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The Modernization of the US Nuclear Weapons Complex in Light of the Renewal of the START Treaty
published Monday, December 21, 2009  2394 Views :: 2 Comments
The Modernization of the US Nuclear Weapons Complex in Light of the Renewal of the START Treaty

December 16, 2009


The United States nuclear stockpile of more than 2,000 warheads is safe, secure and reliable; over the next ten years, the number of warheads in our deployed stockpile will drop by twenty-five to thirty percent, and both the US and Russia have indicated these reductions are only a first step toward deeper reductions. Even so, as long as the US relies on a nuclear deterrent, the need for confidence in our arsenal increases as the number of warheads in our arsenal decreases. The recently released JASON report on Stockpile Stewardship indicates that the US stockpile is, at present, safe, secure and reliable. That is the starting point for the discussion about new warhead production facilities.

The current nuclear weapons complex is comprised of eight facilities spread across the southern United States, from Lawrence Livermore in California to Savannah River in South Carolina. At three of these sites, the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapons wing, the National Nuclear Security Administration, has major new facilities on the drawing board, and in the budget. These facilities, if they are built, will expand the United States’ capacity to design and build new nuclear weapons.

In Los Alamos, New Mexico, the NNSA is clearing land for the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility [CMRR]. This facility expands the US capacity to make new plutonium pits for nuclear warheads beyond the current capacity. Last year Los Alamos produced six plutonium pits. In a bomb, pits are called the “primary”—when the plutonium is compressed by high explosives, the fission of the primary triggers the “secondary” which is the thermonuclear part of the bomb.

Secondaries are made at the Y12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This year’s budget included ninety-four million dollars to design the Uranium Processing Facility, or UPF, a new bomb plant that will cost more than three billion dollars to build. The UPF will manufacture secondaries out of highly enriched uranium, lithium deuteride, beryllium and depleted uranium for new, refurbished, and modified nuclear weapons.

The third facility is the new Kansas City Plant, a replacement for the existing Kansas City Plant in Missouri which produces non-nuclear component for warheads—the electronics, arming, fusing, firing package.

These three facilities were conceived as part of the push to develop the Reliable Replacement Warhead—this was the original driver for these facilities. Plans call for the CMRR and the UPF to be built with matching production capacity—50 to 80 warheads a year. This is not just a curious coincidence, it is important. The 50/80 warheads per year capacity has no relation to stockpile stewardship and maintenance, but it is the capacity needed for full-scale production of new warheads.

These new warhead production plants are being marketed as the “modernization” of the nuclear weapons complex. “Modernization” sounds like a good thing; people who are against modernization must be stuck in the past, Luddites who resist progress and improvement. Who can be against modernizing?

It’s a clever sales pitch. Before we sign off on “modernization,” though, we should understand clearly what is at stake, even to the point of appreciating the irony: in this case, advocates of “modernizing” the weapons complex and the arsenal are adhering to the nuclear doctrine of the past; “modernization” represents regress, not progress.

It is important to distinguish between facilities needed to maintain an enduring nuclear arsenal into the indefinite future and facilities needed to maintain a safe, secure, reliable stockpile as US reliance on strategic nuclear weapons diminishes and force structure requirements approach numbers in the low hundreds on their way to the goal almost universally embraced: a world free of nuclear weapons. It is a distinction with a profoundly important difference.

The primary purpose of “modernization”—of the CMRR, the UPF, and the Kansas City Plant—is expanded warhead production. If we clear out the marketing hype, we can talk about what is really on the table: increasing the US capacity to produce nuclear warheads—refurbished, modified, and new—not to guarantee the safety and reliability of our current stockpile, but to maintain an enduring nuclear arsenal. After several failed attempts in the last decade to secure funding for new-design nuclear weapons, efforts are now focused on creating new weapons capabilities through modifications of current warheads and “heavy life extension” upgrades. These will be done in the new warhead production plants.

The question facing us is fairly simple: How can we meet the mission requirements of tomorrow—increased dismantlement, ongoing stockpile surveillance, materials disposition—without undermining or corrupting the US commitment to a world in which nuclear weapons play a continuously diminishing role until they are gone?

New bomb plants aren’t cheap: Expanding our capacity to build 50 to 80 secondaries a year for nuclear weapons at the Uranium Processing Facility in Oak Ridge will cost more than $3 billion.

That’s just in Oak Ridge. The price tag for the CMRR-Nuclear Facility in Los Alamos is $97 million this year; that’s mostly for site preparation. Remember: this is for a plutonium pit production facility to manufacture 50-80 pits/year even though the only reason we might need new pits in the next seventy years is if we are designing and manufacturing new nuclear warheads.

The cost of the new Kansas City Plant will be realized over the next twenty years; this year’s four hundred sixty-five million dollar budget line for the KC Plant includes an increase of sixty-six million dollars for transition to the new facility even though construction has not yet begun. Eventually, according to the General Services Administration, leasing and operating the new bomb plant will cost $1.2 billion over the next twenty years.

All of this is money we don’t need to spend—we can maintain a safe, secure and reliable stockpile without these facilities.

The federal government can save about two billion dollars by consolidating highly enriched uranium operations required for stockpile surveillance and maintenance in down-sized existing facilities, aiming for a five-to-ten warhead per year throughput, upgrading only those technologies needed for surveillance and confidence. For the high-demand dismantlement and materials disposition work Oak Ridge will need to do over the next decades, we should build a dedicated Dismantlement and Disposition facility.

At Los Alamos, the facility needed to perform stockpile maintenance work has already been built; it’s called the Phase One Radiological Lab. The Rad Lab, along with the existing pit production facility, which has the capacity to make up to 20 pits per year, can do what is needed to guarantee the safety and reliability of the stockpile’s pits.

The existing Kansas City Plant is not expiring either; the need for these new plants is rooted mostly in the NNSA’s addiction to capital intensive projects. The work necessary to maintain our current arsenal can be done safely next year in the same place it is being done this year.

Over the last fifteen years, attempts to bring new production facilities on-line have employed a remarkably diverse stream of arguments— first, we needed new bomb plants because our aging warheads needed to be replaced; then it was the facilities themselves, though we are assured they are still safe and secure, rapidly deteriorating (We’re in “run to failure mode” the manager of Y12 in Oak Ridge said in 2001. Later he took it back). Over the last decade, we’ve been told new facilities would be required to produce new warheads—first mini-nukes, then the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, then the Reliable Replacement Warhead; we’ve also been told retaining weapons design and production expertise requires new weapon designs and new facilities.

If you’ve had much experience with teenagers, you might be nodding with a knowing smile. My youngest daughter, Emma, turned twelve six weeks ago, and the birthday triggered a serious need for a cell phone. I explained the family finances to her, and gave her the parental lecture on the difference between wants and needs and made it clear she would have to really need a cell phone, not just want one. So over the last month and a half, I’ve been hearing a series of justifications, each one sincerely and hopefully offered. Each time, I patiently reiterate the difference between want and need, and she, in turn, retreats to design another argument, this time, she hopes, a winning one.

I get that same feeling when I go to public hearings in Oak Ridge. Back in 1991, DOE proposed Complex 21; since then we’ve had studies on consolidation, Programmatic Environmental Impact Statements on Complex 2030, then Complex Transformation, and now it’s “modernization.”

The current rationale for these projects follows a similar line. The existing facilities are aging, and worker health and safety will be compromised unless we do something. That the plants are aging is undeniable. NNSA tells us in Oak Ridge, the current existing facilities can and will be upgraded to meet ES&H and seismic standards for 100 million dollars. That’s to make them safe until the UPF can be built. That’s real modernization; and call me conservative, but if we can upgrade the existing facility to meet current standards for 100 million, do we need to spend 3 billion dollars on a new bomb plant?

The problem NNSA has is that it really wants new bomb plants for expanded warhead production, but it can’t say that out loud. So, like my daughter, it is groping with increasing desperation for a palatable rationale for new production facilities. In the last five years, with independent reports from the JASON, Congressional tightening of purse strings, and the President’s commitment in Prague, Moscow and Cairo, the power of arguments for new warhead production facilities has declined.

Since 1996, the Life Extension Program has performed upgrades on several warheads designs and, if the current schedule is maintained, sometime in 2016 the number of Life Extended Warheads will approach 2,000 and will meet the number of warheads permitted under the renewed START Treaty—1,675—coming down. At that point, the argument for new warhead production facilities disappears, and we are left with the question we should be asking, since none of these proposed new facilities will come on-line before 2016:

Does the US really need enormously expensive new facilities and expanded warhead production capacity? It’s not just that the CMRR, UPF and new Kansas City Plant would be provocative in terms of nuclear proliferation; it’s that they are unnecessarily provocative.

Here’s how it looks on the ground at one weapons site: In Oak Ridge we got our first clear look at the plan for a new bomb plant on October 30. In the plan, three UPF options are presented as “reasonable alternatives.”

The first is a full size UPF with a manufacturing capacity of 125 secondaries and cases per year. It is not the “preferred option.” A new “capability-sized” UPF, ten percent smaller, and with a capacity of 50-80 secondaries and cases per year is “preferred.” But also included as a “reasonable alternative” is the “No Net Production UPF” with a capacity of ten warheads per year—this is the capacity required to maintain the current stockpile and is currently being met in existing facilities.

At a public meeting in mid-November, another option was presented to NNSA— build a new facility for dismantling warheads; we have a ten-to-fifteen year backlog at Y12 now, and with START renewal, we’ll be getting another surge of old warheads. The dismantlement facility will disassemble old warheads and prepare materials for disposal or disposition; it can be designed to accommodate international inspections and verification protocols as they are developed; it would be a complement to the new highly enriched uranium storage facility coming on-line at Oak Ridge next year.

This is the investment we need if we are to meet our nation’s commitment to the future; it spends money where it needs to be spent and frees excess funds to be spent elsewhere—or not to be spent at all.

In an article last spring in the Yale Divinity School’s journal Reflections, George Shultz, who served as Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan and also as the President of the Bechtel corporation, wrote this:

“The goal of achieving a world free of nuclear weapons is of transcendent importance. So far as the proliferation of nuclear weapons and their potential use is concerned, we are at a tipping point. The danger is all too real. The simple continuation of present practice with regard to nuclear weapons is leading in the wrong direction. We need to change the direction.”

Funding expanded warhead production at the CMRR, the UPF and the Kansas City Plant in the name of “modernization” is continuing in the same direction we have been going the last sixty years. Changing direction may be a challenge, but it’s not beyond us, and those of us who have a role in determining the nuclear future of the US, whether we do policy or budget, from inside the government or as an NGO, have to step up

If we are to move in a direction consistent with the country’s commitment to nuclear disarmament, we should commit our resources to pursue our stockpile security goals with the minimum investment necessary to maintain a safe and secure stockpile and a maximum commitment to full-capacity dismantlement and disposition.

Ralph Hutchison
Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

Ralph Hutchison has served as Coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance since 1991. He is a graduate of Erskine College (A.B.) and Union Theological Seminary in Virginia (D.Min.) and is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, USA. He served on Advisory Panels for the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Academy of Sciences, and the state of Tennessee. Editor of A Citizens’ Guide to Oak Ridge and author of The Continuing Assault and The Future of Y12, he lives in Knoxville, Tennessee. Information about the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance is available at www.stopthebombs.org.




 



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