Asleep at the Wheel - Press ignores congressional OK for martial law
by Robert Kubey
Posted on 2007-06-20 15:55:53
“Job Losses Looming for Sandia, LANL,” moans the headline of the Albuquerque Journal’s June 8 lead story, in a tale of woe, recounting how “deep cuts” of $600M in US nuclear programs by the House Appropriations Committee will eliminate 2000 jobs at the two national laboratories located here in New Mexico, undermining the nation’s “nuclear deterrent.” Congresspersons were quick to raise an outcry. Senator Pete Domenici ®, who has done more than any other legislator to further the growth of New Mexico’s nuclear industry, was aghast. Representative Tom Udall has released a statement expressing his concerns. And Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson states: “This guts the nuclear weapons programs.”
Why, that’s good news! The Appropriations Committee has declined to fully fund the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) and the plutonium pit production factory at Los Alamos, two key elements of the huge “Complex 2030” proposed by the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) last fall.
But in New Mexico, the nuclear industry means jobs, not bombs. One in nine New Mexicans works for the industry but most of them say they are not involved in making nuclear weapons, according to a survey done some years back by Citizens Against Radioactive Dumping (CARD) in Albuquerque.
Denial is rampant in the state where the Manhattan Project launched the first atomic bomb. More than half the DOE budget is spent in New Mexico, some $22 billion and more, and people believe that weapons research is what props up the economy. Yet the state’s per capita income remains one of the lowest in the nation. So, argues Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group, nukes are actually more of a drain than an asset, when environmental and social impacts are factored in. (see http://www.lasg.org/LANLecon_impact.pdf)
For those of us more concerned about the blast than the jobs, the cuts are a drop of hope in a dismal sea, a sign that Congress is growing weary of the nuclear buildup, recognizing that expanding bomb production may be a just little hypocritical in a world where nuclear proliferation in undesirable places like Iran is becoming a pretext for war. According to the Washington Post, Sam Nunn (D-GA), a strong advocate for nuclear disarmament, in a statement to Congress, quoted a recent study prepared for the Defense Department that said: “The world sees us as increasing emphasis on nuclear weapons. The world sees us as shifting from nuclear weapons for deterrence and as weapons of last resort to nuclear weapons for war-fighting roles and first use . . .. And the world sees us as blurring the difference between nuclear and conventional weapons—use whatever fits best.”
That inconsistency hasn’t posed a problem for the current administration, which has been marching steadily to embrace nuclear weapons. With his Nuclear Policy Review of 2002, Bush called for a “new Triad” of nuclear and non-nuclear strike capabilities and “responsive infrastructure”, effectively blurring what had been a firm line between conventional and nuclear weapons and transforming nuclear policy from the historic stance of deterrence to the revised policy of deterrence by use. The NPR called for smaller, more usable, “more credible” nuclear weapons, and the NNSA leaped to comply, proposing to “transform” the nuclear arsenal to meet the directive of the Commander-in-Chief, and thereby protecting the legacy of nuclear weapons science by creating opportunities for new scientists, thus keeping the nuclear industry in business for decades to come.
But doesn’t the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which the US signed in 1968, specifically prohibit the creation of new nuclear weapons?
Precisely so. That is why the NNSA has proposed to replace aging warheads rather than create new ones – and without resuming nuclear testing! In the process, Complex 2030 promises to “consolidate” the number of nuclear production sites from the current 12 to an eventual 8, and, more endearingly, reduce the total number of bombs (from 10,000 now to 6000 by 2012) in its stunning $150B package. Not only that, but production of the new warheads will be kind to the environment, because there will be no new waste because the program will utilize already existing, recycled, waste material, except for tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen that has a half life of only twelve years and not very radioactive, or so I was told by George Allen, head of the new Office of Transformation in NNSA, in conversation prior to the public hearing on the proposed complex, at the Albuquerque Convention Center December 6, 2007.
Tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen, is only weakly radioactive, according to the EPA, releasing only small amounts of beta radiation, and is mainly found in groundwater because it binds with oxygen to form irradiated water. However, the recycling of old nuclear materials has proven to create more waste, not less.
He was a very nice man, and I could tell from his soft brown eyes that he sincerely believed what he told me, “the purpose of a nuclear deterrent is not to win a nuclear war – it’s to prevent one.” BUT: ”To make sure that everyone feels they would have nothing to gain if these weapons were ever used against them, they [the weapons] have to be credible.”
The implication is that we have to demonstrate that we are willing to use them.
Hardly so sanguine about the new RRW, Marylia Kelly, director of Tri-Valley Cares, a Livermore Lab watchdog group, calls the RRW an “H bomb,” presumably because it uses tritium; but she does not explain further. Livermore, not Los Alamos, has won the contract for producing the first phase of RRWs (Sandia will be involved in either location). In the much more populated East Bay, the production of some 125 warheads a year seems even more ludicrous than on the Hill at Los Alamos, and Tri-Valley Cares is screaming. But the California public remains largely unaware that Complex 2030 is even on the table, much less that RRW production will be so close to home. The war on Iraq, which in every other way has been a dismal failure for this administration, has succeeded in this one respect. With all eyes riveted on the bloodshed there, public attention has been successfully diverted from many other things, including the nation’s new nuclear program.
Luckily, Congress now seems reluctant to fund more levels of RRW production, thanks in part to the relentless work of activists like Kelly, Mello and a national coalition of nuclear groups called the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA). California congresspersons Lynn Woolsey and Senator Diane Feinstein remain staunchly opposed to the RRW.
Representative Ellen Tauscher, who represents the Livermore district, chairs the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. She has been instrumental in tabling the RRW proposal, and in its May 2 markup of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, the subcommittee restricted funds for the RRW until a “public re-evaluation of our nuclear posture” can be made – that is to say, after the next president takes office in 2009.
Said Peter Visclosky (D-IN), Chairman of the Appropriations Committee on Energy and Water Development, in his statement to Congress regarding the 2008 energy bill, “Given the track record of mismanagement at the agency [DOE] . . . I don’t think it is too much for a comprehensive nuclear strategy before we build a new nuclear weapon.”
However, cutting $45 million from the Administration’s $119 million request for RRW, the mark still left $74 million to play with.
The mark also cuts the entire $24.9 million requested by the Administration for the proposed Consolidated Plutonium Center, which would manufacture plutonium pits.
Will jobs be lost after all? Will warheads be replaced; will new plutonium pits be produced? Stay tuned. Perhaps the best indicators may be read from inside LANL. In a blog called “LANL the Rest of the Story,” where lab employees comment anonymously on recent news reports from the nuclear arena, one scientist has commented: “Is this any way to treat the world’s best and brightest? True...we don’t need new and better nukes, but how the hell do you expect me to retire in comfort unless we keep fleecing the taxpayer? … As brilliant as I am in my field, I can’t shake the fear of having to leave Los Alamos to feed my family.”
This reduction in what has been called a “welfare program” for highly paid nuclear physicists may not leave the rest of us weeping.
But wait, there’s still hope for the endangered Los Alamos physicist. The Senate Appropriations Committee has yet to weigh in on the proposed cuts, and the two committees must reconcile before the package goes to a vote. And let us not forget that funding for nuclear weapons has increased overall by 14 percent since the end of the Cold War to a 2007 total of $6.4B, while the DOE’s five-year “National Security Plan” for the next five years would raise the nuclear weapons budget to $7.4B by 2012.
Even if a few members of Congress are ready to call a halt to this continuing escalation, the present administration appears to be aiming for “nuclear primacy” as part of its plan for global dominance, according to a recent article in Foreign Affairs, citing the 2002 National Security Strategy: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”
With uranium prices cresting $138 per pound to feed the nuclear power industry, a new enrichment plant planned for Eunice, New Mexico, and nuclear power plants advertised, misleadingly, as the answer to global warming, we are not yet out of the nuclear wasteland.
For a more complete analysis of present and future nuclear plans, see “Duck and Cover: The Bush administration’s ‘Complex 2030’ plan is reviving the nuclear threat” by William D. Hartung and Frida Berrigan, In These Times, April 30, 2007, http://www.inthesetimes.com/main/article/3133/
Stephanie Hiller was the Managing Editor of the North Bay Progressive until it closed last February. She is currently living in New Mexico, working on nuclear issues. Contact her: editor@awakenedwoman.com
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