Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Los Alamos

  • 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.

  • What Is Ethical?

    This article was originally published by Pressenza.

    During the lunch hour on the final day of the ICAN Civil Society Forum in Oslo, around 150 people attended a panel discussion on “Ethics in International Politics.”

    At the end of the panel discussion, Fr. John Dear briefly brought up an important example that shocked many in the audience. He said that many of the employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), near where he lives in New Mexico, believe that they are engaged in an ethical – perhaps the most ethical – line of work.

    The definition of “ethics” through which I view the issue of nuclear weapons is this:

    That branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.

    How can LANL employees possibly believe their work is ethical? Each nuclear weapon that LANL employees have created, monitored and modernized from the dawn of the Nuclear Age until today have the capacity to destroy hundreds of thousands – or more – lives in a flash. The resulting nuclear famine from even a relatively small regional exchange of nuclear weapons would kill hundreds of millions more people around the world.

    The answer to this question lies in their belief in nuclear deterrence – that the threat of massive retaliation by Country B prevents Country A from initiating hostilities. Therefore, nuclear weapons keep the peace and will never be used.

    As a signatory to the Santa Barbara Declaration against nuclear deterrence, I do not believe that this idea about human behavior holds in all cases or can be relied on to keep us safe. A conscious effort must be made by nuclear weapons proponents to ignore the well-documented catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons in order to consider nuclear weapons “ethical.”

    At the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, NAPF President David Krieger asked U.S. Undersecretary of State Ellen Tauscher whether the U.S. would be willing to conduct a “human impact statement” on the use of nuclear weapons. Ms. Tauscher’s answer was simple: “We have no intention of doing this.”

    This willful ignorance continues today: the P5 (U.S., Russia, U.K., France and China) made a collective decision to avoid the Norwegian Foreign Ministry’s conference on the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, which begins on March 4. To participate in it would shatter their carefully-crafted illusion that the “motive” and the “end” of maintaining even one nuclear weapon is ethical.

    At least 132 countries will come together in Oslo on March 4-5 to examine the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons. The scientific evidence is beyond doubt. No one could hide from the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons should a nuclear exchange take place.

    The P5 cannot hide forever from the fact that humanity demands the abolition of nuclear weapons. A Nuclear Weapons Convention for the phased, verifiable, transparent and irreversible elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide is the only ethical option.

    Rick Wayman is Director of Programs & Operations at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

  • The Bells of Hiroshima – in Los Alamos

    This article was originally published by the National Catholic Reporter.


    John Dear, SJA hundred and fifty of us gathered on Sunday night, Aug. 5, at Ashley Pond in Los Alamos, New Mexico, at the exact spot where long ago the Hiroshima Bomb was built. Right at 5:15 p.m — 8:15 a.m. Monday morning, Aug. 6 in Japan — we heard live, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, the ringing of the Peace Bell in Hiroshima.


    It was deeply moving. Each year, thousands gather in Hiroshima in Peace Park to commemorate the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing with a ceremony and the ringing of the giant Peace Bell. But here we were, standing in Los Alamos where the bomb was made, listening live over our sound system to the deep sound of the bell in Hiroshima. For once, people in Hiroshima and Los Alamos were connected in commemorating the U.S. bombing. It was a holy moment.


    After we heard the solemn bell several times, all hundred and fifty of us processed in silence two by two up Trinity Boulevard toward Oppenheimer Way and the main entrance of LANL, the Nuclear Weapons Laboratories.


    At 5:45 p.m. precisely, we each donned sackcloth and poured ashes on the sidewalk and sat down in strict silence, using this ancient biblical symbol of “sackcloth and ashes” to “repent of the mortal sin of nuclear weapons and beg the God of peace for the gift of disarmament.”


    We sat in contemplative prayer for thirty minutes. Cars passed by. Clouds hung overhead. And you could hear a pin drop.


    But for me, that deep Hiroshima bell continued to resonate. It was like a giant mindfulness bell, calling the world back to the center of peace.


    For years now we’ve used the ancient biblical symbol of sackcloth and ashes. In the Book of Jonah, we recalled, Jonah marches through the town of Ninevah, and calls the people to repent of their violence. Lo and behold, the entire town repents in sackcloth and ashes, and changes their violent ways.


    That’s what we’re trying to do: to call upon the people of Los Alamos and United States to repent of the evil work of building and maintaining nuclear weapons; to take responsibility for our own complicity in this culture of death; to demand that we dismantle our nuclear weapons; and to welcome a new nuclear-free world. That’s our hope and our prayer.


    The evening action came after a remarkable weekend conference in Santa Fe called “Vision Without Fission.” Several dozen speakers looked at nuclear weapons from a variety of angles. Indigenous women from the Santa Clara Pueblo, for example, which is located at the foot of the mountains below the labs, told their stories and expressed their sadness and outrage at the ongoing development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos.


    At the heart of the weekend was the witness of our friend, Alaric Balibrera. Alaric is a Santa Fe screenwriter who grew up in Los Alamos, where his father was the documentarian for LANL. As a child, he saw films of the atomic explosions projected practically every evening on his living room wall. Later, he visited Hiroshima and finally realized the horrors which his hometown had unleashed upon the world.


    On July 16, the anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test, Alaric began a “hunger strike” to protest nuclear weapons development. He’s still fasting today, three weeks later, and still calling for the end of nukes. Dozens of people have joined Alaric for a day or more of fasting. He is perhaps the first Los Alamos resident to make such a public stand against nuclear weapons.


    “I’m on hunger strike because I love Los Alamos and I love science and I want to see both of them used for the enrichment of humanity,” Alaric told me as we sat on the lawn by Ashley Pond, listening to musicians singing about peace. “There’s so many wonderful things we can do with science — cure cancer, cleanup our messes, and create freedom want.”


    “I’m striking for transformation from a world of competition to a world of cooperation. I don’t believe we need to raise our children for the future; we need to raise the future for our children. The minds of Los Alamos could be turned to creating solutions to our most pressing problems. I want to see this brain power used for life-sustaining work.”


    Other speakers included Arjun Makhijani of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research; Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety; Pancho Ramos Stierle, from the Oakland Occupy movement; Cynthia Jurs, of the Open Way Buddhist Sangha; and Beata Tsosie-Pena of the Santa Clara Pueblo who works with HOPE, (“Honor Our Pueblo Existence”).


    “I’m here because if you’re going to fight nuclear weapons, you have to come to the source,” William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, told me. “This is ground zero for weapons of mass destruction, so we have to speak here.” I asked Bill about hope. “I think the fact that our president said we have to get rid of these weapons is good. People are realizing we can’t afford them. These moments come in waves, and I think more people are coming along who will help make disarmament a reality.”


    “I’m here to do my part for nuclear abolition,” Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico told me, “and we’re going to do it, but it will be a step by step process. This weekend has been fabulous for focusing us, and we’re going to keep doing this every year until we get the job done!”


    Today there is little accountability, transparency or public participation in decisions made at Los Alamos, according to www.nukefrewnow.org, the broad coalition that sponsored the weekend. They write:



    After the war, a few scientists, fearing that the new A-bomb might initiate a nuclear arms race, worked to stop its further development. As we know, they failed, and the task of controlling and stopping nuclear weapons was left to later generations…. Since 2006 nuclear weapons have been a for-profit business at the Lab. From 1943 to 2006, the University of California (UC) ran the Lab as a non-profit entity. Since 2006, LANL has been operated by Los Alamos National Security (LANS), a for-profit cooperation. The dominant members of LANS are the international construction giant Bechtel and UC. Under LANS, the research and design of nuclear weapons at LANL became a for profit business and costs soared. In 2011, for instance, US taxpayers paid over $83 million to run LANL, ten times what UC as sole manager received; the same year the Lab Director was paid over $1 million, triple the pre-Bechtel salary. Bechtel, the world’s largest privately owned corporation, conducts all daily operations at the Lab… The Labs continue to be a drain on the state of New Mexico, despite what politicians say… The county of Los Alamos receives $47 million a year from the state of New Mexico from the gross receipts tax paid by the lab as a for profit business. Los Alamo County has the lowest poverty rate of any county in the United States and the most millionaires per capita in the country. On the other hand, the state of New Mexico is fourth from the bottom in income and more of our children — twenty-five percent — live in poverty than in any other state.


    For my part in the program, I noted that nuclear weapons not only bankrupt us economically, they bankrupt us spiritually. I read what Mahatma Gandhi said a few days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: “I hold that those who invented the atomic bomb have committed the gravest sin. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory to the Allied arms, but it resulted for the time being in destroying Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see… Unless the world adopts nonviolence, this will spell certain suicide for humanity.”


    Today, we see everywhere the effect that the bomb has had upon us as a nation, I continued:



    We have lost our soul. We have no sense of meaning, love, truth, empathy or compassion, no understanding of our basic humanity. So we come here to repent of this the gravest sin and start the journey again to reclaim our soul, to become people of nonviolence, to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons once and for all, and to redirect those billions of dollars for food for the world’s hungry, homes for the homeless, free healthcare, jobs and education for everyone, and training every human being on the planet in the methodologies of nonviolent conflict resolution.


    I invited everyone at the Labs to quit their jobs and join the campaign to abolish nuclear weapons. It’s a call we will continue to make as we try to build the nuclear abolition movement.


    On the morning of Aug. 6 itself, members of “Occupy Los Alamos” took to the streets of Los Alamos and blocked the street near the main entrance to the Labs. Six were arrested and given court dates.


    But I will not soon forget standing on the green lawn where the Hiroshima Bomb was built, and hearing that solemn bell ring live from the service in Hiroshima. It was like a giant alarm clock, a global wake up call. It was part mourning, part warning. I left wondering why we are so deaf to the Peace Bell of Hiroshima, what keeps us from hearing that global mindfulness bell, and what we can do to help one another hear that universal wake up call.


    Maybe more and more of us need to go to Los Alamos for this annual commemoration, to see for ourselves the buildings where we continue to build nuclear weapons, and to come to terms with the reality of Los Alamos. Whatever sense of despair or apathy we might feel, the Peace Bell of Hiroshima has rung once again, calling us to wake up, get moving, keep on marching, and keep on doing what we can to build a global movement to abolish nuclear weapons forever.

  • The Folly of Mindless Science

    Alice SlaterIn 2000, I traveled to India, invited to speak at the organizing meeting of the Indian Coalition for Nuclear and Disarmament and Peace. About 600 organizations, including some 80 from Pakistan gathered in New Delhi to strategize for nuclear disarmament. India had quietly acquired the bomb and performed one nuclear test at Pokhran in 1974 but it was in 1998 that all hell broke out, with India exploding five underground tests, swiftly followed by six in Pakistan.


    The trigger for this outbreak of nuclear testing in Asia was the refusal of the US Clinton Administration, under the pressure of the US nuclear weapons scientists, to negotiate a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that precluded laboratory testing and “sub-critical” tests, where plutonium could be blown up underground with chemicals without causing a chain reaction—hence defined as a non-nuclear test by the US and the nuclear club. India warned the nuclear powers at the Commission on Disarmament (CD) where the CTBT was being negotiated, that it opposed the CTBT because it contained discriminatory “loopholes … exploited by some countries to continue their testing activity, using more sophisticated and advanced techniques”, and it would never agree to consensus on the treaty unless the ability to continue high-tech laboratory testing and computer-driven nuclear experiments was foreclosed.


    In an unprecedented move of colonial hubris, Australia, led by Ambassador Richard Butler, brought the treaty to the UN for approval over India’s objections, the first time in the history of that body that the UN General Assembly was asked to endorse a treaty that had not received consensus to go forward in the negotiating body at the CD. I spoke to Ambassador Butler at a UN reception where the wine was flowing a bit liberally. I asked him what he was going to do about India’s objection. He informed me that he had been visiting with Clinton’s National Security Advisor in Washington, Sandy Berger, and Berger said, “We’re going to screw India!” And Butler repeated for emphasis, “We’re going to screw India!” Unsurprisingly, India and Pakistan soon tested overtly, not wanting to be left behind in the technology race for new improved nuclear weapons which was characterized blasphemously by the US in biblical terms, as its “stockpile stewardship” program to protect the ‘safety and reliability” of the arsenal.


    As for the “safety and reliability” of the nuclear arsenal, in the late 1980s, during the heady days of perestroika and glasnost, when there was talk of a nuclear testing moratorium, initially instituted in the Soviet Union after coal miners and other activists marched and protested the enormous health threats from Russian testing in Kazakhstan, a debate in Congress resulted in an annotated Congressional record indicating that since 1950 there were 32 airplane crashes carrying nuclear weapons and not one of them ever went off! Two spewed some plutonium around Palomares, Spain and Thule, Greenland that had to be “cleaned up”, but there was no catastrophic nuclear explosion. There are still some bombs unaccounted for including an airplane still missing which crashed off the coast of Georgia. How much more “safer and reliable” would the weapons have to be? Fortunately, General Lee Butler, taking command of the nuclear arsenal stopped the insanity in 1992 and ruled that the planes carrying nuclear weapons would be grounded instead of being in the air 24/7 keeping us “safe” and “deterring” the Soviet Union. What could they have been thinking? Sadly, there has been no corresponding move to ratchet down the lunacy that endangers our planet at every moment from some 1500 deployed nuclear weapons mounted on missiles poised to fire against Russian missiles, similarly cocked, in minutes.


    US scientists are enabling a new arms race with Russia and China


    Even before “stockpile stewardship”, I remember attending a meeting with the mad scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of Dr. Strangelove, and sitting in a circle to discuss the aftermath of nuclear policy in the shadow of the crumbled wall in Berlin. The scientists were earnestly discussing the need for AGEX (Above Ground Experiments), to keep their nuclear mind-muscles alive and limber, which eventually morphed into the diabolically named “stockpile stewardship” program. Today, that misbegotten program is funded to the tune of $84 billion over the next ten years, with another $100 billion budgeted for new “delivery” systems—missiles, submarine, airplanes—as if the Cold War had never ended!


    At the Delhi conference, Dr. Amulya Reddy, a nuclear physicist gave an electrifying talk on the responsibility of science and its moral failures, explaining how shocked he was to find documents describing how the German scientists carefully calculated, with extraordinary accuracy and scientific precision, the amount of poison gas required per person to kill the Jews who were routinely marched to the Nazi “showers” in the concentration camps. And at a workshop on the role of science, there was an extraordinary conversation with Indian and Pakistani scientists who pondered whether scientists have lost their moral compass because the system of higher education produced the growth of the scientific institute, isolating scientists from the arts and humanities. They examined whether these separated tracks of learning, denying scientists the opportunity to intermingle with colleagues engaged in those issues, while narrowly concentrating on their scientific disciplines, had stunted their intellectual and moral growth and led them to forget their humanity.


    Now scientists are pushing whatever boundaries might have existed to open a whole new avenue of terror and danger for the world. In a profound disregard for the consequences of their actions, US scientists are enabling a new arms race with Russia and China as the military-industrial-academic-Congressional complex plants US missiles in Eastern Europe and beefs up military bases in the Pacific. This despite efforts by Russia and China to forestall this new arms race by calling for a treaty to ban weapons in space, supported by every nation in the world except the US which blocks any forward progress for negotiations.


    The US has recently admitted to cyber warfare, targeting uranium enrichment equipment in Iran with a killer virus to set back the Iranian program to build their own bomb in the basement, while at home, we are talking of massive subsidies to the uranium enrichment factory in Paducah, Kentucky. It is hard to believe how screwy this new venture into cyber warfare is in terms of providing security to the “homeland”. After all, cyber terror is not nuclear warfare. Any country, or even scores of various groups of individuals, can master the technology undetected, and wreak catastrophic havoc on the myriads of civilian computer-dependent systems, local, national, and global. Similarly, the recent expansion of drone warfare, assassinating innocent civilians together with suspected “terrorists” in eight countries, at last count, with the President of the US acting as judge, jury and executioner, is the application of misbegotten science in a recipe for endless illegal war. Just as the US was the first to use the atomic bomb, opening the door to the disturbing and uncontrollable nuclear proliferation we witness today, it is again opening the door, taking the lead in a new global arms race in cyber warfare and drone technology. Despite Russia’s suggestion that there be a treaty against cyber war, the US is resisting negotiations, indicating their continued arrogance and disregard of what must be manifestly apparent to any rational thinking person. There can be no reasonable expectation that scientists can keep the dark fruits of their lethal discoveries from proliferating around the world. It is just so 20th century, hierarchical and left-brained to imagine that there will not be others to follow their evil example, or that they can somehow control an outbreak of the same destructive technology to others who may not wish them well.


    Can there be any doubt that scientists driving US policy are out of touch with reality? Officials talk about “risk assessment” as though the dreadful disastrous events at Chernobyl and Fukushima are capable of being weighed on a scale of risks and benefits. Scientists are constantly refining their nuclear weapons and designing new threats to the fate of the Earth. After the horrendous devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely everyone with half a brain knows these catastrophic bombs are completely unusable and yet we’re pouring all these billions of dollars into perpetuating the weapons labs, as hunger and homelessness increase in the US and our infrastructure is crumbling. The high priests of Science are not including the Earth in their calculations and the enormous havoc they are wreaking on our air, water, soil, our biosphere. They’re thinking with the wrong half of their brains—without integrating the intuitive part of thinking that would curb their aggressive tendencies which engender such deadly, irreversible possibilities. They are engaged in creating the worst possible inventions with a Pandora’s box of lethal consequences that may plague the earth for eternity. Still, they continue on. Scientists are holding our planet hostage while they tinker in their laboratories without regard to the risks they are creating for the very future of life on Earth.”

  • Nuke U: How the University of California Is Helping to Blow Up the World

    This article was originally published by The Bohemian.

    On my way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory a few years ago, I found it listed in a New Mexico phone book—under “University of California.”

    Since the early 1940s, UC has managed the nation’s top laboratories for designing nuclear bombs. Today, California’s public university system is still immersed in the nuclear weapons business.

    Sixty-five years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, the University of California imprimatur is an air freshener for the stench of preparations for global annihilation. Nuclear war planners have been pleased to exploit UC’s vast technical expertise and its image of high-minded academic purpose.

    During most of WWII, scientists labored in strict secrecy at the isolated Los Alamos lab in the New Mexico desert, making possible the first nuclear weaponry. After the atomic bombings of Japan, UC continued to manage Los Alamos. And in 1952, when the government opened a second nuclear bomb generator, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco, UC won the prize to manage operations there, too.

    A few years into the 21st century, security scandals caused a shakeup. UC lost its exclusive management slots at Los Alamos and Livermore, but retained major roles at both laboratories.

    In mid-2006, the Los Alamos lab went under a new management structure, widened to also include Bechtel and a couple of other private firms. A year later, a similar team, likewise including UC and Bechtel, won a deal to jointly manage Livermore.

    At Los Alamos, I learned that the new management team was, legally speaking, an LLC, a limited liability corporation. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the concept of “limited liability” for managers of a laboratory that designs nuclear weapons.

    Weird, huh? But not any stranger than having the state of California’s top system of higher education devoted to R&D for designing better ways to blow up the planet.

    Yes, those laboratories do some nifty ecological research and other laudable things. But nuclear weapons remain central to the labs’ mission. And, lofty rhetoric aside, the federal government is pouring billions more dollars into the continuous high-tech pursuit of nuclear weapons “modernization.”

    Last spring, the White House announced plans for this decade that include investing $80 billion “to sustain and modernize the nuclear weapons complex”—in addition to “well over $100 billion in nuclear delivery systems to sustain existing capabilities and modernize some strategic systems.”

    In fact, the U.S. government is now on a jag to boost spending for its nuclear arsenal. As the Livermore-based organization Tri-Valley CAREs noted weeks ago, “the 2011 budget request for nuclear weapons is the largest in our nation’s history; bigger than under George W. Bush and a whopping 40 percent higher than the amount spent for nuclear weapons activities on average during the Cold War.”

    Credit where due: the UC-managed laboratories for nuclear bombs have been on the cutting edge of digital advancement. Their record recalls a comment from Martin Luther King Jr., who noted the proliferation of “guided missiles and misguided men.”

    When I interviewed Los Alamos press officer Kevin Roark, he explained that “this laboratory has been at the forefront of computing research and development” from the Manhattan Project days of slide rules and punch cards to the lab’s present-day computers, with one able to do upwards of 100 trillion calculations per second.

    An official website of the University of California boasts that “UC has been involved in the management of these laboratories since their inception—a relationship spanning seven decades—as a public service to the nation.” With a lab on the UC Berkeley campus included in the mix, “the three laboratories have a combined workforce of more than 21,000 and operate on federally financed budgets totaling more than $4 billion.”

    For sure, there’s plenty of money sloshing around to reward the masters—and academic servants—of the nuclear weapons industry. But should the University of California be managing laboratories that design the latest technologies for nuclear holocaust? 

  • Los Alamos on the 60th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

    As we gather here to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the annihilation of Hiroshima, it is significant that we raise these memories here at Los Alamos in the heart of the dragon the very place where such an unprecedented level of violence against humanity was created in a single blast, resulting in the death of over 200,000 people by the end of 1945, most of them civilians. In the 60 years since, delayed effects including radiation-induced cancers, immunologic disorders, psychological trauma and birth defects have killed and afflicted many tens of thousands more in Japan.

    But it is not only the people of Japan who are suffering from the 60 year nuclear nightmare first created at Los Alamos. We are all downwinders. Nuclear weapons drove us to the unspeakable act of secretly testing radiation on our own population. 23,000 American civilians were subjected to radiation research in about 1400 projects over 30 years. The government tested on retarded children, mental patients, poor women and US soldiers. More than 200,000 troops were ordered to observe nuclear test detonations and were exposed to radiation.

    After 60 years, there are now at least seven acknowledged nuclear powers, and 44 nuclear capable states, thanks to the so called Atoms for Peace program which spread nuclear reactors and materials around the world and put the keys to the nuclear bomb factory in those nations hands­handing them the technology and materials for bombs, under the guise of “peaceful” nuclear energy. The world is awash in radioactive waste. We haven’t a clue where to put it. The best we have come up with in the US is a harebrained scheme to ship the toxic waste from weapons and power plants, by rail and by truck from the four corners of the continent and bury it in a hole in the ground in Nevada at Yucca Mountain. Citizens groups, like the proverbial boy with his finger in the dike, have been holding off the onslaught of this devastating disposal solution, preventing legislation from passing in the Congress for years, and now, when the current Republican Congress voted for it to proceed, with a lawsuit in the courts that hangs by a thread, having enlisted the Court’s aid in forestalling the process until some of the tainted, fraudulent evidence submitted by the government as to the suitability of the repository is re-examined. Deadly plutonium remains lethal for 250,000 years and there is no way to guarantee that the Yucca site could prevent radioactive seepage into the ground water over this unimaginable period of time. Remember that all of recorded history is only 5000 years old!

    The US has spent nearly six trillion dollars on nuclear weapons over the past sixty years, We’ve created more than 4500 contaminated sites, covering tens of thousands of acres that may take 75 years and cost as high as one trillion dollars “to clean up” Clean up of radioactive waste, much of which remains toxic for hundreds of thousands of years is the wrong word. At best, we can only attempt to manage and contain the poisons from seeping into the air soil, and groundwater and visiting further destruction on our planet.

    And yet, 60 years later, our Doctor Strangeloves continue to create new sources of toxic waste with sub-critical underground tests of plutonium blown up with high explosives 1,000 feet below the desert floor at the Nevada test site; plans to fabricate new plutonium pits for nuclear bombs here at Los Alamos; plutonium powered rockets to fire into space which could spew down highly carcinogenic radioactive particles upon the earth below should there be an accident like the ill-fated Challenger and Columbia shuttles; as well as the bullets and tanks made with depleted uranium in a bizarre recycling program which enabled the government to make a dent in the 500,000 tons of depleted uranium waste amassed since the Manhattan Project. Don’t be misled by the term “depleted uranium”. Like “spent fuel” from civilian reactors, depleted uranium is highly toxic and carcinogenic and has a half-life of some 4.4 billion years. “Half life” is another euphemism that distances us through our language from grasping the deadly seriousness of what we are doing to our planet. For example, while the Half-life of plutonium is 26,000 years, it remains toxic for about 250,000 years until all the radioactivity decays. So you can imagine­or can you­the life span of depleted uranium with its half-life of over 4 billion years!

    There are heartbreaking reports that the hundreds of tons of DU ammunition used in Iraq during both wars, as well as in Bosnia left a growing legacy of respiratory problems, liver and kidney dysfunction among US vets and birth defects among their new born children with similar reports coming from Iraq and Kosovo, with an increase in leukemia and birth defects. Yet, as in so many cases, our government has covered up and denied that depleted uranium has been harmful even though a new National Academy of Sciences Report on the Biologic Effects of Ionizing Radiation has reaffirmed that there is no safe dose of radiation. Even the lowest levels of radiation can be carcinogenic. Discouragingly, an August report in the Denver Post informs us that 8500 uranium mining permits have been requested in Utah and Colorado, in the wake of the numerous new nuclear projects in the works, including a push by the Bush administration to build 50 new nuclear power plants by 2020.

    But perhaps the most damaging injury from the 60 years of the nuclear age is the toxic effect it has had on our very democracy. Because of nuclear weapons, the government created a whole culture of secrecy, lies and cover ups about the awful effects of the bomb. The very existence of nuclear weapons demonstrates a failure of democracy. We are not permitted to confront our own history. In 1995, 50 years after the bomb, Congress actually fired the Historian at the Smithsonian Museum, our must prestigious historical institution, because they didn’t want Americans to know about the controversy that preceded President Truman’s decision to drop the bomb at the end of World War II. Top US military officials, like Generals Omar Bradley and Eisenhower, wrote letters to Truman telling him it was unnecessary to use the bomb to end the war against Japan. Then there were reports of Winston Churchill, urging Truman to drop the bomb before Russian entered the Pacific front.

    Recent reports, in anticipation of this 60th Anniversary, have told us how the military censored photographs and films of the gruesome devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By not only developing the bomb and trying to maintain a monopoly on its use­despite urging by the “father of the bomb”, Robert Oppenheimer, to President Truman to stop the spread of atomic weapons by placing international controls over all atomic technology, the United States lost its moral compass and entered a 60 year cycle of Empire. Pushing our weight around the world, we brandish our nuclear weapons. They are the brass knuckles on the fist of our empire. Even without ever dropping another nuclear weapon on a so-called “rogue or “axis of evil” state we are still using the 10,000 nuclear warheads in our arsenal, just as a bank robber uses a gun in a hold up ­even without ever pulling the trigger. Breaking our promises for good faith efforts for nuclear disarmament in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, refusing to submit the Comprehensive Test Ban to the Senate for ratification, trashing the Anti-Ballistic Treaty to clear the way for dominating and controlling the military use of space–and spurring a new arms race to the heavens, developing new more useable nuclear weapons and planning to replace all the thousands we already have, we are seen as the nuclear bully, lawlessly menacingthe world with our might like some mad cowboy nation from the Wild West, while actually going to war without legal authority and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians under the false premise that Iraq was a nuclear threat to America.

    Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, of Hiroshima has written that “according to Japanese and Chinese tradition, a 60th anniversary begins a new cycle of rhythms in the interwoven fabric that binds humankind and nature.” Let us begin a new cycle in a life affirming connection of our humanity and nature. Let us awaken from our 60-year nuclear nightmare of imperial hegemony. Let us reject the drive for Empire and reclaim our democracy by working for the abolition of nuclear weapons. We know from public opinion polls that the majority of Americans, 65% in the latest poll taken even while we waged this misbegotten war against Iraq, said they think we’d be better off without nuclear weapons if all countries gave them up. Abolition Now, the campaign of the Abolition 2000 Network, of over 2000 organizations in 95 countries, is working with Mayor Akiba and nearly 1,000 Mayors around the world, to enroll our Mayors in a campaign to have a treaty negotiated by 2010 for the elimination of nuclear weapons, with full implementation by 2020. We have already produced a model nuclear weapons convention that is now an official UN document as a starting point for negotiations. We are working with the Parliamentary Network for Nuclear Disarmament to enroll our members of Congress in these efforts. At least, until we get regime change here at home, we’ll have to work with our local, state and congressional members to use this cycle of renewal to put an end to the nuclear scourge. Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey of California has submitted a resolution proposing that negotiations begin on a treaty to eliminate nuclear weapons. It needs the support of your member of Congress. We need a Senator to sponsor a similar resolution. There’s lots we can do to take back our Democracy and halt the spread of Empire. Let us use this 60th anniversary to begin a year of awakening, acknowledge our shameful nuclear history in which we sacrificed so much of our democracy to the national security state, and say no to the nuclear scourge and yes to our highest ideals of an open and transparent society that, with an informed public, can deliver on our cherished American ideals to uphold the rule of law and live in peace with other nations.

    Alice Slater is president of Global Resource Center for the Environment (GRACE).

  • Renewal at Los Alamos Weapons Lab Resurrects Deeper Debate

    While a bidding war for control of the US’s top nuke facility pairs two state universities with two corporations, critics are asking questions that won’t appear in either team’s proposal.

    As the 60th anniversary of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki approaches, one of the nation’s top nuclear weapons laboratories is seeking new management. Or more accurately, the Department of Energy is sponsoring a competitive bidding war for control of the Los Alamos National Laboratory – the first since the lab’s secretive genesis during World War II as the Manhattan Project, the birthplace of the bombs that devastated out those Japanese cities.

    But the contest over who will run the nation’s premier nuclear arms facility has prompted activists to ask harder questions than just those concerning who will operate the facility safer and more efficiently. Some critics challenge the very wisdom of what they see as an administration trudging headlong into another nuclear arms race.

    On one side of the contract face-off is the University of California, which has run Los Alamos for over 60 years. UC is paired up with Bechtel, the global engineering firm best known for its enormous, largely unfulfilled contracts to help rebuild Iraq’s war-torn public infrastructure.

    On the other side of the bidding war is the University of Texas, which has aggressively sought management of a national lab since 1996. UT is joined by Lockheed-Martin, the world’s top defense contractor and manager of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

    Both groups have also added smaller contractors with experience managing components of the nuclear weapons complex as junior partners. Meanwhile, the UT-Lockheed team has involved thirty universities listed as an “Alliance Academic Network” in its portfolio. Proposals from the two consortiums were due July 19, and the Department of Energy will pick a new management team by December 1.

    The bidding war for Los Alamos has shaken the lab community and inspired a debate over who can best run the $2.2 billion a year operation. Most Los Alamos employees are not concerned with questions about the country’s weapons policy, according to Greg Mello with the Los Alamos Study Group, a research organization that promotes disarmament. Instead, said Mello, they “are mostly concerned about pensions, working conditions, and their identities as scientists.”

    There are misgivings among some employees at the lab about working for a corporation, said Mellow, who claimed most people there prefer to consider their workplace an academic institution. “People say, ‘If I wanted to work for a corporation, I would have done so earlier in my career,’” relayed Mello.

    But many anti-nuclear activists and lab watchers see the debate over who should manage Los Alamos as obscuring a critical discussion of the role nuclear weapons play in the world today.

    Hugh Gusterson, an MIT anthropologist who has written two books based on his experience living and studying the culture of nuclear weapons labs, sees both bids as “conservative” in that they are headed by people entrenched in the weapons bureaucracy. “The real question is, ‘Do you need two nuclear weapons labs?’” Gusterson added, referring to Los Alamos and its “sister” lab in California, Lawrence-Livermore.

    Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit organization that strives to make science accessible to laypersons, is even more blunt. “I have a date when I think the [ University of California] should have gotten out of the nuclear weapons business,” Makhijani said. “December, 1944 – when it was discovered that Germany did not have the Bomb.”

    Los Alamos is a flashpoint for arms control advocates because the facility is responsible for an estimated 80 percent of the nuclear weapons ever designed in the United States. In addition, lab administrators have historically had a hand in championing nuclear weapons and pooh-poohing arms control agreements and bans on testing, said Jackie Cabasso of the Western States Legal Foundation, an advocacy organization that specializes in supporting anti-nuclear activism.

    Paul Robinson, who stepped down as the CEO of the Sandia operation to run the UT-Lockheed bid and will be director of Los Alamos if his team wins, has been a proponent of new, low-yield nuclear weapons such as so-called “mini-nukes” and “bunker-buster” warheads designed to take out deeply entrenched targets. In a 2001 “white paper” Robinson argued for a transformation of the nuclear stockpile, including the re-design of existing warheads and the development of low-yield nukes, to deal with “To Whom It May Concern” enemies, a term applied to any non-Russian states or terrorist groups

    Naturally, Robinson also backed President Bush’s push – and Congress’s 2003 decision – to repeal the 1994 ban on low-yield nuclear weapons. Because the national labs rely almost entirely on federal funding, officials such as Robinson often find themselves promoting nuclear weapons to lawmakers.

    Los Alamos National Laboratory and the companies associated with whichever team wins the bidding war are positioned to benefit from the largesse of a nuclear arms revival. President Bush has consistently asked Congress to fund new nuclear weapons; increased production of plutonium pits, the part of the bomb that renders it atomic; and a facelift to the Nevada Test Site in order to reduce the amount of time it would take to resume underground nuclear testing.

    But Congress has trimmed most of the Bush administration’s requests for the past four years.

    Still, many arms control advocates fear that the Los Alamos competition is designed, in part, to make way for a resumption of warhead production. Several Los Alamos critics have fingered plutonium pit production as a key to Los Alamos’s future. As part of the competition, bidders will be rewarded for demonstrating how they will meet the perceived need for more plutonium pits – ones that could go to refresh older warheads or be installed in new ones.

    Currently, the lab is the only site in the US that can produce a pit certified for installation in a functional nuclear weapon. But a “Modern Pit Facility,” capable of producing up to 450 pits per year, could find a home at Los Alamos. “The sense in Congress is that Los Alamos is really troubled,” said Carah Ong, director of the Washington DC office of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and a lobbyist for that organization. Congress thinks Los Alamos “needs some results-oriented focus,” she told The NewStandard.. “That’s where pit production comes in because it gives Los Alamos the unique value that Congress is looking for.”

    Some Los Alamos critics are not sitting on the sidelines for the lab war games. Nuclear Watch in New Mexico and Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs) in California have joined forces and sent the Department of Energy their alternative plan for the lab. Unlike UT-Lockheed and UC-Bechtel, the two watchdog groups are making their proposal public.

    “Our emphasis is a pretty radical mission change by truly discouraging the proliferation of nuclear weapons through concrete example,” Jay Coghlan of the activist group Nuclear Watch New Mexico told TNS. “We are proposing a fundamental realignment of the nuclear weapons program,” he explained, by creating an Associate Directorship of Nuclear Nonproliferation. That position would be “responsible for encouraging and verifying compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Nuclear weapons-related projects would have to answer to the nonproliferation director.

    This restructuring aligns with Nuclear Watch and Tri-Valley CAREs’ “proposed program of maintaining [but not advancing] nuclear weapons while they await dismantlement,” according to the organizations’ press release.

  • To the Inheritors of the Manhattan Project

    In national research laboratories, such as Los Alamos or Livermore in the USA, Chelyabinsk or Arzamas in Russia, and Aldermaston in the UK, many thousands of scientists are employed doing pure and applied research for specific purposes, cloaked in secrecy, purposes that I see as the negation of scientific pursuit: the development of new, or the improvement of old weapons of mass destruction. Among these thousands there may be some scientists who are motivated by considerations of national security. The vast majority, however, have no such motivation; in the past they were lured into this work by the siren call of rapid advancement and unlimited opportunity. What is going on in these laboratories is not only a terrible waste of scientific endeavour but a perversion of the noble calling of science.

    The Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe, who was a most distinguished physicist, and one-time leader of the Manhattan Project, said:

    “Today we are rightly in an era of disarmament and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. But in some countries nuclear weapons development still continues. Whether and when the various Nations of the World can agree to stop this is uncertain. But individual scientists can still influence this process by withholding their skills.

    Accordingly, I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons – and, for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.”

    I would like to see an endorsement of this call by the scientific community. I will go further and suggest that the scientific community should demand the elimination of nuclear weapons and, in the first instance, request that the nuclear powers honour their obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

    Let me, in conclusion, remind you that the basic human value is life itself; the most important of human rights is the right to live. It is the duty of scientists to see to it that, through their work, life will not be put into peril, but will be made safe and its quality enhanced.

    Joseph Rotblat

    About Professor Sir Joseph Rotblat KCMG, CBE, D.Sc., FRS, Nobel Peace Laureate, 1995: Professor Rotblat, now 97 years old, was born in Warsaw in 1908, and has been a British citizen since 1946. He is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of London, and Emeritus President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. During World War II, Professor Rotblat initiated work on the atom bomb at LiverpoolUniversity, and later joined the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. When it became clear that Germany was not working on the bomb, he resigned from the project, the only scientist to do so before the bomb was tested. He then changed his line of research to medicine and was Chief Physicist at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. He is the only living signer of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955. He has devoted his life to averting the danger posed by nuclear weapons, working with the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, the organization he helped to found, and with which he shares the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the author of some 400 publications. Professor Rotblat can be reached at Pugwash Conferences On Science And World Affairs, London Office, Ground Floor Flat, 63A Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3BJ, tel 020-7405, fax 020-7831 5651, e-mail: pugwash@mac.com website: www.pugwash.org

    Background to the letter: In Geneva in April 2003, Pamela Meidell mentioned to Professor Rotblat that she once told the story of his walking away from the Manhattan Project in an interview with New Mexico Public Radio. She asked any nuclear scientist who was listening to the show to listen to his/her conscience and follow in Professor Rotblat’s footsteps. He was very eager to know if anyone had responded. Sadly, she didn’t know. Perhaps this message directly from him will bring forth a response.

    On 6 July 2005, the Atomic Mirror wrote a letter to Professor Joseph Rotblat, the only nuclear scientist to walk away from the Manhattan Project, asking if he would like to send a message back to Los Alamos for the 16 July remembrance of the birth of the nuclear age. He graciously responded with the message above.

  • An Open Letter to the Regents of the University of California

    An Open Letter to the Regents of the University of California

    The decision that you make on whether or not to bid to continue managing and overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories transcends ordinary university business decisions; it is a decision of profound moral consequence. The question that must be confronted is whether or not an institution of higher education should be involved in the creation and maintenance of weapons of mass destruction.

    While nuclear weapons are intended primarily for deterrence, the concept of deterrence itself is based on an implied assumption that the weapons might be used. Are the Regents of the University of California willing to continue to affiliate the University with laboratories that research and develop nuclear weapons, recognizing that the mass destruction of human beings could result? Although it may not be the intent, the potential use of nuclear weapons and larger implications of the university’s involvement cannot be denied.

    Your decision has vast legal, as well as moral dimensions. In a 1996 opinion, the International Court of Justice found that the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be illegal if it violated international humanitarian law. This means that any threat or use of nuclear weapons that failed to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants or that caused unnecessary suffering would be illegal under international law. It is difficult to imagine any use of nuclear weapons that would not violate these rules of international humanitarian law.

    Although the actual decision to threaten or use nuclear weapons would be out of the hands of the University of California Regents and the scientists and technicians who contributed to the creation and maintenance of the weapons, the UC Regents and the scientists and technicians in the labs could be considered accomplices to future international crimes. The current work of the nuclear weapons laboratories in researching new and more usable nuclear weapons, such as “bunker busters” and low-yield nuclear weapons, also runs counter to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which calls for ending the nuclear arms race at an early date and for good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

    The University of California justifies its relationship to the nuclear weapons laboratories as “a national service.” But this so-called “service” of designing and improving weapons of mass destruction is unworthy of a great university. In fact, the “service” the University of California has provided is a fig leaf of respectability to the making and maintenance of these genocidal weapons. Should these weapons be used and destroy large civilian populations, the role of the UC would certainly be viewed as a national disgrace rather than a national service.

    If the nuclear weapons laboratories would focus their talented scientists on limiting their nuclear weapons activities to the dismantlement of these weapons and to maintaining the safety and security (rather than reliability) of these weapons while awaiting dismantlement, their efforts could indeed be considered a national service, even an international service. But under the present circumstances in which the US is moving forward with new nuclear weapon designs that make these weapons more usable, the UC should opt out of providing management and oversight to the labs. As UC Regents, you should base your decision on moral considerations, consistent with international law.

    I urge you also to make your decision to withdraw from your past role in management and oversight of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs highly public. Doing so will influence the public and political discourse on the responsibility of the US to set an example in fulfilling obligations for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

    The University of California has a responsibility to pass on the accumulated knowledge of civilization to new generations. The continued engagement of UC in creating and maintaining weapons capable of destroying cities, civilization and most life on earth clearly contradicts the mission of the University, as well as its motto, “Let there be light.” There is no light in the creation of weapons of mass destruction, nor in the shroud of nuclear secrecy.

    I call upon you to take the high road and reconceptualize the national service of the University of California in terms of disarming and dismantling these terrible weapons of mass destruction, rather than creating and maintaining them. In 2005, the 60 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 50 th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto and the 35 th anniversary of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, I urge you to take a principled stand for the future of humanity. Your decision could help change the course of our nation and the future of civilization.

    David Krieger is a founder and the president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org). For more information on campaign to end the University of California ‘s involvement with the nuclear weapons laboratories, visit www.ucnuclearfree.org.

  • Theodore Taylor, a Designer of A-Bombs Who Turned Against Them, Dies at 79

    Theodore Taylor, a theoretical physicist who spent his early career as a designer of streamlined nuclear weapons and his later career as an antinuclear campaigner, died on Oct. 28 at a nursing home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 79 and until recently lived in the western New York community of Wellsville.

    The cause was complications of coronary artery disease, his family said.

    Dr. Taylor, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory at the height of the cold war, was renowned as a designer of fission bombs of minimal size and maximal bang. He later directed Project Orion, whose mission was to develop a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft.

    “His trade, basically, was the miniaturizing of weapons,” the physicist Freeman Dyson says in “The Curve of Binding Energy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974), a book-length profile of Dr. Taylor by John McPhee. “He was the first man in the world to understand what you can do with three or four kilograms of plutonium, that making bombs is an easy thing to do, that you can, so to speak, design them freehand.”

    But by the mid-1960’s, Dr. Taylor had become, in his own words, a “nuclear dropout.” A frequent adviser on nuclear safeguards, he wrote and lectured widely on the threat of nuclear terrorism and the risks of nuclear power. He believed that a small clandestine group, or even an individual, could easily steal nuclear material and, with publicly available information, build a homemade atomic bomb.

    “The nuclear genie has proliferated considerably since it was first released,” he said in a 1996 lecture. His mission, he often stated, was to put it back into the bottle, and by the end of his life he had become an archetypal figure: the creator compelled to destroy his own creation after it runs menacingly amok.

    Theodore Brewster Taylor was born on July 11, 1925, in Mexico City. His grandparents had been missionaries, and his father was general secretary of the Y.M.C.A. in Mexico. A brilliant boy (he completed sixth grade the same year he started fourth), Ted was enthralled by his chemistry set, or, more precisely, its explosive possibilities.

    “He enjoyed putting potassium chlorate and sulfur under Mexico City streetcars,” Mr. McPhee wrote. “There was a flash, and a terrific bang.”

    Dr. Taylor received a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1945 and pursued a doctorate in physics at the University of California. But he failed his oral examinations – he lacked the capacity to focus on things that did not interest him – and he left the department in 1949. (He would eventually earn a Ph.D. from Cornell in 1954.)

    He found a job at Los Alamos. “Within a week, I was deeply immersed in nuclear weaponry,” Dr. Taylor wrote in a 1996 article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “I was fascinated by every bit of information I was given during those first few days.”

    Preternaturally inept at ordinary tasks (parking a car defeated him), he became an artist of the fission bomb, taking the massive nuclear weapons developed for the Manhattan Project and making them smaller and lighter without sacrificing explosive power. Over the next seven years, he designed a series of ever-smaller bombs, whose cunning names – Scorpion, Wasp, Bee, Hornet – captured both their size and their sting.

    Dr. Taylor would develop the smallest fission bomb of its time, Davy Crockett, which weighed less than 50 pounds. (By contrast, Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima, weighed almost 9,000 pounds.) At the other extreme, he designed Super Oralloy, which was at the time, Mr. McPhee wrote, “the largest-yield pure-fission bomb ever constructed in the world.”

    Viewed as a theoretical abstraction, Dr. Taylor’s work had a cool, compelling elegance. Exploded in the Nevada desert, it made a satisfying flash and bang. The weapons, he often reminded himself, were meant to deter nuclear war, and if the United States did not develop them, the Soviets soon would.

    In his 1996 article, he recalled how he spent Nov. 15, 1950, the day his daughter Katherine was born:

    “Instead of being with my wife, Caro, I had spent the day at a military intelligence office, poring over aerial photographs of Moscow, placing the sharp point of a compass in Red Square and drawing circles corresponding to distances at which moderate and severe damage would result from the explosion at different heights of a 500-kiloton made-in-America bomb. I remember feeling disappointed because none of the circles included all of Moscow.”

    Dr. Taylor’s marriage, to the former Caro Arnim, whom he wed in 1948, ended in divorce in 1992. He is survived by their five children: Clare Hastings of Washington; Katherine Robertson of Davis, Calif.; Christopher, of Colorado Springs; Robert, of Rockville, Md.; and Jeffrey, of Brooklyn; two half-brothers, John Barber of Irvine, Calif., and Ralph Thompson of Issaquah, Wash.; 10 grandchildren; and 9 great-grandchildren.

    In 1956, Dr. Taylor left Los Alamos to work on Orion. The size of a 16-story building, Orion was to be propelled by 2,000 nuclear bombs, ejected one by one from the bottom of the spaceship (the designers modeled this feature on the technology of Coke machines) and detonated in space. He dreamed of visiting Mars and Saturn, but the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear explosions in the atmosphere and in space, put an end to the project.

    In the late 1950’s, working for a division of General Dynamics, Dr. Taylor and several colleagues developed Triga, a small reactor used for research and considered safer than conventional reactors.

    In 1964, he went to work for the Defense Department as deputy director of the Defense Atomic Support Agency. There, he later said, he came to see the real-world implications of the elegant little bombs he had designed at Los Alamos.

    “I became privy to the actual characteristics and deployments of what, by then, were thousands of nuclear weapons,” he wrote in 1996. “The nuclear arms race had a force and a momentum I had never dreamed of.”

    He left in 1966 and the following year started the International Research and Technology Corporation, a consulting business. In 1980 he started Nova Inc., which developed alternatives to nuclear energy.

    His books include “The Restoration of the Earth” (1973, with Charles C. Humpstone), “Nuclear Theft: Risks and Safeguards” (1974, with Mason Willrich) and “Nuclear Proliferation: Motivations, Capabilities and Strategies for Control” (1977, with Ted Greenwood and Harold A. Feiveson).

    He also taught at Princeton for a number of years, and was a member of the president’s commission on the Three Mile Island accident.

    Dr. Taylor approached his work with the zeal of a convert and, perhaps, the attitude of a penitent.

    “Rationalize how you will, the bombs were designed to kill many, many people,” he says in Mr. McPhee’s book. “If it were possible to wave a wand and make fission impossible – fission of any kind – I would quickly wave the wand.”

    First published by the New York Times.