Don't overlook the reference to "preemptive nuclear strikes" ... Embattled Lab Unveils New Nukes_ By Noah Shachtman Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,58592,00.html 01:18 AM Apr. 23, 2003 PT The United States' arsenal of 10,000 nuclear weapons isn't enough. The country needs more bombs, and the place to make them is the scandal-plagued Los Alamos National Laboratory. That seems to be the meaning behind yesterday's announcement by Los Alamos officials that the lab has constructed the first plutonium pit -- the deadly heart of a nuclear warhead -- that's bomb-ready. It's been 14 years since the last one was completed. The United States hasn't had the ability to make the pits since the FBI stopped production at the Energy Department's Rocky Flats plant for environmental violations in 1989. It's the opening trickle in what is scheduled to eventually become a torrent of new nuclear cores. For the next four years, Los Alamos will make about a half-dozen pits per year. After that, capacity will ramp up to 10 pits per year -- and then to as many as 500 new pits annually, as the new U.S. Modern Pit Facility comes online in 2018. According to the Bush administration's central plan for atomic weapons, the Nuclear Posture Review, making additional nuclear cores is key to keeping America's potential adversaries cowed. The ability to "upgrade existing weapon systems, surge production of weapons or develop and field entirely new systems … (will) discourage other countries from competing militarily with the United States," the review says. In other words, the mere threat of blowing up opposing countries a thousand times over isn't enough. America must have the option to make more nuclear weapons -- and faster -- than any other nation on earth. This first pit is designed to go into a W-88 warhead -- the same kind of warhead that's carried on a Trident II D5 submarine-launched cruise missile, whose design Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was accused of stealing in the 1990s. The pit is meant as a backup, more or less, in case testing reveals safety or reliability concerns. "We don't know how plutonium ages," said Leonard Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute's Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. "If it turned out that in one weapon aging plutonium created uncertainty, we might want to remanufacture the pits." "This is sort of like making replacement engines for a few cars, not making a whole line of new cars," Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, added. But the United States already has about 5,000 pits in reserve, stored at the Energy Department's Pantex plant in Texas, noted Jay Coghlan, with Nuclear Watch of New Mexico. Los Alamos' current grapefruit-size plutonium core, weighing 3 to 4 kilograms, took $350 million to make. Another $1.2 billion will be needed between now and 2007 to test that one and manufacture the rest of the Los Alamos pits that will be made in the next four years. The program at Los Alamos began in 1996 with testing and production. The pit announced yesterday was the first to meet required standards and will go through further testing until 2007. "The U.S. has been fabricating pits for decades. We made the first one (during World War II) in three years. Why (does) it take nearly a decade for one, single, certifiable pit? It's scandalous," said Christopher Paine, a senior researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The lab has complexified this problem as a way to rob the taxpayer." Los Alamos officials did not return calls asking for comments on the story. This isn't the first time that Los Alamos has been accused of ham-handed management or loose accounting. Lab director John Browne and other officials were forced to step down after several employees were accused of using government money to finance personal purchases -- including a $30,000 Ford Mustang. Two former police chiefs were brought in to investigate these charges. But the pair were fired after revealing what they knew to Energy Department officials. The dismissals triggered a series of Congressional hearings into the University of California's management of the lab. The school has been running Los Alamos on behalf of the Energy Department since the lab's inception, 60 years ago. Now, even Los Alamos' most ardent supporter on the Hill, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), is calling for the lab's $2 billion-per-year management contract to be put up for competitive bid when it expires in 2005. To Greg Mello, with the Los Alamos Study Group, yesterday's new pit declaration was an attempt by the University to say "We can contribute to national security." But the pits can also be put in a larger context, Nuclear Watch's Coghlan points out. The Nuclear Posture Review expanded America's list of nuclear targets to include countries like North Korea, Syria and Iran. Those countries could be hit with preemptive nuclear strikes if they were found to have weapons of mass destruction. The White House considered such an attack on Iraq in the months leading up to the second Gulf War, the Los Angeles Times reported. Saddam wouldn't have been afraid of such a threat, the nuclear hawk argument goes, if he didn't believe the hearts of these weapons were shiny and new. "We need an arsenal that everybody believes is perfect," said Spector, from the Monterey Institute. "That's the whole concept of deterrence."
Don't really think there's anything sinister here, as with all big military programs, it's a pork barrel project with jobs going to districts of congressman all over the country, which makes it so hard to stop even bad ones like Patriot and the Osprey.
"I spit on your twenty year-old warheads. They cannot harm me!" And, by the by, since this pit program was started in 1996, why is it a Bush program. While Mr. Bush may very well agree with the program, it was apparently thought to be a necessary program during the previous administration.
