By John C. Wester, SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | July 21, 2024 santafenewmexican.com
My archdiocese, home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is the birthplace of the atomic bomb. Yet 79 years after Oppenheimer’s Trinity test, our state still hosts the nuclear weapons complex, while New Mexicans’ needs go unaddressed. This fiscal year, the Department of Energy is spending $7 billion in New Mexico on nuclear weapons. This is more than what the whole state spends on education, in which we rank dead last in the nation.
Some $2 billion of this nukes money is for producing brand new plutonium pits — bomb cores for nuclear warheads — to arm the Air Force’s controversial and exorbitant new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. But many experts believe the program is a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and, in fact, makes Americans less safe. Congress should cancel Sentinel and instead compensate New Mexicans and thousands across the nation harmed by U.S. nuclear weapons production and testing and address urgent challenges like education, economic inequality, homelessness and addiction.
Countless New Mexicans — many of whom are my parishioners — have suffered from generations of cancers due to radioactive fallout from the Trinity test. One of my parishioners and a survivor of radiation-induced cancer, Tina Cordova, just last year experienced the tragedy of her 23-year-old niece being the fifth generation in her family to get cancer.
“We don’t ask ourselves if we’re going to get cancer; we ask when,” says Tina. And her family is far from alone.
After over 200 above-ground U.S. nuclear tests, in 1990 Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to provide limited medical help for some communities harmed by the tests. Yet the first victims of nuclear testing, New Mexicans — along with many other Americans — have been arbitrarily excluded from RECA.
In a recent moral test, House Speaker Mike Johnson not only failed to expand RECA to include New Mexicans — a measure that earlier passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate — but he also allowed it to expire for those already covered. Thousands are now without critical support. It is unconscionable not to compensate Americans already harmed by their own government’s nuclear weapons when the U.S. plans to spend $1.5 trillion on a so-called “modernization” program to keep nuclear weapons forever.
While Speaker Johnson complains that RECA is too expensive, Congress keeps funding bloated nuclear weapons programs despite constant and outrageous cost overruns. A chief example is the Pentagon’s Sentinel program, which was originally estimated to cost around $62 billion. But that price tag has now skyrocketed 158% to $160 billion and is still climbing, all without producing a single missile. This has triggered a required review under the Nunn-McCurdy Act to determine whether the program should be terminated.
Similarly, in 2018 production of plutonium pit bomb cores, first destined for the Sentinel’s nuclear warheads, was estimated to cost $43 billion over 30 years. Since then, it has climbed 40% to more than $60 billion and the government still does not have credible cost estimates.
But even more importantly than the staggering costs, we need to ask whether these exorbitant programs are needed in the first place. In both cases, the answer is decidedly “no.”
Many leading nuclear experts — including former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former commander of U.S. nuclear forces, Gen. James Cartwright — have explained why land-based ICBMs are dangerous, unnecessary, and should be scrapped. They are a relic of the Cold War whose raison d’être has already vanished, carry high risks for accidentally starting a nuclear war, and are plainly wasteful and redundant when better alternatives exist.
Worse yet, ICBM proponents further describe the missiles — sitting in fixed silos across Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana, and North Dakota — as a “sponge” that could “absorb” an enemy’s nuclear attack. But if such an attack ever took place, it would completely devastate those states, while lethal fallout could spread across the entire country, irradiating millions. It is horrifying and morally reprehensible to set up millions of people in the central U.S. as unwitting sacrifices in a nuclear war without their consent.
We also don’t need any new plutonium pits. Expert studies have found that plutonium pits have reliable lifespans of at least 85 years, while most existing pits in the U.S. stockpile are between 30 and 40 years old. There is no reason to waste billions making new pits when the ones we have will work for the foreseeable future.
In the name of Christ our savior, the Prince of Peace, in the name of whomever you direct your prayers to, and in the name of the common good, it’s time we put the brakes on the new nuclear arms race. This is a race to oblivion, an affront to God’s creation. It is arguably more dangerous than the Cold War arms race, because it now involves additional actors like China and North Korea, and new risks like cyber weapons and artificial intelligence make nukes even more destabilizing.
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said we survived the Cuban missile crisis and avoided nuclear Armageddon only by luck. But luck is not a sustainable strategy. We should use the Nunn-McCurdy review of the Sentinel ICBM program to rethink the whole new nuclear arms race and consider what is truly in our national and divine interests.
Congress should stop wasting more money on Sentinel and its associated plutonium pit production. It should instead extend and expand RECA to provide a measure of justice to thousands of Americans harmed by their own government’s nuclear weapons.