QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Trump’s Talk of Nuclear Tests Recalls Fears of the Cold War
“Yes, we can learn things by nuclear testing. But when you look at the big picture, we have much more to lose by going back to testing than we have to gain.”
– SIEGFRIED S. HECKER, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was created, after President Trump’s call to resume nuclear testing revived a Cold War debate. The New York Times nytimes.com
“There is nothing comparable in our history to the deceit and the lying that took place as a matter of official Government policy in order to protect this industry. Nothing was going to stop them and they were willing to kill our own people.”
— Stewart Udall, United States Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson.
He was the father of Senator Tom Udall (who ended up being a vigorous supporter of expanded nuclear weapons “modernization” plans).
In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
2022 BLOG POSTS
New Mexico’s Revolving Nuclear Door: Top Environment Officials Sell Out to Nuclear Weapons Labs
As part of a long, ingrained history, senior officials at the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) have repeatedly resigned to go to work for the nuclear weapons labs, the Department of Energy, or DOE contractors. In a number of cases that is where they came from to begin with.
The hierarchy of leadership at NMED starts with the Secretary, Deputy Secretaries and then Division Directors. The position of Resource Protection Division Director is particularly critical because it oversees the two NMED bureaus most directly involved with DOE facilities in New Mexico, the Hazardous Waste Bureau and the DOE Oversight Bureau.
FULL PRESS RELEASE [PDF]
Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review Fuels the New Nuclear Arms Race
Santa Fe, NM– Today, the Biden Administration has released its long awaited unclassified Nuclear Posture Review. It headlines a “Comprehensive, balanced approach to defending vital national security interests and reducing nuclear dangers.” It also declares that “deterrence alone will not reduce nuclear dangers.”
“Deterrence” against others has always been the publicly sold rationale for the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile. First, there is the inconvenient fact that the U.S. was the first and only to use nuclear weapons in war. But secondly, the United States and the USSR (now Russia) never possessed their huge stockpiles for the sole purpose of deterrence anyway. Instead, their nuclear weapons policies have always been a hybrid of deterrence and nuclear war fighting, which threatens global annihilation to this very day.
FULL PRESS RELEASE [PDF]
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New & Updated
Plaintiffs Demand Release of Critical Documents and Extension of Public Comment Period on Expanded Plutonium Bomb Core Production
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, July 6, 2026
Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, 505.989.7342, c. 505.470.3154 | Email
Scott Yundt, Tri-Valley CAREs, 925.443.7148 | Email
Georgetown, SC — Today the South Carolina Environmental Law Project (SCELP) notified the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), that it must publicly release three critical documents. At issue is the fact that NNSA is withholding important information from American taxpayers during a public comment period for a Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS).[1] The public comment period ends this July 16 (ironically the 81st anniversary of the Trinity Test of the first plutonium pit).
Plutonium “pits” are the radioactive fissile cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. None of NNSA’s future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons that could prompt the U.S. to return to testing and accelerate the new arms race.
SCELP, representing the nonprofit organizations Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley CAREs and Nuclear Watch New Mexico, sued NNSA to force it to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. This resulted in a federal judge finding NNSA violated NEPA and the agency ultimately agreeing to complete a Pit Production PEIS. Now it appears that NNSA is cherry-picking information to support its aggressive agenda of expanded plutonium pit production and suppressing negative information that could work against it.
The three documents that SCELP is demanding are:
- A new plutonium pit life study by independent scientists known as the JASONs. NNSA claims that potential aging effects drive the need for the immediate production of new pits, thereby ruling out the alternative of reusing some 15,000 existing pits. In contrast, a 2006 JASON pit life study concluded that most pit types have reliable lives of more than 100 years and those that don’t have relatively easy fixes[2] (the average pit age is now ~43). We believe that NNSA has been withholding an unclassified summary of the new JASON pit life study since the end of 2025. NNSA has not released it despite requests by Members of Congress and public Freedom of Information Act requests.
- A Department of Energy “Special Study” on NNSA leadership and management of its troubled plutonium pit production program, scheduled for completion in December 2025.[3] That Study is expected to be critical of the new pit production plant at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina, which will be the most expensive building in US history ($30 billion-plus). DOE has not released this Special Study despite requests by Members of Congress and public Freedom of Information Act requests.
- A new “Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis” (PSHA) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that is nearly a decade overdue.[4] A 2007 LANL seismic analysis prompted badly needed seismic upgrades to the Lab’s plutonium pit production facility. NNSA’s April 2026 draft Pit Production PEIS stated that the new PSHA would be completed in early 2026,[5] yet it is still not available for public comment.
Lawmakers aim to force University of Michigan to follow local zoning rules
The planned computer data center campus is a joint project between the University of Michigan and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory on the north side of Textile Road across from the Ford Rawsonville Plant in Ypsilanti Township.
ANN ARBOR, MI – Three Michigan lawmakers introduced legislation that would curb the University of Michigan’s authority to buy land and expand its footprint across the state.
State Reps. Jimmie Wilson Jr., D-Ypsilanti, Jason Morgan, D-Ann Arbor, and Morgan Foreman, D-Ann Arbor, drafted two bills to go in front of the Michigan Legislature.
The new legislation would require any property UM acquires after Jan. 1, 2027 to remain subject to local zoning rules.
Testing the waters: Feds stop paying to sample LANL runoff
Buckman Direct Diversion picks up the cost for testing the Rio Grande
The federal government has also deferred its remediation of a dump site called Material Disposal Area C, citing its proximity to “active facility operations.” The dump resides across the street from the plutonium handling facility, where work is taking place round the clock.
That facility — officially known as PF-4 — is the linchpin in the nation’s modernization of its nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to cost about $1.7 trillion over the next three decades, or about two Manhattan Projects per year. Los Alamos’ budget for 2026 is expected to be around $5.2 billion, much of it for weapons production. Its clean-up budget, meanwhile, is around $281 million.
“There’s no reason in hell we should’ve lost that $96,000,” said Anna Hansen, a former county commissioner and Buckman board chair. “It’s a drop in the bucket.”
With every spring snowmelt or heavy summer monsoon comes the chance that radioactive particles and toxic chemicals could run down the lobed canyons that are etched into the sides of the Pajarito Plateau and outside the boundaries of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Evidence of Cold War experiments have been detected at high levels in these stormwaters, including traces of high explosives, metals and other radioactive particles, which dispersed across multiple watersheds when scientists tested weapons components in the open air decades ago or were buried in unlined waste pits.
Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”
A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.
Norman Solomon| June 9, 2026 thenation.com
A few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”
The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”
When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Early in his professional life, Ellsberg had become a “national security” insider, with expertise in the command and control of nuclear weapons along with strategic planning. Access to official calculations made him aware of scenarios for initiating Armageddon. Some classified plans for starting a nuclear war, with a first strike on the Soviet Union and China, were beyond shocking.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated in 1961 that the effects of our carrying out those plans, the annual operational plan for which the weapons existed and were on alert, they estimated it would kill 600 million people. A hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg says in An Ordinary Insanity. “When I saw that estimate in the White House, I thought that was the most evil planning that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”
As scientific research advanced and climate modeling discovered nuclear winter, estimates like 600 million became outdated.
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS Congressional Briefing: Choices Before Congress on Plutonium Pit Production for New Nuclear Warheads
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Public Hearing in Santa Fe, NM, Thurs May 14, 2026
Plan to increase nuclear pit production at Los Alamos lab gets heavy pushback at Santa Fe forum
“The environmental impact statement was produced as a result of a January 2025 settlement between the National Nuclear Security Administration and various groups, including Nuclear Watch New Mexico. The lawsuit claimed the federal government failed to appropriately consider the impacts of production of plutonium pits at LANL and the Savannah River Site, under national environmental law.”
| May 14, 2026 santafenewmexican.com
A draft environmental impact statement on the production of the trigger devices for nuclear weapons faced overwhelming public pushback Thursday evening at a Santa Fe hearing.
The roughly 130 people who attended the meeting at the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute in person and 100 more who joined online were almost all against plutonium pit production in their backyard — and many criticized the nuclear industry.
Sean Arent, a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, brought up that state’s long cleanup process at the Hanford Site, a defunct and decommissioned plutonium production site.
The hearing was one of five scheduled around the country this month and follows meetings in South Carolina, Missouri and California. The final hearing is planned for May 20 in Washington, D.C., and does not have a virtual option.
Nuclear Weapons Issues & The Accelerating Arms Race: May 2026
Nuclear Weapons:
https://www.twz.com/nuclear/new-nuclear-bunker-buster-bomb-plans-revealed
New Nuclear Bunker Buster Bomb Plans Revealed The Department of Energy is seeking millions of dollars for work in part on a new bunker-busting nuclear weapon called the Nuclear Deterrent System-Air-delivered (NDS-A) in its latest budget request… Beyond that it will be air-delivered, there are also no details currently available publicly about the weapon’s design, including whether it will be based on something already in the stockpile.
See the graph below found on the Kansas City National Security Complex website. There are three future new-design nuclear weapons on the right above the W93 (“F” is all 3 cases means “Future”). These new-design nuclear weapons presumably will have new-design pits like the W93.
The Plutonium Circus Comes to Town
AC: How did the idea of doing a documentary about Pantex come
up?
GR: Just growing up around it, I’d always wanted to do something about Pantex, really. It’s a very eerie feeling to grow up with that sort of thing there. Of course, I didn’t consider it eerie growing up, I considered it sort of… comforting. It was sort of an easy way out, if and when the world ended. I grew up always thinking the world was about to end, and I think that’s a pretty common belief for everyone in Amarillo. And that’s a very good excuse, a
very powerful reasoning to not keep up with what’s going on out at Pantex anyway. I think most of the United States, and Amarillo, as far as the religious thinking, feels that the world is going to be over any time anyway,
so why worry? They’ve watched Nostradamus a few too many times, I think.
| October 20, 1995 austinchronicle.com
George Whittenburg Ratliff is not the kind of guy you would peg for one of the most talented filmmakers around these days. Tall and lanky, with an unruly shock of dirty-blond hair and large piercing blue eyes that seem to take in everything and everyone at once without alarming you, he’s soft-spoken and speaks almost shyly of the documentary film he’s made – The Plutonium Circus.
Set in the Texas Panhandle town of Amarillo, The Plutonium Circus focuses on the gargantuan Department of Energy Pantex plant, which looms over the sprawling North Texas Plains like some evil, radioactive monarch. Since the 1950s, Pantex has been the final assembly point for every nuclear weapon made in America. This is the place where the gadgets, gizmos, priming devices, and
plutonium cores arrived, by unmarked train, to be finessed into the country’s arsenal of democracy. Sort of like a General Motors plant headed not by Lee Iacocca, but by the military industrial devil himself.
Amarillo, a hometown I share in common with Ratliff, has always been behind the plant 110 percent. The Pantex plant (or death factory, according to a few observers) is now engaged in the business of dismantling our nuclear stockpile and storing the deadly plutonium on-site, despite the fact that the plant rests directly above the precious Ogallala Aquifer, which is the largest fresh water
aquifer in North America and the primary source of drinking water for the people of Amarillo and surrounding towns such as White Deer and Claude (site of the film Hud), as well as eight neighboring states, and the land and animals that supply 70 percent of the wheat, corn, and beef grown in the United States. The people of Amarillo have wholeheartedly embraced the plant with open
arms because employment and the local economy are the issues here (the plant is said to be responsible for a total of 11,000 jobs, a figure that includes all the local businesses that service the plant), not lymphoma statistics and the perpetual possibility of disaster. It’s a mindset that’s hard to swallow, but then, so are most Panhandle politics.
Literally a world unto itself, Amarillo exists on the periphery of anarchy…
COMMENT TRAINING for the Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Kansas City-Focused Training May 6, 2026
Learn more about the government’s plan to mass produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons, Kansas City’s role in this program, and how to give a well-informed and impactful testimony at the public comment hearing in Kansas City on May 7 or submit written comments until July 16.
Presented by PeaceWorks KC, Physicians for Social Responsibility KC, Veterans for Peace KC and special guests from Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
See more info at https://PitPEIS.com
https://peaceworkskc.org/plutonium/
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Public Hearing North Augusta, South Carolina, Tues May 5, 2026
Kansas City: Inside America’s Nuclear Weapons Capital, As It Builds the Newest American Bomb
“For seventy-seven years, Kansas City has built most of nearly every American nuclear weapon. On May 7, the federal government will hold a hearing to ask if Kansas City consents to the next chapter.”
By | May 6, 2026 kansascitydefender.com
His hands did the work. Maurice Copeland was a tool and die supervisor at the Kansas City Plant for the last twelve of his thirty-two years there, and for most of that time he passed chemicals he did not know were poison across a workbench to men he supervised.
He was a Black Vietnam veteran when Bendix Corporation hired him in 1968, one among thousands of Black returning soldiers Bendix brought in as the Cold War pushed weapons assembly to wartime pace.
The plant at 1500 East Bannister Road sat at the edge of Troost Avenue, the apartheid line that has divided this city since before he was born. What Copeland and the men he supervised handled with their bare hands, included benzene, beryllium, trichloroethylene, polychlorinated biphenyls, asbestos, mercury, lead, and depleted uranium. Group 1 carcinogens.
New Nuclear Bunker Buster Bomb Plans Revealed (Updated)
“There has been talk for decades about a true successor to the specialized deep bunker-busting B61-11 nuclear bomb.”
By Joseph Trevithick| May 1, 2026 twz.com
The Department of Energy is seeking millions of dollars for work in part on a new bunker-busting nuclear weapon called the Nuclear Deterrent System-Air-delivered (NDS-A) in its latest budget request. At present, there is only one specialized air-delivered deep-penetrating weapon known to be in America’s nuclear stockpile, the B61-11 gravity bomb, and there have been discussions about a potential successor for decades now.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the Department of Energy, which was released last month, includes a new line under Weapons Activities for Future Programs. The Department is asking for $99.794 million in the next fiscal cycle to support those efforts.
ACTION ALERTS
Comment on the Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) by July 16
UPCOMING COMMENT TRAININGS:
| Wednesday, July 8, 2026 | 6:00-7:00 p.m. PT / 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET |
https://secure.ucs.org/a/2026-7-8-peis-training |
Learn more/See sample comments:
A World Without Nuclear Weapons: Sunday, July 19, 2026: Join Us for an Interfaith Remembrance of the Trinity Test with Archbishop John Wester, Archdiocese of Santa Fe
Doors open at 2 p.m.
Reservations Helpful – Visit bit.ly/2026-Trinity
Public Scoping Meeting for LANL Consent Order Audit: Tuesday, July 14th, 2026, at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe 5:30 – 7:30pm
5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. MT
828 Paseo de Peralta
Santa Fe, NM 87501
Meeting ID: 299 504 680 502 772
Passcode: wr7aD2vo
Public Hearings: Submit Comments on the Draft LANL SWEIS
- Review and submit comments on the Draft LANL SWEIS through March 11, 2025.
- Comments may be submitted via one of the following means:
- By email to: LANLSWEIS@nnsa.doe.gov; By mail to Mr. Stephen Hoffman, LANL SWEIS Document Manager, DOE/NNSA, 3747 W. Jemez Road, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87544; Verbally at one of the public hearings; In written form at one of the public hearings
-
Public hearings are scheduled for:
- February 11, 2025, at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Sweeney Room, 1-4 p.m. and 5-8 p.m. There will be a virtual option for these two meeting. Virtual hearing access instructions (g., website link or phone number) will be announced at least 15 days before the hearing and will be published in local newspapers, noticed to the GovDelivery mailing list, and available on the following websites: https://www.energy.gov/nnsa/nnsa-nepa-reading-roomand https://www.energy.gov/nepa/public-comment-opportunities.
- February 12, 2025, in Española at Mision y Convento, 5-8 p.m. This meeting is in-person only.
- February 13, 2025, in Los Alamos at Fuller Lodge, Pajarito Room, 5-8 p.m. In-person only.
- Comments may be submitted via one of the following means:
Briefing on Plutonium Migration at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
Who: Nuclear Watch New Mexico and chemist Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University
What: Nuclear Watch has mapped plutonium migration based on sampling data from Intellus, the Lab’s environmental sampling database. Our map graphically demonstrates widespread contamination down the Rio Grande to Cochiti Lake and vertically to deep groundwater. We believe it shows the need for comprehensive cleanup at LANL instead of proposed “cap and cover” that will leave toxic and radioactive wastes permanently buried in unlined pits and trenches.
When: 11:00 am MT Thursday April 25, 2024
Where: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/95570087953?pwd=R1hNUEIyb1BLaktDQzZQaWNEdlpoQT09
Meeting ID: 922 1214 9822 Passcode: 975887
This virtual briefing is for media and the public. Nuclear Watch and Dr. Ketterer will briefly present followed by Q&A. Media and reporters will be given preference for questions. Please feel free to forward this notice to others.
Our plutonium contamination map and background materials will be available at www.nukewatch.org by 10:00 am MT Thursday April 25.
First Annual Plutonium Trail Caravan
On Saturday, April 6, you will be able to join the First Annual Plutonium Trail Caravan! It will start at Pojoaque and end at Lamy. It will also stop in Eldorado and you are welcome to join the caravan on its way to the final stop in Lamy. There will be several stops along the way, with more details coming soon. Please save the date for 30 minutes on the afternoon of April 6. There will be fun satiric songs, banners, and plenty of people to ask questions about risks to neighborhoods on the route.
WIPP Information Exchange Dec. 13 – In Person and Virtual
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Carlsbad Field Office (CBFO) and Salado Isolation Mining Contractors (SIMCO) (Permittees) will conduct a virtual WIPP Information Exchange pursuant to Permit Part 4, Section 4.2.1.5, Legacy TRU Waste Disposal Plan. This exchange will discuss information regarding the Legacy TRU Waste Disposal Plan.
Questions and comments outside the scope of the Legacy TRU Waste Disposal Plan should be directed to the WIPP Community Forum.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023, 2 p.m. – 4 p.m.
Skeen-Whitlock Building
4021 National Parks Hwy
Carlsbad, NM 88220
REGISTRATION:
In-Person Registration:
WIPP Information Exchange In-Person Registration: https://form.jotform.com/222836798629172
Virtual Registration:
WIPP Information Exchange Virtual Registration:
QUESTIONS:
For questions regarding this information exchange please contact the WIPP Information Center at infocntr@wipp.ws or by calling 1-800-336-9477.
– ICAN Executive Director Beatrice Fihn on the release of the letter January 11, 2022
Interfaith Panel Discussion on Nuclear Disarmament - August 9
HELP US SUPPORT NEW MEXICO’S GOVERNOR IN ACTING TO STOP WIPP EXPANSION!
STOP “FOREVER WIPP!”
The Department of Energy is seeking to modify the nuclear waste permit for southeastern New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Dragging out WIPP’s operations decades past the original 20-year agreement violates the social contract made with New Mexicans. WIPP is being equipped to take the waste that will be generated from production of plutonium pits for nuclear warheads, and it was never supposed to do that. An expansion of WIPP will impact the entire country, not just residents of southeastern New Mexico.
View the videos below for more information, and, if you live in an area that may be endangered by these nuclear waste transportation risks, please consider making your own “This is My Neighborhood” video!
Background Information – Problems with Nuclear Waste
Mixed Waste Landfill Facts
New Nuclear Media
Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”
A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.
Norman Solomon| June 9, 2026 thenation.com
A few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”
The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”
When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Early in his professional life, Ellsberg had become a “national security” insider, with expertise in the command and control of nuclear weapons along with strategic planning. Access to official calculations made him aware of scenarios for initiating Armageddon. Some classified plans for starting a nuclear war, with a first strike on the Soviet Union and China, were beyond shocking.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated in 1961 that the effects of our carrying out those plans, the annual operational plan for which the weapons existed and were on alert, they estimated it would kill 600 million people. A hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg says in An Ordinary Insanity. “When I saw that estimate in the White House, I thought that was the most evil planning that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”
As scientific research advanced and climate modeling discovered nuclear winter, estimates like 600 million became outdated.
