads to put one on each Sentinel missile, with several dozen to spare.

So LANL production, which will cost about $15 billion to start up and entail enormous changes in the region, has nothing to do with providing "weapons that work," as Ted Wyka erroneously said. LANL could train a much smaller number of people, mostly for SRS, and demonstrate processes, without generating nearly so much waste or cramming so much work of all kinds into that old, cramped facility, with really no degradation to the U.S. so-called "deterrent."

So what exactly is the deterrent value, in conventional terms, of the few pits LANL will be able to make in the interim? That was the question. The real answer is that this value proposition is still being worked out, since NNSA does not have an actual reliable schedule for LANL production.

We believe Dr. Mason and his staff should have refused the production mission, as opposed to the technology stewardship and training mission, when it became apparent that 24/7 work would be necessary to fulfill it.

As matters stand now, no NNSA study supports construction and operation of two pit production sites. That two-site decision was of a political nature, made under Trump to satisfy the New Mexico senators at the time (Heinrich and Udall) and the extreme nuclear hawks allied with them. For these senators, it was a nuclear-colonial economic development plan for New Mexico. For the arms control community, the realistic goal should be to delay pit production until it is actually needed, which would dampen contractor- and pork-barrel-driven aspirations for a lucrative arms race.