Comment:
One can say there are three levels in which this issue can be approached. At the most fundamental level, nuclear weapons are inherently heinous, and the US has agreed to negotiate them away. (Of course, the US is not “treaty-capable,” as the Russian expression goes, as most recently exemplified by yesterday’s unilateral abandonment of a UN Security Council-agreed Iranian compact.) Most states say nuclear weapons cannot be used, or threatened with (aka deterrence), under international law, and as a result have negotiated a treaty to ban them. Austria is the latest state to ratify this treaty (this week).Frequently nuclear weapons proponents and detractors alike confuse the issue by failing to consider the incremental or marginal value of specific nuclear weapons. Even in hell there are levels. Specific nuclear weapons, and quantities of nuclear weapons, have wildly-differing impacts on infrastructure plans, budgets, and strategic stability. This is the basic level.
At the next level, why make pits? There is no need to make pits to maintain the current arsenal, or any planned arsenal, through at least the 2060s. As Linton Brooks hints, there are alternatives to making entirely new pits. Pit reuse is routine; partial pit rebuild is established and required by the existing plutonium “sustainment” program. Pit reuse across warhead type is supported by nuclear tests in some cases (which are classified) and was used to build a deployed warhead (the W89) after closure of Rocky Flats. Note that partial disarmament decreases the number of warhead types and quantities to be supported, while increasing the pit reuse possibilities. There are about 23,000 pits in all, of which roughly half are in warheads (deployed, reserve, retired) or in a special strategic reserve. The US is drowning in long-lasting, usable pits.
At the most superficial level, the level at which Congress is currently forced to operate because of the new law mentioned in Patrick’s article, which came into being by an ugly combination of right-wing ideology, military nuclear war-fighting instincts, contractor (i.e. LANL) greed, and corrupt, pork-barrel politics, industrial pit production will be very difficult to achieve if indeed it can ever be, and LANL cannot do it. LANL’s problems in this regard can be grouped into three intractable unsuitabilities: geology and topography, institutional identity, and location.
Like so much else in our declining empire — both the US empire over most of the world and the capitalist-industrialist empire over living nature — this issue has become a hologram, a living metaphor, of wider decline and the horrible precipices ahead. To survive, we must collectively downsize, reorient to actual human and natural security issues, deny legitimacy to normalizing mass destruction either of humans or of nature, and actively see through the tricks used to keep us divided and passive — such as political parties and the shattering of common humanity by toxic identity politics, just to pick two. We are going to have to rise up, with kindness, against institutions and ideas — first and foremost some of our own — which are driving humanity’s bus off the cliff.