UPF Lawsuit

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 6, 2026

Contact: Jay Coghlan, 505.989.7342, c. 505.470.3154 | Email
Sophie Stroud, 505.231.9736 | Email

“Rationality will not save us… this is very important: at the end we lucked out.  It was luck that prevented nuclear war.” Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary, “Lessons Learned from the Cuban Missile Crisis”

Santa Fe, NM – The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has posted its annual Performance Evaluation Reports for FY 2025. In 2012 Nuclear Watch New Mexico had to sue the NNSA for these unclassified reports on contractors growing rich at taxpayers’ expense. The NNSA and/or its parent Department of Energy have been on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List” for project mismanagement and waste of taxpayers’ dollars ever since 1990. According to a recent report, the NNSA currently has $4.8 billion in cost overruns for major construction projects (likely an underestimate), which represents a significant decline in performance since the GAO’s last assessment in 2023. In three years, cumulative schedule delays for NNSA’s construction projects increased from 9 years to 30 years, attributable to poor contractor project management, poor vendor/subcontractor performance, and general inflationary costs.

In 2019 the NNSA began restricting access to its Performance Evaluation Reports again, so Nuclear Watch New Mexico sued again in 2022. This time we compelled NNSA to post the Reports in an online Freedom of Information Act Reading Room. These Performance Evaluation Reports provide important insights into all of NNSA’s eight active nuclear weapons research and production sites.

In its latest Performance Evaluation Report for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the NNSA graded the Lab’s expanding nuclear weapons programs as “Very Good.” At the same time, NNSA praised LANL for:

“… collaborat[ing] with stakeholders across the NSE [“National Security Enterprise”] to develop a programmatic baseline schedule supporting the pit production mission through FY 2050. This represents… a significant advancement in the planning for the pit mission at LANL and the national security needs of the United States.”

Nuclear Watch New Mexico argues that the true national security needs of not only the United States, but the entire world as well, is to avoid a staggering new nuclear arms race. The world’s last arms control treaty expired a few weeks ago and now war is raging across the Middle East over Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. A Review Conference of the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty, to which 191 countries are State Parties, is scheduled to begin in late April. However, it is widely assumed that it will utterly fail for the third consecutive time to make any progress whatsoever toward nuclear disarmament. The U.S. should be leading by example toward universal, verifiable nuclear disarmament as mandated by the NPT, instead of, in reality, acting diametrically opposed to it through its $2 trillion “modernization” program to keep nuclear weapons forever.

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