US to build thousands of new nuclear weapons

WASHINGTON — The US Department of Energy (DOE) plans to replace existing nuclear weapons with modified or new ones. This was revealed on April 21 when the agency was forced to release a declassified version of its October 1997 "Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan" to a Washington federal court. The document admits the DOE intends to maintain a large nuclear arsenal indefinitely.

"Nuclear weapons in the enduring stockpile will eventually be replaced ... This work is anticipated to begin around 2010", the document states. The DOE plans to develop "new nuclear options for emergent threats" and create the capacity to build thousands of additional nuclear weapons if "needed".

The US had previously denied that it plans to develop "new nuclear options". The US government has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but the Senate has yet to ratify it. Still classified are details of how DOE plans to use its multi-billion-dollar array of "surrogate" testing facilities to design new weapons.

The court case that produced the document was brought by 39 disarmament and environmental organisations, represented by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The NRDC is opposing production of plutonium pits (the core of nuclear weapons) at Los Alamos National Laboratory and construction of the National Ignition Facility in Livermore. The projects will cost $1.2 billion.

Environmental and safety risks at both sites led the NRDC to ask federal Judge Stanley Sporkin to order DOE to analyse alternatives to the projects.

"These [documents] reveal a shocking disregard for U.S. commitments, especially those enshrined in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to end the nuclear arms race", said Los Alamos Study Group director Greg Mello. "It's imperative that these plans be stopped. If we don't abide by the treaties we've signed, how can we get other countries to do so?"

DOE believes it can gradually replace fully tested weapons in the US nuclear stockpile with weapons whose "physics packages" have been designed and "tested" by computers. The document reveals plans for the development of "a 10 petaflop or faster supercomputer — a machine at least 10,000 times faster than the fastest experimental supercomputer operating today".

The document also reveals that new or modified nuclear weapons are to be developed for the air force and the US Navy's submarine fleet. Production plans are in place to allow the DOE to quickly increase US nuclear weapons production to "Cold War levels of building".

[Information provided by the Environment News Service.]

From GLW issue 316