Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Category: US Nuclear Weapons Policy

  • Nuclear Weapons and the Deep State: Can Bureaucracy Constrain Nuclear Weapons?

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    I’m naturally inclined toward apocalyptic thinking, so I find it all too easy to imagine scenarios involving catastrophic nuclear conflict. Mistake, misunderstanding, unintended escalatory spirals, culminating in mass death and environmental disaster: it’s still a fearful and quite real possibility. In January 2018, escalating tensions between the US and North Korea led the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the hands of the symbolic nuclear “Doomsday Clock” forward by 30 seconds, to 11:58 p.m.: two minutes to midnight.

    That same month, in Hawaii and Japan, false alarms about incoming ballistic missiles led to brief public panics, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsored a workshop on “public health responses to a nuclear detonation.” If you’re a normal human being, you should be feeling thoroughly rattled—and perhaps inclined to browse through listings of hardened underground bunkers for sale in your region.

    But I live in the city of Alexandria, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. For those of you who don’t know the DC region’s geography, this means I live in that strange land—part geographical reality, part state of mind—known as “Inside the Beltway.” Outside the Beltway, jittery school children are ducking and covering. Inside the Beltway, bureaucratic familiarity, the exigencies of politics, and the incentive structures of the defense industry combine to create a looking-glass world in which the potential horrors of nuclear conflict are rationalized away.

    Inside the Beltway, it’s routine to hear “experts,” who should surely know better, speak with cavalier dismissiveness about existential threats to human civilization. Inside the Beltway, at think tanks, in government buildings, and in the offices of defense contractors, talk of nuclear catastrophe is brushed aside as so much wacky paranoia—the sort of ridiculous fearmongering indulged in by people who are neither responsible nor knowledgeable.

    “The world has had nuclear weapons for more than 70 years, and we haven’t had a nuclear apocalypse yet,” say the Inside the Beltway Experts. “Ipso facto, this shows that we have successfully learned how to manage nuclear threats.” In fact, this shows only that we haven’t blown ourselves up yet. In the grand sweep of human history, 70 years is the blink of an eye. And as President Donald Trump—the man with the biggest button—is in the process of demonstrating, nuclear peace can’t be taken for granted.

    Trump’s bellicose (and sometimes baffling) pronouncements about nuclear weapons and possible conflict with North Korea have raised anew a question that has rarely been posed since the end of the Cold War: Are there any legal constraints governing presidential decisions on the use of nuclear weapons? Should there be legal constraints? And, whether or not there are meaningful legal constraints, are there any practical constraints—bureaucratic, political, or cultural—on the presidential nuclear power?

    In my view, there are no clear or firm US legal constraints against a presidential “first use” of nuclear weapons. True, the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war; true, the 1973 War Powers Resolution sought to reaffirm Congress’s war-making prerogatives. It’s not hard to make a strong argument, based on text and on history, that the president needs to receive congressional authorization before launching an offensive nuclear strike.

    But inside the Beltway, there are thousands of clever lawyers, many sitting inside the White House, the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the State Department, whose job it is to find legal arguments that justify executive power. Those arguments are not hard to find, for a clever lawyer. The president is the executive and the commander in chief! The president may need to make a decision in a time frame that precludes congressional consultation! Launching a few nuclear weapons is not the same thing as starting a “war”! The War Powers Resolution applies only to sending US military personnel into overseas combat, not to launching unmanned missiles overseas!

    At the end of the day, the clever lawyers generally prevail. As a practical matter, then, there is no US legal bar to a presidential first use of nuclear weapons.

    If you doubt this, consider the cautionary tale of executive power under President Barack Obama and his 2011 decision to intervene militarily in Libya. The War Powers Resolution seemed designed to prevent a president from doing precisely this sort of thing without notifying Congress or seeking congressional authorization.1 But the Obama administration took the position that military action in Libya didn’t count as “hostilities,” since the US was relying mainly on air strikes from unmanned drones and had no ground combat troops in Libya.

    The administration therefore opted not to provide formal War Powers Resolution notification to Congress—much less seek congressional authorization. On both sides of the aisle, members of Congress complained: President Obama was ignoring what appeared to be the plain meaning of the War Powers Resolution. But nothing changed. The US military intervention in Libya continued. Obama wasn’t impeached.

    International law is even more ambiguous on nuclear weapons, and even less likely to serve as a meaningful constraint than US domestic law. True, international legal rules prohibit aggressive uses of force and require that military force be necessary and proportionate and make appropriate distinctions between civilian and military targets, but in practice these terms become troublingly slippery. In 1996, for instance, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion on nuclear weapons, coming to the unsatisfying conclusion that the use of nuclear weapons would “generally be contrary to the rules of international law. … However, … the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance …” In other words: don’t ask us!

    Law is thus a slender reed to lean on in the search for constraints on presidential nuclear powers. This is, of course, a shame and a terrible failure; the purpose of law—of the rule of law—is, most fundamentally, to regulate violence and place constraints on power. What’s more, placing decisions about the use of nuclear weapons in the hands of a single individual is, as Elaine Scarry argues in her book Thermonuclear Monarchy, profoundly undemocratic: how can we claim to have a democracy when we give one individual the power, in effect, to obliterate the whole earth? Prior to the nuclear age, who could have even imagined such awesome destructive power in the hands of one man?

    Granted, nuclear weapons are not the only weapons with profoundly antidemocratic effects. In their recent book, Forged Through Fire, political scientists John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth trace the historical connections between the evolution of democracy, the expansion of the suffrage, and the granting of political rights to large numbers of people, on the one hand, and the existence of manpower-intensive forms of warfare, on the other. When elites need to field mass armies in order to protect themselves from external threat, they are forced to grant rights and some degree of political power to the masses as a means of motivating them to fight.

    By contrast, the ascendance of forms of warfare that are not manpower-intensive—unmanned drones and cyber weapons as much as nuclear weapons—tends to correlate with contractions of democracy. When political leaders believe they can deter or respond to external threats without the need to raise and sustain mass armies, they have little motivation to make decisions in a democratic manner.

    There are, then, few meaningful legal constraints on presidential nuclear powers, much as we may wish it were otherwise. Are there, however, some practical constraints on a presidential first use of nuclear weapons, constraints that arise out of bureaucratic practice or political necessity?

    In the pragmatic realm, there are some constraints, though they are far from sufficient. Remember: the presidential nuclear power is not a magic wand; it works only insofar as we have created an elaborate institutional and physical infrastructure designed to make it work. That is to say: if the President wants to launch one or more nuclear strikes, he needs to have the right missiles in the right launch locations with the right targets programmed into them. Missiles are built and maintained and programmed by human beings.

    The presidential nuclear power is, in this sense, more like the power to order from a menu than the power to instantly produce any cuisine. Historically, the US nuclear arsenal has been designed and maintained to focus on particular threats: Russia, North Korea, Iran, and so forth. Specific target sets associated with these potential adversaries are preprogrammed.

    If a US president wants to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against North Korea, it is a safe bet to assume that the military knows exactly which missiles to fire at which targets, and it is unlikely that anyone in the (short) chain of command would question a presidential order to strike.

    If a US president suddenly decided to launch nuclear weapons against Canada, it would be quite a different story: strike packages and targets would need to hastily be put together, creating the time and space for advisors close to the president to say, “Mr. President, this is not a good idea, let’s talk about this.” Would we suddenly find officers and advisors willing to say, “Wait a minute, Mr. President, I can’t seem to work the lock on the nuclear football, we’d better call the secretary of defense and get him over here to discuss this”? I think we would.

    This is perhaps not terribly consoling. But we should not imagine that building in a more extensive and consultative decision-making process would guarantee wiser decisions. Legislatively or through embedded bureaucratic practice, we could create a system in which the president needs the concurrence of, say, the secretary of defense and the attorney general before launching a preemptive nuclear strike.

    But homogenous groups, particularly in a hierarchical setting where people are habituated to abiding by the decision of the commander in chief, will not necessarily put meaningful brakes on a presidential decision. “Groupthink” led us to the 2003 Iraq War, a catastrophically foolish venture to which hundreds of intelligent “experts” gave their wholehearted support. Even those with serious reservations tend to go along to get along. We are social animals; that’s what we do. Especially inside the Beltway.

    My final point brings me back to where I began: particularly when dealing with the Inside the Beltway crowd, those of us who care deeply about reining in presidential nuclear powers need to draw careful distinctions, and be mindful of the language we use. Those opposed to nuclear weapons have a natural tendency to speak in terms of extremes: we talk about nuclear winters and climate catastrophe, about cataclysmic global conflicts with high-yield nuclear devices capable of destroying the planet earth.

    The language of catastrophe is easily brushed aside by Beltway insiders. In the halls of the Pentagon and the White House, such scenarios just generate dismissive chuckles: “That’s not what we’re talking about,” the “experts” will say. “Nobody would be crazy enough to start an unlimited global nuclear war. Remember, not all nuclear weapons are the same. When we talk about nuclear strikes, we’re talking about designing small, tactical, tailored nuclear weapons. We could control their use; we could ensure that only military targets would be affected; we would only use these low-yield, tactical nuclear weapons in very special circumstances, such as to destroy hardened underground bunkers that we couldn’t get at through conventional weapons.”

    There is, in other words, nothing to worry about, say the Beltway insiders: we can manage and control this fearsome nuclear power. This is foolish. Even a small-scale, “precise” use of tactical nuclear weapons runs a very high risk of deliberate or inadvertent escalation, as well as a high risk of normalizing the use of nuclear weapons, thus opening the door to wider use.

    Those concerned about nuclear weapons use need to confront this false logic head on: to spell out the ways in which “control” over nuclear conflict is inherently illusory.

    Those inside the Beltway have lived with the threat of nuclear weapons for so long that it has stopped seeming like a real threat. The insiders are like those crocodile or grizzly bear tamers who become so habituated to the proximity of a dangerous predator that they convince themselves the danger isn’t real—the bear won’t attack them! Until the bear, being a bear, does attack them.

    Inside the Beltway, we are so used to living in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse that it has stopped frightening us. But we should never forget that we are living with a dangerous predator—only in this case, the predator is us.

  • Protocol for a U.S. Nuclear Strike

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    The current US protocol for deciding whether to launch a nuclear strike—developed in the early 1960s, with the advent of intercontinental ballistic missiles—has two main functions and virtues: first, it concentrates the power and authority over the use of nuclear weapons in the presidency, at the highest level of the executive branch of the US government, thus keeping it out of the hands of the military and others. Second, it enables the president to respond rapidly and decisively to a nuclear attack by an enemy whose missiles may fly from one side of the planet to the other in 30 minutes; or whose missiles launched from submarines in the oceans may fly to targets in the United States in 15 minutes. It’s critical to have a protocol that allows the president to consider the use of nuclear weapons and, if necessary, to order their use, and to have the process of implementation begin in a very, very short period of time.

    The protocol’s virtues also produce its disadvantages. By virtue of the speed and concentration of authority in this protocol, the president has an opportunity to effectively railroad the nuclear commanders and forces into executing even a very large nuclear strike first—preemptively or preventively. That could lead to a misguided decision based on an impulsive psychology or on other factors that lead to a very bad call.

    The other downside to this protocol, which we used to talk about a lot more than we do today, is that the protocol itself, rooted as it is in speed and concentrated authority, can railroad the president into authorizing, in a hasty way, the use of nuclear weapons based on indications, possibly false, of an attack underway (a strategy known as “launch on warning”). In other words, we might believe we are retaliating when in fact we’re launching first.

    During the Cold War, to my knowledge, a false alarm never led to notification of the president at the beginning of the protocol that I’m about to describe. The false alarms were caught before that happened. Ironically, today, with the proliferation of ballistic missiles over the last decade (there’s been a huge surge in ballistic missile proliferation, and in their testing) you find that recent missile launches—from China, from Iran, from North Korea—have led on multiple occasions to sufficient ambiguity that the presidents have actually been notified about the ongoing event.

    Here are the key features of the current protocol. It begins with an early-warning function: the effort to detect a possible attack against North America and to notify the president and others to begin a process of deliberation. Every single day, the early-warning staffs out in Colorado and Omaha pick up events that require a second look to determine whether we’re under attack. Events they might review include a Japanese satellite launch into space, a North Korean missile test, a US missile test out of California, a wildfire in the southwest US. Most of these are usually dismissed quickly. Once or twice a month, something happens that requires a really close second look. And once in a blue moon, something happens and all hell breaks loose, as in the case of a false alarm concerning a missile launch.

    If these staffs receive any indication that we may be under attack, they have three minutes from the time the first sensor data arrives until they have to provide a preliminary assessment as to whether North America is under attack. If the assessment is of medium or high confidence that there is a threat, they initiate a process that will bring the president and his top advisors into an emergency conference no matter what time of day or night.

    Imagine that the president has decided to initiate a conference with his top advisors to consider the first use of nuclear weapons. The United States does not have a no-first-use policy. Furthermore, under the current review of our nuclear policy, undertaken primarily by the Pentagon, there is an emerging thesis that we should move further away from no first use and consider use of nuclear weapons in a wider variety of contingencies. We are on the verge of modifying our assurance to non-nuclear-weapons countries that we would not use nuclear weapons against them, in contradiction to the position adopted by the Obama administration.

    The emergency meeting of the president and his top advisors will typically include statutory members of the National Security Council: the secretary of defense; the secretary of state; the national security advisor; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who participates at the discretion and the invitation of the secretary of defense; and a number of key military command centers and personnel, the most important of whom is the commander of strategic forces based in Omaha, Nebraska, who commands all our strategic nuclear weapons.

    Time and circumstances permitting, the commander will brief the president on his nuclear options and their consequences. It will not be a long briefing. He’s going to have to boil this down into very, very brief sound-bites for the president: here are your options and here are the consequences. The commander will then ask the president a couple questions, such as whether he wants to withhold attacks on a particular location, such as a populous city. That briefing, if we are under attack, will be as short as 30 seconds. Of course, if the president is considering the first use of nuclear weapons, the timeline is not nearly as short and that conversation can last for quite a long period.

    If we are under attack, the president is going to have to consider his options in about six minutes, given how this protocol tends to work. If we’re not under attack, he can deliberate longer. Then he makes a decision: What option am I going to pursue? Am I going to decide to attack North Korea, for example? (With the current preprogrammed attack plan, I estimate we would have 80 nuclear aim points in North Korea.)

    Let’s say the president chooses an option. It will be conveyed instantly to the war room at the Pentagon, which probably initiated the presidential conference in the first place. The people in the Pentagon war room are listening in on the conversation and are beginning, as they hear the president moving toward a decision to use nuclear weapons, to prepare a launch order.

    Note that the secretary of defense does not confirm the president’s decision, nor does he or she have a right to veto it, nor does anyone else have the authority to override the decision. This is what Elaine Scarry has identified as, in effect, a “thermonuclear monarchy,” which gives the US president almost carte blanche command over the nuclear forces.

    When the president conveys his decision to the war room, they ask him to authenticate his identity using a special code. It’s referred to colloquially as “the biscuit,” otherwise known more officially as the “gold code.” If that code matches, the war room at the Pentagon, or an alternate, will format a launch order that will be transmitted down the chain of command to the executing commanders of the submarines, land-based rockets, and bombers.

    That launch order is roughly half the length of a tweet. It contains all the information necessary for the crews down the chain of command to launch their forces: the time to fire, the chosen war plan, an unlock code that the crews need to physically unlock their weapons prior to the launch, and special authentication codes that the crews check with the codes in their safes to satisfy themselves that these orders came from the president (those codes are not in the possession of the president, but of the military).

    That takes two minutes: 10 seconds to authenticate, then a minute or two to format and transmit the order. And in two more minutes, from the receipt of that order down the chain of command, missiles could be leaving their silos; it takes only about one minute for a Minuteman crew in the plains states of the Midwest to carry out their launch checklist. This was my job in the 1970s and at the time, it took me one minute. We delayed a little bit, for classified reasons, but that’s how long it took then and that’s how long it takes today.

    After the crews enter the war plan it goes out to all the missiles, which are preprogrammed with what wartime targets to strike. In peacetime, they are aimed at the ocean, but changing their targets to Moscow or any other targets is as easy as changing the channel on your TV set.

    Today, within a minute or two there can be up to 400 high-yield strategic weapons launched out of their silos to their targets, wherever those targets may be. Submarines take about 10 minutes longer because it takes them longer to target their missiles, position the submarine, and get to the proper depth. But even submarines on alert in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans would within 15 minutes be launching missiles out of their tubes, then firing them one at a time every 15 seconds.

    Lastly, the bombers would take 8 to 10 hours to reach their launch points if they were already on alert. They are not normally, today, in peacetime, on alert. They don’t even have bombs on board, so in a crisis they would have to be placed on full alert, with bombs and cruise missiles loaded, before they were usable.

    To sum up: the president wakes up, gives an order through a system so streamlined that there’s almost no gatekeeping, and, within five minutes, 400 bombs leave on missiles launched out of the Midwest. About 10 minutes later, another 400 leave on missiles launched out of submarines. That’s 800 nuclear weapons—roughly the equivalent of, in round numbers, 15,000 Hiroshima bombs.

    Reform of current US launch protocol is long overdue. Layering on new safeguards that strengthen checks and balances on presidential launch authority is necessary to reduce the risk of nuclear first use. Safeguards include the Markey-Lieu Bill, which would prohibit the president from employing nuclear weapons first unless Congress has declared war and provided specific authorization for their use; the Betts/Waxman solution, which would add the secretary of defense and attorney general to the chain of command to certify that a presidential launch order is authentic and legal; and adoption of a no-first-use policy, which would draw a red line that, if crossed, makes the president accountable and even impeachable.

    Regarding a second strike, the United States should eliminate launch on warning and move toward a true retaliatory posture, requiring protection of the president and his successors and providing a large increase in warning and decision time.

  • Presidential First Use vs. Congress

    This article is part of a series from the November 2017 Harvard University conference entitled “Presidential First Use: Is it legal? Is it constitutional? Is it just?” To access all of the transcripts from this conference, click here.

    What are the constitutional limits on the president, if any, when it comes to using nuclear weapons? What kind of decision making comes into play when we think of the unthinkable: nuclear war? I say “unthinkable” because for over 70 years the idea around nuclear deterrence has been that we have these terribly destructive nuclear weapons in order to make sure that we do not use them. They used to call this MAD—“mutually assured destruction”—and it is mad. It is totally insane. But this idea remains the international framework for restraint.

    The nuclear disarmament treaties of the last decades have been bilateral and multilateral. Such treaties have significantly decreased the number of weapons in the US and Russian arsenals; eliminated nuclear aboveground testing and nearly all belowground testing; prevented nearly all countries from acquiring or developing nuclear weapons; and restrained those nations that have nuclear weapons from acquiring new ones. These were no small accomplishments. Congress has enshrined most of these into US law, either by ratifying treaties or by authorizing and funding nonproliferation programs. I firmly believe that Congress would not have acted in these ways without a very engaged citizenry.

    And now here we are today. Speaking for myself, I don’t believe that I’ve ever been so worried about a possible nuclear confrontation in my life. Nuclear weapon use can be triggered very quickly and then can escalate so rapidly that before we know it we’re in a nuclear war. The national command authority is very simple. The president makes the decision to use nuclear weapons and the secretary of defense executes the order. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of you right now, I don’t know what will. Once the decision is made and in the process of being carried out, our systems of checks and balances don’t apply. Congress couldn’t stop it. The Supreme Court couldn’t stop it. The way it’s set up, not even the secretary of defense in theory has the authority to stop it.

    This is far from what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they drafted and adopted the document as the foundation of all our laws and democratic institutions. The framers gave the power to declare war to Congress. That is why H.R. 669 and S. 200, the Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act, was introduced by Congressman Ted Lieu of California and Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, in January 2017. This bill prohibits any and every president from using US armed forces to carry out a first-use nuclear strike unless Congress has declared war and authorized such a first strike. I’m proud to be the very first cosponsor of the House bill, H.R. 669, which currently has 77 cosponsors: not a bad beginning.

    Requiring that Congress authorize a nuclear first strike shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue. This is a commonsense issue. The bill clearly defines a first strike as meaning that the enemy has not launched a nuclear weapon against the United States or an ally of the United States. If another country launches a nuclear weapon at us, the President does have the right to proportionate self-defense under international law.

    Some might argue that prohibiting the United States from striking first with a nuclear weapon ties the president’s hands and makes the country vulnerable to attack. However, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, a true champion of rational nuclear disarmament, has noted that in any imaginable scenario, the US military could rely on our conventional arsenal alone to deliver a first strike of devastating force. That conventional arsenal includes our B-2 bombers, our cruise missiles, our Tomahawks, our nonnuclear ICBMs, and a huge range of weaponry. We’ve seen the destructive capacity of those conventional first-strike weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan. Limiting a first strike involving nuclear force does not leave us weak or vulnerable.

    Democrats were strongly pushing President Obama to adopt a no-first-strike policy when he was in office. This is not just about President Trump. We have been contemplating this policy for quite some time. But it will take many more cosponsors for this bill to have any chance of moving in the House or the Senate. It will take the Republican leadership of Congress being a lot more nervous about the possibility of the president actually launching a nuclear strike. Meanwhile we have the President backing away from hard-won international agreements to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of the Iranians. We have him exchanging ever more heated taunts with nuclear-armed North Korea. This is why the Markey-Lieu bill is so absolutely necessary.

    Congress needs to assert its Constitutional authority when it comes to war, and especially when it comes to the catastrophic possibility of nuclear war. I’m proud to have also joined with Senator Markey and Representative Conyers to introduce bipartisan, bicameral legislation to reaffirm Congress’s constitutional power over first strike on North Korea. H.R. 4140, the No Unconstitutional Strike against North Korea Act, was introduced last October with 60 co-sponsors. Two of them are Republicans. The bill restricts any funds from being used to launch a military strike against North Korea without prior approval from Congress. That’s any strike, not just a nuclear strike. Because war is war is war is war, and only Congress has the right to declare and authorize it.

    I worry that President Trump actually believes that we have some kind of missile defense system able to knock all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons out of the sky if they were to launch a nuclear weapon. No such thing exists. We cannot guarantee the protection of ourselves and our allies.

    These current crises, threatening and as frightening as they are, speak to the underlying and long-unresolved crisis of nuclear weapons themselves. President Obama began a program of so-called nuclear modernization, which would update, not just maintain, the current US nuclear arsenal, and replace older nuclear weapons with modern versions. President Trump has doubled down on that proposal to modernize and update our current nuclear weapons, and is proposing to create new nuclear weapons.

    The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came out with a report that estimated the cost of President Trump’s plans to maintain and replace the US nuclear arsenal over 30 years at $1.24 trillion. That is $200 billion more than the last estimate. When you factor in inflation the price tag soars to $1.7 trillion. These costs are simply unsustainable. They threaten the entire federal budget, including the rest of the military budget.

    The CBO report also laid out several different options for improving our military force structure that are much more cost-effective. This is important, because the Pentagon sometimes likes to paint its proposals in very stark terms: either give us everything we ask for or we’re all gonna die. That’s a false choice, as the CBO report makes abundantly clear.

    However, I fervently believe that the best choice the United States can make, and that the world can make, is to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether. I realize that this can’t be done in a day. I’m not a fool. But my fear right now is that there has been a shift in thinking among the nuclear powers—not just the United States and Russia but also France, the UK, and China, not to mention India, Pakistan, and North Korea—that nuclear arsenals must be protected, updated, and increased, all with an eye to the inevitable use of a nuclear strike against an enemy in the foreseeable future.

    While the nuclear powers are hunkering down, the rest of the world is moving toward a demand for total nuclear disarmament. Not too long ago that was at least a future goal of nuclear powers: careful, verifiable, incremental disarmament, while assuring that no other nation acquired nuclear weapons capabilities. I fear for the current moment. We have members of Congress who think using a nuke against North Korea or Iran is not just something we should think about; they believe it is something we should do.

    I think it’s time to get moving again. It’s time once again to remind our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers that these are issues that affect every single American family, every single one of us. In a very busy world, where families are focused on picking up their kids from school, wondering how the economy is going to affect their jobs and their grocery bills, there is one more sure thing that we all need to remember: a nuclear war will kill us all. Quickly or slowly, it will kill all of us. Nuclear war not only devastates the people where it falls. Over time, it would devastate the world as we know it. That was once a commonly understood fact, but it’s been forgotten because so many other crises and hardships have moved to the forefront.

    It is time to remind everyone, including every single member of Congress, what the reality is. It is time to rebuild this movement across ages, across regions, cities, towns, suburbs, and rural communities, across genders and races, because a nuclear war will devastate us all. It’s important to remember, though, how different the times are now than when the freeze movement was organized. We no longer have a Democratic Congress. We don’t even have a moderate Republican Congress. We have a very conservative Republican-controlled House and Senate that have never moved forward any legislation outside their own narrow agenda. And we have a very unstable, volatile, erratic White House.

    In 1978 I was a college intern in the office of Senator George McGovern (no relation but one of my heroes). I had the privilege of attending a debate that he had with William F. Buckley Jr. at Yale University. The debate was entitled “Resolved: That the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Are in the Interest of US National Security.” Senator McGovern concluded by referring to a 1963 debate on a limited nuclear test ban treaty. And here’s what he said that night at Yale:

    Senator Everett Dirksen took the floor to close the debate. He said that he had just reread John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the description of what happened to that great city, the morning after. The scene of one family sitting charred around the breakfast table; out in the yard, bits and pieces of children’s clothing; the broken arm of a doll; toys and debris scattered over the landscape. And he said, “I thought about that scene, and I said that someday Everett Dirksen will be buried in Illinois, and when that happens, I don’t want them to put on my gravestone, ‘He knew about this, and he didn’t care.’”

    We need to show that we care. We need to build this movement. Time is of the essence.

  • Letter to Secretary Mattis: Postpone the U.S. ICBM Tests During the Olympic Truce

    Photo | U.S. Department of Defense

    On February 2, 2018, the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis. The letter called on Secretary Mattis to respect the Olympic Truce, which began on February 2nd in advance of the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games.

    The U.S. had scheduled two tests of its Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile in the month of February, during the Olympic Truce period.

    On the afternoon of Monday, February 5, the Air Force announced that it would be conducting the first Minuteman III missile test in the early morning hours of February 7. Just a couple of hours later, the Air Force cancelled the test with no explanation.

    A full copy of the letter to Secretary Mattis is available at this link, and the text of the letter is reproduced below.

    Gen. James Mattis
    Secretary of Defense
    1000 Defense Pentagon
    Washington, DC 20301-1000

     

    February 2, 2018

     

    Dear Secretary Mattis,

    We were very pleased to learn of the decision by South Korea and the United States to postpone joint military exercises until after the official period of the Olympic Truce. It was with great alarm, then, that we read a January 11 article in Bloomberg indicating that the Air Force Global Strike Command has no plans to postpone two Minuteman III ICBM tests in February, also during the Olympic Truce.

    Captain Anastasia Schmidt of Global Strike Command stated, “There are two launches currently scheduled for February that have been scheduled for three to five years.”

    Regardless of advance planning, it is essential to global security that the United States be flexible and respect worthwhile initiatives for peace such as the Olympic Truce. The Air Force has postponed launches due to unfavorable weather conditions, technical problems, and other issues. There is no reason why the Air Force cannot, at a minimum, postpone these ICBM tests until after the designated weeks of the Olympic Truce.

    If North Korea were to test an ICBM during the Olympics, many nations, including the United States, would view the act as provocative and threatening. One does not have to stretch the imagination too far to guess how North Korea might react to our testing of ICBMs during the same period.

    For the sake of global stability and to honor the Olympic spirit, I urge you to postpone the February ICBM tests.

    Sincerely,

     

    David Krieger                                                                     Robert Laney
    President                                                                            Chairman
    Nuclear Age Peace Foundation                                  Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

  • Press Release: 2018 Nuclear Posture Review Released

    NUCLEAR AGE PEACE FOUNDATION

    For Immediate Release

    Contact:
    Rick Wayman
    (805) 696-5159; rwayman@napf.org

    Sandy Jones
    (805) 965-3443; sjones@napf.org

     

    2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review Released

    Trump administration plan calls for smaller nuclear weapons, making nuclear war far more likely.

     

    February 2, 2018 –The 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released today, represents a reckless realignment of an already dangerous U.S. nuclear policy.

    The review specifically calls for the development of new, low-yield nuclear weapons that have lower explosive force. Many experts warn that such smaller weapons would blur the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, representing a significant and dangerous increase in the likelihood of their use.

    Rick Wayman, Director of Programs at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, stated, “Once nuclear weapons – of any size – are introduced into an armed conflict, no one can guarantee that the cycle of escalation would end. The terrifying reality is that nuclear weapons can end human civilization as we know it. Every person on the planet should be outraged that the Trump administration threatens their future in this way.”

    In another important policy shift, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review would permit the U.S. to use nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of non-nuclear attacks on the United States, including cyber attacks and attacks on American infrastructure. The review seeks to deter nuclear war by making it easier to start nuclear war.

    Last year, the price tag for a 30-year makeover of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was estimated at $1.2 trillion. Analysts say the expanded plan put forth in the Trump NPR review would push the cost vastly higher.

    Just last week, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. This is thirty seconds closer to the metaphorical “point of annihilation” and is the closest to midnight the clock has been since the end of the Cold War. Clearly The Trump Doctrine is equivalent to winding the Doomsday Clock in the wrong direction.

    The review does not contain a single reference to Article VI of the U.N. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which obligates the U.S. and the other nuclear-armed nations signatories to the treaty to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament. This posture review signals such a radical and dangerous shift in U.S. nuclear policy direction NATO states will be forced to re-evaluate their positions to not automatically accept and support the U.S. in this changed nuclear policy.

    World leaders now face a clear choice: support the Trump Doctrine and lock the world into a likely nuclear war, or join the rational world in moving towards the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The world’s international security framework must not rely on nuclear weapons.

    David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation said, “The prohibition and elimination of nuclear weapons is the only rational choice. World leaders must now take the right step and sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons that opened for signatures at the United Nations on September 20, 2017. By doing so, they would lead the world away from almost certain annihilation and toward the worthy goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and creating a safer and more secure world for all of humanity.”

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    If you would like to interview David Krieger or Rick Wayman, please call (805) 696-5159.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders. Founded in 1982, the Foundation is comprised of individuals and organizations worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations. For more information, visit www.wagingpeace.org.

     

  • The President Is Unfit for Office

    With each passing day it becomes increasingly apparent that Donald Trump is unfit to carry out the duties of President of the United States, particularly those of commander in chief. He is erratic, impulsive, thin-skinned and narcissistic. These are dangerous qualities in someone with control over a nuclear arsenal that, if used, could lead to the destruction of civilization and human extinction. Trump is not trustworthy to have such power at his fingertips and should be removed from office.

    To achieve peace with North Korea, the U.S. must be engaged in negotiations with their leadership. It seems simple enough, but the Trump administration appears unwilling. The talks must begin immediately, and the U.S. must do so without preconditions.

    Rather than pursuing this path, however, the Trump administration seems intent on tightening economic sanctions on North Korea, a strategy bound to fail. Trump recently said that the U.S. is considering stopping trade with any country that trades with North Korea. This is a non-starter unless we want to stop trading with China, leading to a serious deterioration in U.S.-China relations and possibly a worldwide recession.

    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has recently released an Open Letter to Members of Congress. It calls upon Congress to impeach Trump, or, at a minimum, pass legislation that would require a declaration of war and specific authorization of Congress before the president could engage in a first-strike nuclear attack. The Open Letter follows below. If you would like to sign the letter, click here.

    OPEN LETTER TO MEMBERS OF THE U.S. CONGRESS: ACT TO PREVENT NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE

    This may be the most dangerous time in human history. The Roman emperor Nero is remembered for having fiddled while Rome burned. We may be witnessing the far more dangerous Nuclear Age equivalent to Nero’s fiddling in the form of the nuclear threat exchanges between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

    The U.S. has elected a man to its highest office who is erratic, impulsive, thin-skinned and generally imprudent and insufficiently informed on nuclear and foreign policy issues. As president, he possesses unrestricted authority to threaten and use the weapons of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which could lead not only to the destruction of our country but to dire consequences for the entire world.

    The president has already caused widespread national and global alarm by his behavior in office, including his participation in a dangerous and irrational escalation of threats directed at the erratic leader of nuclear-armed North Korea, which if executed would produce a monstrous catastrophe of untold consequences. James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, a normally cautious civil servant, has described the president’s behavior as “downright scary and disturbing.”

    There are currently no restraints on the president’s ability to use the insanely powerful weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including using them in a first-strike attack rationalized as preventive war. To allow this set of conditions to persist would be a perilous, perhaps fatal, abdication of Congressional responsibility, posing severe dangers to the peace and security of the country and world.

    What can be done?

    Having shown himself to be unfit for office, the president should be impeached and removed from office by the Congress as a matter of most urgent priority, or possibly removed from the presidency by recourse to procedures under the 25th amendment.

    Congress should also independently act to put unconditional restraints on any president’s ability to threaten or order a nuclear first-strike. One approach would be enactment of the “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act,” introduced by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Ted Lieu, which would prohibit the president from initiating a first-strike nuclear attack without a Congressional declaration of war expressly authorizing such strike. We would urge even stronger legislation that would make illegal any U.S. nuclear first strike and threats to do so.

    We do not suggest that the Markey-Lieu legislation would cure a nuclear first-strike of its essential immorality and illegality under international law. This legislation would, however, broaden the long-standing, dangerously centralized U.S. decision-making authority over a nuclear first-strike and could lead to a U.S. commitment never again to use nuclear weapons except in retaliation against a nuclear attack.

    While this proposed legislative initiative on first-strikes is a responsible effort to limit presidential authority with respect to nuclear weapons under present conditions, we urge a parallel framework of restraint with respect to any contemplated threat or use of nuclear weapons by a U.S. president. Additional legislation to this end needs to be proposed and enacted by Congress after appropriate vetting through hearings and public discussion as a matter of supreme national interest and for the benefit of global security.

    Furthermore, we would hope that in due course the United States would join with the majority of countries in the world in supporting the recently negotiated UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

    Click here to sign the Open Letter.

  • Open Letter to Members of the U.S. Congress: Act to Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe

    To add your name to this Open Letter, click here.

    This may be the most dangerous time in human history.  The Roman emperor Nero is remembered for having fiddled while Rome burned.  We may be witnessing the far more dangerous Nuclear Age equivalent to Nero’s fiddling in the form of the nuclear threat exchanges between Donald Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.

    The U.S. has elected a man to its highest office who is erratic, impulsive, thin-skinned and generally imprudent and insufficiently informed on nuclear and foreign policy issues.  As president, he possesses unrestricted authority to threaten and use the weapons of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which could lead not only to the destruction of our country but to dire consequences for the entire world.

    The president has already caused widespread national and global alarm by his behavior in office, including his participation in a dangerous and irrational escalation of threats directed at the erratic leader of nuclear-armed North Korea, which if executed would produce a monstrous catastrophe of untold consequences.  James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, a normally cautious civil servant, has described the president’s behavior as “downright scary and disturbing.”

    There are currently no restraints on the president’s ability to use the insanely powerful weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including using them in a first-strike attack rationalized as preventive war.  To allow this set of conditions to persist would be a perilous, perhaps fatal, abdication of Congressional responsibility, posing severe dangers to the peace and security of the country and world.

    What can be done?

    Having shown himself to be unfit for office, the president should be impeached and removed from office by the Congress as a matter of most urgent priority, or possibly removed from the presidency by recourse to procedures under the 25th amendment.

    Congress should also independently act to put unconditional restraints on any president’s ability to threaten or order a nuclear first-strike.  One approach would be enactment of the “Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act,” introduced by Senator Ed Markey and Representative Ted Lieu, which would prohibit the president from initiating a first-strike nuclear attack without a Congressional declaration of war expressly authorizing such strike.  We would urge even stronger legislation that would make illegal any U.S. nuclear first strike and threats to do so.

    We do not suggest that the Markey-Lieu legislation would cure a nuclear first-strike of its essential immorality and illegality under international law.  This legislation would, however, broaden the long-standing, dangerously centralized U.S. decision-making authority over a nuclear first-strike and could lead to a U.S. commitment never again to use nuclear weapons except in retaliation against a nuclear attack.

    While this proposed legislative initiative on first-strikes is a responsible effort to limit  presidential authority with respect to nuclear weapons under present conditions, we urge a parallel framework of restraint with respect to any contemplated threat or use of nuclear weapons by a U.S. president.  Additional legislation to this end needs to be proposed and enacted by Congress after appropriate vetting through hearings and public discussion as a matter of supreme national interest and for the benefit of global security.

    Furthermore, we would hope that in due course the United States would join with the majority of countries in the world in supporting the recently negotiated UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

  • Marshall Islands Nuclear Zero Lawsuit Appeal Dismissed by Ninth Circuit Court

    For Immediate Release

    Contact:

    Sandy Jones 805.965.3443; sjones@napf.org

    MARSHALL ISLANDS’ NUCLEAR ZERO LAWSUIT APPEAL DISMISSED IN NINTH CIRCUIT COURT

    San Francisco–The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled to affirm the U.S. Federal District Court’s dismissal of the Nuclear Zero lawsuit, brought by the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI).

    The lawsuit sought a declaration that the United States was in breach of its treaty obligations under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and international law, and asked the court to order that the United States engage in good-faith negotiations.

    The suit also contended that the United States clearly violated its legal obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament by spending large sums of money to enhance its nuclear arsenal. The U.S. plans to spend an estimated $1 trillion on nuclear weapons over the next three decades. President Trump has said he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the “top of the pack,” saying the United States has “fallen behind in its nuclear weapons capacity.”

    The case was initially dismissed on February 3, 2015 on the jurisdictional grounds of standing and political question doctrine without getting to the merits of the case. Oral arguments were then heard in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 15, 2017.

    The ruling today from the court held that Article VI was non-self-executing and therefore not judicially enforceable. The panel also found that the Marshall Islands’ claims presented inextricable political questions that were nonjusticiable and must be dismissed.

    Laurie Ashton, lead attorney representing the Marshall Islands commented, “Today’s decision is very disappointing.  But it is also more than that, because it undercuts the validity of the NPT. There has never been a more critical time to enforce the legal obligations to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament.  While the Ninth Circuit decision focuses on its inability to judicially determine the parameters of such negotiations, which are at the discretion of the Executive, with respect, the Court failed to acknowledge the pleading of the RMI, supported by the declarations of experts, that such negotiations have never taken place.  At issue was whether Article VI requires the US to at least attend such negotiations, or whether it may continue to boycott them, as it did with the Nuclear Ban Treaty negotiations. To that we have no answer.”

    Marshall Islanders suffered catastrophic and irreparable damages to their people and homeland when the U.S. conducted 67 nuclear tests on their territory between 1946 and 1958. These tests had the equivalent power of exploding 1.6 Hiroshima bombs daily for 12 years.

    The Marshall Islands did not seek compensation with this lawsuit. Rather, it sought declaratory and injunctive relief requiring the United States to comply with its commitments under the NPT and international law.

    Rick Wayman, Director of Programs for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) and a consultant to the Marshall Islands in their lawsuit, stated, “This ruling from the Ninth Circuit continues the trend of a complete lack of accountability on the part of the U.S. government for its nuclear proliferation, active participation in a nuclear arms race, and refusal to participate in nuclear disarmament negotiations.”

    Wayman continued, “The Marshall Islanders made a valiant and selfless effort to bring the U.S. into compliance with its existing legal obligations. I deeply appreciate the RMI’s courageous leadership on today’s most pressing existential threat. Together with willing non-nuclear countries and non-governmental organizations around the world, we will continue to work until the scourge of nuclear weapons is eliminated from the earth.”

    The full opinion can be found at http://bit.ly/9th-opinion

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    The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation was founded in1982. Its mission is to educate and advocate for peace and a world free of nuclear weapons and to empower peace leaders. The Foundation is a non-partisan, non-profit organization with consultative status to the United Nations and is comprised of some 80,000 individuals and groups worldwide who realize the imperative for peace in the Nuclear Age.

  • U.S., UK and France Denounce Nuclear Ban Treaty

    This article was originally published by Counterpunch.

    The U.S., UK and France have never shown enthusiasm for banning and eliminating nuclear weapons. It is not surprising, therefore, that they did not participate in the United Nations negotiations leading to the recent adoption of the nuclear ban treaty, or that they joined together in expressing their outright defiance of the newly-adopted treaty.

    In a joint press statement, issued on July 7, 2017, the day the treaty was adopted, the U.S., UK and France stated, “We do not intend to sign, ratify or ever become party to it.” Seriously? Rather than supporting the countries that came together and hammered out the treaty, the three countries argued: “This initiative clearly disregards the realities of the international security environment.”  Rather than taking a leadership role in the negotiations, they protested the talks and the resulting treaty banning nuclear weapons. They chose hubris over wisdom, might over right.

    They based their opposition on their belief that the treaty is “incompatible with the policy of nuclear deterrence, which has been essential to keeping the peace in Europe and North Asia for over 70 years.” Others would take issue with their conclusion, arguing that, in addition to overlooking the Korean War and other smaller wars, the peace in Europe and North Asia has been kept not because of nuclear deterrence but in spite of it.

    The occasions on which nuclear deterrence has come close to failure, including during the Cuban missile crisis, are well known. The absolute belief of the U.S., UK and France in nuclear deterrence seems more theological than practical.

    The three countries point out, “This treaty offers no solution to the grave threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear program, nor does it address other security challenges that make nuclear deterrence necessary.” But for the countries that adopted the nuclear ban treaty, North Korea is only one of nine countries that are undermining international security by basing their national security on nuclear weapons. For countries so committed to nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence, is it not surprising and hypocritical that they view North Korea’s nuclear arsenal not in the light of deterrence, but rather, as an aggressive force?

    The three countries reiterate their commitment to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but do not mention their own obligation under that treaty to pursue negotiations in good faith for an end to the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament. The negotiations for the new nuclear ban treaty are based on fulfilling those obligations. The three countries chose not to participate in these negotiations, in defiance of their NPT obligations, making their joint statement appear self-serving and based upon magical thinking.

    If the U.S., UK and France were truly interested in promoting “international peace, stability and security” as they claim, they would be seeking all available avenues to eliminate nuclear weapons from the world, rather than planning to modernize and enhance their own nuclear arsenals over the coming decades.

    These three nuclear-armed countries, as well as the other six nuclear-armed countries, continue to rely upon the false idol of nuclear weapons, justified by nuclear deterrence. In doing so, they continue to run the risk of destroying civilization, or worse. The 122 nations that adopted the nuclear ban treaty, on the other hand, acted on behalf of every citizen of the world who values the future of humanity and our planet, and should be commended for what they have accomplished.

    The new treaty will open for signatures in September 2017, and will enter into force when 50 countries have acceded to it. It provides an alternative vision for the human future, one in which nuclear weapons are seen for the threat they pose to all humanity, one in which nuclear possessors will be stigmatized for the threats they pose to all life. Despite the resistance of the U.S., UK and France, the nuclear ban treaty marks the beginning of the end of the nuclear age.

  • Nuclear Lab Under Investigation After Safety Violations

    Federal regulators are launching an investigation into reports of an inappropriate shipment of “special nuclear material” from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that took place two weeks ago. The shipment, most likely containing isotopes used for nuclear explosions, was sent via commercial air cargo services to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina. A National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) official, Lt. Gen. Frank Klotz, charged that it was “unacceptable” to ship such material by air because of the dangers caused by pressure changes, the explosive result of which some scientists have likened to flying with a ball-point pen.

    This security scandal is just the latest in a long history of safety missteps by the Lab, which has motivated the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) to launch a year-long investigation into its reported “climate of impunity” on plutonium pit production (you can read the Washington Post’s series reporting on the issue). The investigation was spurred by a 2011 incident involving the careless placement of plutonium rods too close together — a mistake that could have sparked the release of criticality-produced radiation, which has previously caused the death of three scientists at LANL alone. Luckily, catastrophe avoided the facility in 2011, though serious consequences followed. The acting head of NNSA at the time, Neile Miller, immediately shut down the PF-4 building at LANL (the site of the incident) and almost every safety supervisor at the facility left their post in resigned exasperation. CPI’s investigation has uncovered the previously shuttered culture of negligence systemic in LANL’s operations, a finding surprising to many when considering the sensitive material the Lab handles.

    A relic from the Manhattan Project, LANL is the only U.S. lab that produces plutonium pits (fissile cores of nuclear weapons that, when imploded, initiate thermonuclear detonations). Though the Lab regularly handles plutonium and inspects the U.S. nuclear arsenal, LANL managers have consistently struggled to meet even basic safety standards. James McConnell, the top NNSA safety official, commented on the Lab and its managers at a public hearing in Santa Fe on June 7, stating that “they’re not where we need them yet.” Even former president of the American Nuclear Society Michaele Brady Raap candidly remarked that “there are a lot of things there [at LANL] that are examples of what not to do.” If these safety oversights are so glaringly obvious to even the most senior nuclear safety officials, what has allowed this system to persist? Like many factory operations involving contractors, the answer lays in the profits.

    LANL is operated by a consortium of contractors — most notably by the firm AECON, which bought the previous contractor URS in 2014. Needless to say, CPI’s report confirms the contractors’ prioritization of profit over safety when it comes to plutonium pit production at the Lab. Congress has placed a large burden on the shoulders of LANL’s scientists through the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which mandates the production of 80 pits per year by 2027. To achieve this incredible rate, managers have imposed lax penalties for worker safety risks and have encouraged technicians to cut safety corners. Accidents have been, until now, largely unpublicized. In addition, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) where LANL stores its nuclear waste experienced an underground barrel rupture, initiating a three-year shutdown and leading to questions on where LANL’s waste will go. To top it off, the Laboratory sits on an active seismic zone that is a few thousand years overdue for a considerable earthquake. Such a shock could bring materials in the Lab to critical status, dispersing lethal particles to nearby communities.

    These disturbing conditions are hardly setbacks for the Lab’s contractors, who field earnings despite major safety breaches: after the 2011 crisis, the government paid contractors $50 million of taxpayer money. And the profits don’t plateau there. Congressional legislation requires that LANL continue to produce plutonium pits even though there is no technical need in the stockpile (15,000 plutonium pits — each lasting about a century — are currently stored near Amarillo, Texas). This quantity is well beyond U.S. warhead maintenance needs; in fact, future plutonium pits are tentatively intended for use in an “interoperable warhead,” an undeveloped weapon that could theoretically act as both a land-based ICBM and a submarine-launched nuclear warhead. The warhead would cost an estimated $13 billion, plus the cost for plutonium core production of $100 million. Those spell large sums for contractors setting their sights high, even on weapons that the military doesn’t want and that can’t be tested due to international nonproliferation consequences. Contractors not only manage the overall business machine for plutonium pit development, but they are also the lab directors overseeing day-to-day operations. This inarguable conflict of interest is what divides security priorities and production quotas. Lab safety has been thrown to the desert wind as contractors seek out profits by continuing the demand for plutonium pit production despite the exorbitant costs to our national budget and the blatant lack of actual need. This discrepancy forms the root of the systematic safety protocol violations at LANL.

    In the wake of the CPI investigation, both the NNSA and LANL management have issued statements announcing the renewal of the Criticality Safety Program: Lab manager Craig Leasure ended a LANL internal memo by asserting, “safety is our top priority and as a result our plutonium facility is safe, even if that impacts programmatic timelines.” Though the shutdown of the PF-4 facility in 2011 completely halted nuclear weapons testing and plutonium pit production for 4 years, some functionality has returned recently. Management predicts a return to 100% functionality of the PF-4 facility by the end of this year. Plutonium pit production will continue to strive for the outlandish goals set by Congress, propelled forward by contractors striving to meet those quotas at any cost. The $2.2 billion contract to manage LANL ends in 2018 and the NNSA has just begun the competition to find the next firm — some see this as a real opportunity to enact effective changes at the troubled lab. Though the realignment of safety priorities at LANL is a promising response to the recent spotlight, it is difficult to foresee the implementation of any real change in a system already plagued by a culture of mercenariness.