Trump’s 2020 Nuclear Weapons Budget Escalates New Arms Race
Posted By Scott Kovac
Santa Fe, NM – Today the Trump Administration released more budget details for the Department of Energy and its semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear weapons programs for fiscal year 2020. This same fiscal year will also mark the 75th anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Global Nuclear Weapons Threats Are Rising
More than 25 years after the end of the Cold War, all eight established nuclear weapons powers are “modernizing” their stockpiles. Talks have broken down with North Korea, the new nuclear weapons power. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan narrowly averted war last month. Russian President Vladmir Putin made new nuclear threats in response to Trump’s announced withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This could lead to hair-trigger missile emplacements in the heart of Europe and block extension of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia. If so, the world will be without any nuclear arms control at all for the first time since 1972.
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Hard duty in the Chernobyl zone
Cathie Sullivan, a New Mexico activist, worked with Chernobyl liquidator, Natalia Manzurova, during three trips to the former Soviet Union in the early 2000s. Natalia was one of 750,000 Soviet citizens sent to deal with the Chernobyl catastrophe. Natalia and Cathie together authored a short book, “Hard Duty, A woman’s experience at Chernobyl” describing Natalia’s harrowing four and a half years as a Chernobyl liquidator.
View an excerpt in this ARTICLE FROM beyondnuclearinternational.org
“The Chernobyl accident is not over, in fact its damaging effects on people and the land will only taper off slowly for generations—lingering harm that is almost certainly unique to nuclear accidents.”
– Natalia Manzurova
Natalia Manzurova, with fellow Russian activist, Nadezhda Kutepova, was awarded the 2011 Nuclear-Free Future Award in the category of Resistance.
HARD DUTY IN THE CHERNOBYL ZONE
beyondnuclearinternational.org : Hard duty in the Chernobyl zone
Feds stand by splitting ‘pit’ production between LANL, S.C.
“NNSA’s plans for expanded plutonium pit production is a house of cards waiting to fall down. First, we have an agency with a long track record of cost overruns and schedule slippages. Added to this is the lack of true mission need.
“Plutonium pit production is not being expanded to maintain stockpile safety and reliability. Instead it’s all about provocative new nuclear weapons designs that can’t be tested, or alternatively will push the U.S. back into testing with serious proliferation consequences.” – Nuclear Watch New Mexico director Jay Coghlan
BY MARK OSWALD | abqjournal.com
SANTA FE – Key federal agencies are standing by their plan split the work of producing the plutonium cores of nuclear weapons between Los Alamos National Laboratory and another site, a move that New Mexico’s congressional delegation continues to oppose.
But the Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Safety Administration were not unequivocal in describing the potential success of a two-site plan for making plutonium “pits.”
“Indeed, no option is without risk,” said NNSA administrator Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty in a news release Wednesday.
The NNSA, which oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons labs, announced that a contractor has completed a study of options for pit production that was mandated by language added to a defense budget bill by New Mexico Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich.
The two senators want all pit production — and the federal dollars and jobs that come with it — to remain at LANL and say turning a facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina into a second pit-production post will make the undertaking much more expensive.
2020 Democratic Candidates on the Issue of Climate Change
The New York Times sent a climate policy survey to the 18 declared candidates. They all want to stick to the Paris Agreement. Beyond that, they diverge.
BY LISA FRIEDMAN & MAGGIE ASTOR | nytimes.com
The nuclear option
The most divisive policy among the candidates was nuclear energy. Many climate change activists reject nuclear plants, even though they emit no carbon dioxide, because of safety concerns and a general preference for wind, solar and other purely renewable sources. And only seven candidates were unequivocally in favor of new nuclear energy development.
Mr. Sanders, who has called for a moratorium on nuclear power license renewals in the United States, rejected nuclear energy, as did Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Messam, the mayor of Miramar, Fla.
NNSA Downplays Study That Says Agency Can’t Make 50 Nuke Cores Per Year by 2030 in S.C.
A planned South Carolina facility will be able to produce 50 plutonium nuclear-weapon cores a year by 2030, despite a Department of Energy-funded study that says 2035 is more realistic, according to a top official with DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
BY DAN LEONE | exchangemonitor.com
“We have been working on scenarios to bring it back in time to ‘30,” Charles Verdon, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs, told Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor Tuesday after a hearing of the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee.
In congressional testimony this year, NNSA Administrator Lisa-Gordon Hagerty has repeatedly mentioned the study — an engineering analysis completed by Parsons Government Services in 2018 — in the same breath as her appeals to lawmakers that the agency can only meet the Pentagon’s demand for 80 cores a year by 2030 by building the South Carolina facility while also producing cores in New Mexico.
– The full referenced Parson engineering analysis can be viewed here, & a summary here –
NNSA remains silent on meeting national Environmental Policy Act requirements for public environmental review.
Recognizes the Inherent Challenges in Meeting Requirements for Plutonium Pit Production and Notes that the Current Approach is Achievable Given Sufficient Time, Resources, & Management Focus
energy.gov | WASHINGTON – A study of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) recommended alternative to revitalize the United States’ plutonium pit production capabilities was delivered April 16 to Congress by the Department of Defense (DoD).
The Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act required the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the NNSA Administrator, to contract a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) to conduct an assessment of NNSA’s two-pronged approach to achieve DoD’s requirement for producing no fewer than 80 plutonium pits per year by 2030.
The Ploughshares Fund has released an official trailer for their new podcast, Press the Button! The podcast will cover the latest news, feature exclusive interviews and share insider, in-depth perspectives on all things nuclear. President of Ploughshares Fund Joe Cirincione will be the host, and you will also hear from many Ploughshares Fund voices like Program Director Michelle Dover, Deputy Policy Director Mary Kaszynski, Roger Hale Fellow Catherine Killough, Communications Director Delfin Vigil and more.
Press the Button will feature the smartest voices in nuclear and national security analyzing all the key issues. So, please take a listen. Our first full-length episode, with special guest Dr. Carol Cohn, will be dropping soon.
– Listen and subscribe on iTunes.
– Listen and subscribe on Spotify.
– Listen and subscribe on SoundCloud.
– Listen and subscribe on Google Play.
A NEW VISION 2019
The Ploughshares Fund has released a new report, “A New Vision: Gender. Justice. National Security.” These 10 essays from leading women in the field present a snapshot of what could be the start of a truly diverse, equitable and inclusive new vision for nuclear policy and national security.
This collection presents a snapshot of what could be the start of a truly diverse, equitable, inclusive and just new vision for nuclear policy and national security, direct from the minds of leading women in the field. We are grateful to the funding partners who made this report (pdf) possible.
US-Russia Chill Stirs Worry About Stumbling Into Conflict
The deep chill in U.S.-Russian relations is stirring concern in some quarters that Washington and Moscow are in danger of stumbling into an armed confrontation that, by mistake or miscalculation, could lead to nuclear war.
BY ROBERT BURNS | apnews.com
WASHINGTON (AP) — It has the makings of a new Cold War, or worse. American and European analysts and current and former U.S. military officers say the nuclear superpowers need to talk more. A foundational arms control agreement is being abandoned and the last major limitation on strategic nuclear weapons could go away in less than two years. Unlike during the Cold War, when generations lived under threat of a nuclear Armageddon, the two militaries are barely on speaking terms.
“During the Cold War, we understood each other’s signals. We talked,” says the top NATO commander in Europe, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who is about to retire. “I’m concerned that we don’t know them as well today.”
Scaparrotti, in his role as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, has met only twice with Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian general staff, but has spoken to him by phone a number of other times.