Nuclear Watch of New Mexico

One Minute Closer To Midnight
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: "It is five minutes to midnight. Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed. For that reason, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is moving the clock hand one minute closer to midnight, back to its time in 2007." (Read more at the Bulletin's website)

Los Alamos Lab officials have recently claimed that LANL has moved away from primarily nuclear weapons to "national security", but what truly remains as the Labs central mission? Here's the answer from one of its own documents:

LANL's "Central Mission"- Presented at: RPI Nuclear Data 2011 Symposium for Criticality Safety and Reactor Applications (PDF) 4/27/11

Bureaucracy Strangles National Laboratories
2/28/12. "The past few weeks have been brutal for Los Alamos, the lab that brought atomic weaponry to the world and has long stood as a bastion of our nation's nuclear weapons expertise. But its problems today are of the nuclear enterprise's own making.
In testimony before Congress on Feb. 16, former weapons program manager C. Paul Robinson, a veteran of both Sandia and Los Alamos national labs, spoke bluntly and with a touch of anger and what sounded like more than a little sadness of the weapons program's decline. . . 'Bureaucratic organizations are not an effective structure to be used for organized activities or businesses that are required to be innovative . . .'" Read John Fleck's column "Up Front" at the ABQJournal Online

How Kansas City Learned to Stop Worrying
and Love the Bomb (makers), by Ben Palosaari
"The plant's private ownership is drawing both ire and bewilderment from experts. Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his classic The Making of the Atomic Bomb, says the ownership arrangement is an aberration in the history of the military-industrial complex. While many American companies make fortunes by selling arms, Rhodes says private ownership of a nuclear [weapons] plant is a novel idea." Read the full article at Pitch News

Reason over Relics:
Restructuring our Nuclear Force
Lt. Gen. Robert Gard (Ret.), chairman, Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
"With the end of the cold war, the world has changed, and those who ardently defend massive spending on nuclear weapons are either unaware of, or unwilling to consider, the changed strategic landscape. Our current nuclear force structure is a holdover from an era where the overarching goal was deterring a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States or an invasion of Europe. Every submarine in our fleet today can single-handedly destroy every major city in either China or Russia and completely obliterate smaller nations. If the essence of deterrence is a credible threat, then its safe to say we can make significant reductions with no impact whatsoever on our deterrent or security capacity." Read the full article at Pitch.com

"Up On The Hill" exposes the horrifying truth of the weapons production, corporate profiteering and environmental and health consequences of the work of Los Alamos National Laboratory - truths that for too long citizens and politicians alike have chosen to ignore. See teaser and website for the film.

"Judging by the proposals in this bill, one would think that the Soviet Union hadn't dissolved and that taxpayer funds were limitless. . . this bill funds pet nuclear projects as if the Cold War were at its peak while busting the fiscally-prudent defense spending cap that Congress agreed to last year as part of the Budget Control Act"

Joel Rubin, "Taking Us Backwards on Nuclear Spending", in The Hill's Congress Blog, regarding the Defense Authorization Act passed in the House Armed Services Committee May 9th, 2012.

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"The grim prospect of nuclear famine requires a fundamental change in our thinking about nuclear weapons. The new evidence that even the relatively small nuclear arsenals of countries such as India and Pakistan could cause long lasting, global damage to the Earth's ecosystems and threaten hundreds of millions of already malnourished people demands that action be taken. The needless and preventable deaths of one billion people over a decade would be a disaster unprecedented in human history. It would not cause the extinction of the human race, but it would bring an end to modern civilization as we know it."

Dr. Ira Helfand, the author of the report, "Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk- Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition" released at the Nobel Peace Laureates Summit in Chicago, prepared by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and its US affiliate, Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR).

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"It is in connection with the principles of jus in bello that charges of the immorality of nuclear deterrence arise. Threatening civilian populations completely disregards the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Deterrence requires that millions be threatened as a means to influence the decisions of a few leaders. Thus deterrence requires that we treat human life as a mere object of policy and a means rather than an end. The theologian Paul Ramsey draws the analogy of deterring reckless automobile drivers by tying babies to the front bumpers of every car:
'This would be no way to regulate traffic even if it succeeds in regulating it perfectly, for such a system makes innocent human lives the direct object of attack and uses them as a mere means for restraining the drivers of automobiles. It would even have to be assumed that the drivers will tacitly agree never to remove the baby from the bumper, since that would destabilize the entire system of controls!'"

Robert P. Churchill quoting Paul Ramsey (The Just War) in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: 'Nuclear Arms as a Moral and Philosophical Issue'

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"Our political system is losing its ability to even explore alternatives. If fealty to these pledges [to the ideologies of both parties] continues to expand, legislators may pledge their way into irrelevance. Voters will be electing a slate of inflexible positions rather than a leader."

Sen. Richard Lugar in his concession speech after losing the Republican primary in Indiana, May 8, 2012. Lugar was the co-creator of the 1992 Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (AKA the Nunn–Lugar Program) that enabled the dismantlement of ~7,000 nuclear weapons and 100’s of strategic bombers and missiles in Russia. His successful Tea Party opponent used Lugar’s willingness to work with Democrats to create critical national security programs against him as being insufficiently conservative.

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"My takeaway from The Partnership is that nuclear weapons are in the process of being reframed. After decades of foundations, think tanks, and universities lavishing resources on game theorists to devise hyper-rational scenarios in which nuclear weapons could be used in war and diplomacy for national advantage, these devices are now in the process of being recoded as unacceptable instruments of terror that are of no use in war."

Anthropologist Hugh Gusterson in his review of "The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb", a new book on “five front-rank Cold Warriors who have become nuclear abolitionists in their old age” (Kissinger, Schultz, Perry, Nunn and Drell); March 30, 2012; The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists/The New Abolitionists

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"Only in Washington could an increase of this magnitude be seen as a cut"

Rep. Frelinghuysen (R-NJ –Subcommittee Chair) referring to the budget for NNSA Weapons Activities in opening statement at the Energy and Water Appropriations markup June 15, 2011 where the committee recommended $195 million over FY11, but about half a billion less than the FY 12 request.

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Flashback: Crime and Corruption at LANL
Ten years ago, security scandals erupted at the Los Alamos Labs. In July 2011, Jay Coghlan, Executive Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, interviewed Glenn Walp, who investigated the security lapses for the Labs, about his newly published book, "Implosion At Los Alamos: How Crime, Corruption And Cover-Ups Jeopardize Americas Nuclear Weapons Secrets" (Langdon Press, 2010).