“From South Carolina to California, locals in nuclear weapons towns raise health, safety, and environmental concerns over renewed plutonium pit manufacturing.”
| June 12, 2025 inkstickmedia.com
The United States’ plans to restock its entire nuclear weapons arsenal, known in military parlance as nuclear “modernization,” hit a bump in the road in January. A scrappy coalition of grassroots watchdog groups and impacted communities from places like the Gullah/Geechee sea islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts and San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods near a weapons laboratory sued the government agency that oversees the security of the US nuclear weapons complex.
The plaintiffs argued that the government was moving ahead with plans to produce new plutonium pits for warheads at plants in rural South Carolina and the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico without properly evaluating alternatives under the National Environmental Policy Act. A federal judge agreed, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) settled with the grassroots groups, agreeing to perform a multi-year environmental analysis.
The extensive environmental impact study is a rare speed bump that everyday Americans have been able to place in the way of the 21st century’s new nuclear arms race — and one that forces the government to hear from locals in the specific communities across the country that produce parts for the weapons.
“A nuclear arms race can feel abstract and distant, but it very much isn’t,” Ravi Garla, a consultant for the Nuclear Threat Initiative, told Inkstick. Garla recently worked on a campaign that led to a unanimous vote in the Nevada state legislature to oppose any resumption of explosive nuclear tests at a desert site outside Las Vegas where the government carried out more than 900 tests during and after the Cold War.
Top photo: A billboard by an advocacy group opposed to nuclear weapons testing in Nevada (Courtesy of Nevadans Against Nuclear Weapons Testing)