LANL’s prototype plutonium bomb core passes key tests
By Scott Wyland, Feb 19, 2024
Thanks for the good article, Scott. I would add that on January 31st, NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby said, at a conference in Washington, that the NNSA aims to have the Savannah River Site’s (SRS’s) new pit factory — a partially-built, never-used, plutonium/uranium nuclear reactor fuel factory now in the early stages of re-construction — making W93 pits by 2035. Construction at SRS is supposed to be complete by 2032, the same year that NNSA now says re-tooling for pit production will be complete in the Los Alamos plutonium facility.
What was new in Ms. Hruby’s speech was that SRS is to produce W93 pits (for Trident submarine-launched missiles), rather than W87-1 pits (for new silo-based missiles). So LANL’s production, if it proceeds as planned, is to be entirely for the W87-1/Sentinel fleet until the required (classified) number of W87-1 pits have been produced, whenever that is. Meanwhile, the roughly $140 billion Sentinel project has experienced a large cost overrun, triggering Pentagon review. I believe even more expensive problems with silo reconstruction will be found when construction begins.
Many senior military leaders, not just independent analysts, academics, and peace activists, have questioned the value of silo-based missiles altogether. We believe the ICBM force should be scrapped — followed by the rest of the U.S. arsenal, a goal to which the United States and all other major nuclear states are committed by law.
Reliable production at LANL will be, according to NNSA and GAO, 6 years later than promised. NNSA will have spent by then some $21 billion setting up LANL production, of which $7 billion has already been spent. In crude terms, this is about 6 times NNSA’s 2017 cost estimate. Production will have to be 24/7, because LANL’s facility is so small and crowded — about 1,000 people are working there compared to the “100” NNSA told Congress were originally projected for the facility. Again according to the same NNSA report to Congress, the LANL facility is not projected to last beyond 2045. (Risks for Sustainment of PF-4 at LANL, Report to Congress, Nov 2020, obtained by FOIA, redacted.)
As readers of these comments know, we see no national security value in turning LANL into a production plant under any but the most hawkish nuclear policies. What is actually necessary for the United States to prosper is to turn away from the new nuclear arms race toward international cooperation. We can’t begin to “win” an arms race, no matter how “winning” is defined. Russia and China both have greater industrial capacity for war and nuclear weapons production than does the U.S. Baiting the bear and the dragon may be a recipe for a few corporate profits and individual fortunes, but it will bankrupt the rest of the country and drive many of our people into poverty and spiritual despair. We are already quite close to that.
Current “defense” and nuclear weapons expenditures are running at about $7,600 per household per year, and debt service on the $34 trillion or so in federal debt now outstanding is about that much again. This is a crushing load. In addition, sucking skilled workers into military production takes them away from the productive contributions they could be making in our society, which badly needs engineers, craft workers, and administrators to rebuild our crumbling future. It is our cities and our countryside that need rebuilding, not our nuclear arsenal. Let that arsenal decrease and seek cooperation, not confrontation and mutual terror (“de-terr-ence”). It will take time, now that we have wrecked our foreign relations so badly. The best time to stop ravaging and start replanting the orchard of peace and cooperation is always now, so our children can be fed from its fruit. We need realism and we also need faith — as in the name of this newspaper and this city.