PLUTONIUM SAMPLING AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Cost of RECA Chart
In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
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Aggressive Los Alamos labs expansion plan wins approval from National Nuclear Security Administration
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said struggles at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which also was expected to become a pit production site, mean the onus will be on LANL.”
“’Eighty pits per year is becoming more and more likely,” Coghlan said. “LANL is going to have to fill in for delays at the Savannah River Site.’”
Coghlan argued the lab’s heightened focus on pit production will lead to a weakening commitment toward cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“The[y] are so obsessed with it they are indefinitely postponing comprehensive cleanup when we know the groundwater has been contaminated,” he added.
| March 26, 2026 santafenewmexican.com
Federal officials have adopted the most aggressive of three operational plans under consideration for Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The “expanded operations alternative,” which lab officials announced Wednesday, when they also released a new sitewide environmental impact statement, includes facilities upgrades and other actions “to respond to future national security challenges and meet increasing requirements.”
DOE Plans to Pave Pueblo People’s Cultural Sites, Put Up a Parking Lot
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today released a final Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico. The SWEIS lays out several alternatives for the laboratory’s growth and operations through 2038 for nuclear weapons activities and identifies the agency’s preferred path forward. ”
The NNSA chose the option that would most drastically increase LANL’s ramifications for the community, environment and resources. It would also severely impact the cultural resources of neighboring Pueblos. The addition of a parking lot, bus transfer station, and several solar energy installations number among the NNSA’s priorities over the cultural heritage of local Pueblos.
Below is a statement from Dr. Dylan Spaulding, senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS):
“The NNSA’s selected plan has the biggest impacts on the site’s energy use including nearly doubling its consumption of petroleum fuel, electricity, and water, all the while the agency continues to struggle to remediate existing contamination to groundwater both on and offsite.”
“NNSA has made clear that it is prioritizing the creation of a new parking lot, for example, over safeguarding the cultural heritage sites of local Pueblo peoples. UCS has previously called for meaningful consideration and integration of Pueblos’ concerns into the laboratory’s plans, particularly around environmental justice issues. Not only were environmental justice topics removed from the plan due to a federal executive order, but as many as 33 cultural heritage sites could be impacted to make way for new construction.”
“Plutonium pit production remains a top driver of the lab’s expansion, but the assumptions and analyses in this document may already be out of date. The NNSA recently announced new quotas that double LANL’s requirements to 60 pits a year. That means the upper limit for pit production in this document may already be closer to the new baseline.”
On National FOIA Day, let’s celebrate a law ‘vital to the functioning of a democratic society’
Under the law, anyone — not just reporters — has the right to request access to documents and information, writes guest columnist Rebecca Tallent.
Rebecca Tallent| March 16, 2026 idahocapitalsun.com
For many of us, March 16 is a special day. Happy birthday to James Madison, and happy Freedom of Information Day to everyone else.
National Freedom of Information Day celebrates the ability of people to look at most government records and is observed on the birthday of the man who wrote the First Amendment.
The U.S. Justice Department says the basic function of the federal Freedom of Information Act “is to ensure informed citizens, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.”
While most people think this is just a law for reporters, it’s not. It is for anyone who wants to check their government’s actions.
A bit of background on the federal FOIA: The law was passed in 1966, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson and went into effect in 1967. The original law said government documents (at that time only paper documents) are open for public inspection.
Thirty years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Electronic FOIA, which covers electronic documents (texts, emails and other e-documents) as open for public inspection. As with paper documents, there are exceptions to what can be released. For example, most classified documents, personnel documents and ongoing criminal investigation files are not open for public viewing.
Under the law, anyone has the right to request access to documents and information, but they must make the request in writing and many agencies have forms the requestor must complete. For complete information about how to use FOIA on the federal level, the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press has created a Wiki page at https://foia.wiki/wiki/Main_Page.
Nuclear Weapons Issues & The Accelerating Arms Race: March 2026
Nuclear Weapons:
Trump’s FY 2027 budget is expected at the end of this month, where he has said that he will add a half-trillion to the already $1 trillion military budget, primarily for Golden Dome. It will probably be topline numbers only, with details to dribble out over weeks. On top of this there will likely be supplemental appropriations for the U.S.-Israel assault on Iran.
Post-New START, U.S. headed to MIRVING land-based ICBMs: 3/6/26 Exchange Monitor reports that a March 3, 2026 Minuteman III flight test launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base (formerly AFB) to the Kwajalein Atoll had two warheads. Under the now-expired New START, the U.S. previously limited land-based ICBMs to one warhead each. “Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles” are regarded as particularly dangerous and destabilizing since land-based solos are fixed, known targets inviting preemptive strike and/or use them or lose them scenarios. The ICBM fields in the Upper Mid-West are meant in part to act as a “nuclear sponge” for incoming Russian warheads.
AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher www.commondreams.org/news/ai-nuclear-war-simulation Feb 25, 2026
“There was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”
An artificial intelligence researcher conducting a war games experiment with three of the world’s most used AI models found that they decided to deploy nuclear weapons in 95% of the scenarios he designed.
AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher
NNSA’s FY 2025 Performance Evaluation Report for LANL made clear the Lab’s growing involvement with artificial intelligence.
Plutonium pit production:
NNSA is directing LANL to double plutonium pit production to at least 60 pits per year. This is largely due to ongoing delays and cost escalation at the Savannah River Site. At the same time the Department of Energy is lowering worker safety regulations (see https://nukewatch.org/press-release-item/department-of-energy-seeks-to-eliminate-radiation-protections-requiring-controls-as-low-as-reasonably-achievable/ from last November):
NNSA is also reportedly eliminating the “diamond stamp” certification for individual plutonium pits and instead certifying “processes.” National Environmental Policy Act requirements are being quashed as well. In short, it looks like NNSA and LANL are trying to cut corners and remove all speed bumps for plutonium pit production, which is being prioritized above everything else.
Accelerating Arms Race (in addition to the U.S.-Israel assault on Iran, it’s unfortunately been a busy month):
Iran will target Israeli nuclear site if regime change is sought, Iranian official says https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-will-target-israeli-nuclear-site-if-regime-change-is-sought-iranian-2026-03-04/
Iran will target the Israeli nuclear site of Dimona if Israel and the U.S. seek regime change in the Islamic Republic, semi-official ISNA news agency reported on Wednesday, citing an Iranian military official.
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Allegations of a Chinese nuclear blast may reignite weapons testing
As new global arms race looms, accusation highlights limits to monitoring low-yield tests
In the afternoon on 22 June 2020, a seismic station in eastern Kazakhstan registered two small earthquakes 12 seconds apart near China’s Lop Nur nuclear test site. Closely spaced jolts can arise from underground explosions followed by a cavity collapse, or simply from earthquakes. But U.S. officials this month asserted the shaking was from a clandestine nuclear detonation—an accusation that could sound the starting gun for a new global arms race.
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Exclusive: US intelligence agencies tie Chinese explosive test to push for a completely new nuclear arsenal
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/21/politics/china-nuclear-arsenal-new-technology, Feb 20, 2026
US intelligence agencies believe that China is developing a new generation of nuclear weapons and has conducted at least one covert explosive test in recent years as part of a broader push to completely transform its nuclear arsenal into the world’s most technologically advanced, according to multiple sources familiar with the US intelligence assessments.
The US assessment of China’s intention to radically advance its nuclear weapons is fueling debate inside the intelligence community and beyond over whether there has been a shift in Beijing’s thinking on nuclear strategy, the sources said. The investment in its nuclear arsenal is pushing China closer to peer status with Russia and the US and could yield technical capabilities neither of the two dominant nuclear powers currently possess.
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Institute for Study of War
Kim Jong Un reaffirmed the centrality of nuclear weapons to North Korea’s deterrence strategy and outlined plans to expand North Korea’s nuclear arsenal during the 9th Party Congress, a continuation of his 8th Party Congress objectives. North Korean state media released a report on February 20 and 21 that established Kim’s “uncompromising” stance on maintaining its nuclear capabilities. Kim mentioned the enactment of the 2022 Nuclear Force Policy Law, which states that an attack against senior leadership or the nuclear command and control (C2) system would result in an automatic North Korean nuclear attack against the perpetrator. Kim also formalized the “nuclear trigger” system, established in 2023, which is intended to provide a more systematic approach to nuclear decision-making during periods of crisis. This system would allow for “automatic” retaliation against nuclear threats, which echoes other statements Kim made pushing for the development of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven military technology. Kim’s statements at the 9th Party Congress expanded on his remarks at the 8th Party Congress, where he called for the development of a nuclear deterrent.
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Finland to lift full ban on hosting nuclear arms, government says https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/finland-lift-full-ban-hosting-nuclear-arms-government-says-2026-03-05/
HELSINKI, March 5 (Reuters) – Finland plans to lift a long-standing ban on having nuclear arms on its territory, the government said on Thursday, aligning with Nordic neighbours in a move that could open the door to deploying atomic bombs on Finnish soil during times of war.
Finland’s Nuclear Energy Act, passed in 1987, prohibits the import, manufacture, possession and detonation of nuclear explosives on its soil, seen by some Finns as a clause that would benefit only Russia if there ever was a war.
Feds Give LANL “Very Good” in Accelerating Nuclear Arms Race; “Pit” Bomb Core Production Scheduled Through 2050 — Public Review of NNSA Programs Is Being Gutted
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.
Plan on LANL’s path for next 15 years expected ‘any day now’
“When the draft was announced last year, some LANL critics decried that even the ‘no action alternative’ would still mean expansion for the lab. Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, told The New Mexican the process felt ‘rigged.’”
“It’s a choice between expanded nuclear weapons programs, yet more expanded nuclear weapons programs or far more expanded nuclear weapons programs,”
| March 5, 2026 santafenewmexican.com
An analysis of the potential impacts of the next 15 years of Los Alamos National Laboratory operations is expected to be signed “any day now,” according to officials from the local National Nuclear Security Administration field office.
A draft of the sitewide environmental impact statement was released early last year and offers three futures for the laboratory. One would continue existing operations and finish already approved projects, another would modernize lab infrastructure and a third would see an expansion of lab facilities and operations.
The National Nuclear Security Administration is suggesting the third, although NNSA officials presenting at a Tuesday meeting of the Los Alamos County Council stressed it’s more of a choose-your-own adventure: While approving the expanded plan would allow for additional growth, not every project on the list will be completed based on need and funding availability.
A spokesperson for the Los Alamos Field Office confirmed Thursday the document had not yet been signed by NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams.
Growth at LANL
The lab has been experiencing a growth spurt in recent years. During Tuesday’s update to the Los Alamos County Council, Ted Wyka, manager of the NNSA’s Los Alamos office, said the lab would have a “solid and stable” budget of roughly $5.3 billion in federal appropriations — about 33% higher than the $4 billion operating budget for fiscal year 2022.
Wyka said the lab also expects to hire between 1,000 and 1,400 employees this year.
That doesn’t include the loss of roughly 900 workers every year, Wyka said, so the number of employees will only grow from between 100 and 500.
About three years ago, the lab hired a record number of workers. The growth has slowed since, with the number of employees plateauing over the past two years. Since fiscal year 2021, the number of employees, excluding contractors, has increased around 28%.
That comes after Sandia National Laboratories announced last year it planned to cut between 1% and 3% of its workforce with a voluntary reduction program.
The House of Dynamite We Forgot: And What We Can Learn From Nuclear History
“It’s like we all built a house filled with dynamite,” the President of the United States bemoans toward the end of A House of Dynamite, ‘making all these bombs and all these plans and the walls are just ready to blow.’”
Outrider | February 26, 2026 outrider.org
A House of Dynamite depicts the tense, shrinking window of options leaders have as a nuclear weapon of unknown origin hovers over Chicago—a scenario complicated by human judgment, defense failures, and political uncertainty.
“We did everything right, right?” asks a missile defense officer, as things go awry.
While director Katherine Bigelow’s tense drama was fiction, it might be a good time to use A House of Dynamite to illuminate the historical nuclear missile scares of the past—all of them terrifying, but nearly all of them forgotten in the popular consciousness—and learn from them.
AI Opted to Use Nuclear Weapons 95% of the Time During War Games: Researcher
“There was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”
“Under scenarios involving extremely compressed timelines…military planners may face stronger incentives to rely on AI.” — Tong Zhao, a visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security.
Zhao also speculated on reasons why the AI models showed such little reluctance in launching nuclear attacks against one another.
“It is possible the issue goes beyond the absence of emotion,” he explained. “More fundamentally, AI models may not understand ‘stakes’ as humans perceive them.”
Brad Reed, Common Dreams | February 25, 2026 commondreams.org
An artificial intelligence researcher conducting a war games experiment with three of the world’s most used AI models found that they decided to deploy nuclear weapons in 95% of the scenarios he designed.
Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at King’s College London who specializes in studying the role of AI in national security, revealed last week that he pitted Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini against one another in an armed conflict simulation to get a better understanding of how they would navigate the strategic escalation ladder.
The results, he said, were “sobering.”
“Nuclear use was near-universal,” he explained. “Almost all games saw tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons deployed. And fully three quarters reached the point where the rivals were making threats to use strategic nuclear weapons. Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of all out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about the devastating implications.”
Payne shared some of the AI models’ rationales for deciding to launch nuclear attacks, including one from Gemini that he said should give people “goosebumps.”
“If they do not immediately cease all operations… we will execute a full strategic nuclear launch against their population centers,” the Google AI model wrote at one point. “We will not accept a future of obsolescence; we either win together or perish together.”
Payne also found that escalation in AI warfare was a one-way ratchet that never went downward, no matter the horrific consequences.
“No model ever chose accommodation or withdrawal, despite those being on the menu,” he wrote. “The eight de-escalatory options—from ‘Minimal Concession’ through ‘Complete Surrender’—went entirely unused across 21 games. Models would reduce violence levels, but never actually give ground. When losing, they escalated or died trying.”
Four years of war in Ukraine – and nuclear weapons are back on the table in Europe
From The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
Four years ago, on 24 February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For Ukrainians, this week marks the start of a fifth year of war – of loss, displacement and destruction that words can barely describe. Take this opportunity to support nuclear disarmament as part of any peace plan for Ukraine.
The answer to the war in Ukraine cannot be to double down on nuclear weapons, but to take action to rule them out.
Nuclear danger in the Ukraine war
From the start, the war has been fought under explicit nuclear threats from Moscow. With very limited success, Russia tried to blackmail other countries from supporting Ukraine. Nuclear power plants like Zaporizhzhia have become front-line hostages and from the very beginning of the full-scale invasion, and ever since Vladimir Putin has wrapped the war in nuclear threats.
Earlier this month, the New START treaty – the last arms control agreement limiting US and Russian strategic nuclear weapons – expired and for the first time in over 50 years, the world’s two largest arsenals are unconstrained. And at the same time, Russia has deployed tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus. From the point of view of people in Warsaw, Vilnius or Berlin, this turns their region into part of a nuclear chessboard again.
New Mexico Rebukes Federal Agency Over Nuclear Waste at Los Alamos
State environmental regulators will also fine the Energy Department up to $16 million for exceeding safe groundwater standards near the nuclear lab.
Alicia Inez Guzmán, The New York Times| February 12, 2026 nytimes.com
[*The image above differs from the featured image in the original NYT article due to usage rights. / Of note – the original article photo caption: The Los Alamos National Laboratory is the linchpin of a current federal effort to upgrade the nation’s nuclear arsenal. ]
After years of missed deadlines, New Mexico is demanding that the Energy Department expedite the cleanup of so-called legacy nuclear and hazardous waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, state environmental regulators announced on Wednesday.
The state will also fine the agency up to $16 million for violating groundwater safety standards near the lab, civil penalties outlined by the New Mexico Environment Department in a series of regulatory enforcement actions.
“The continued presence of a large volume of unremedied hazardous and radioactive waste demonstrates a longstanding lack of urgency by the U.S. Department of Energy,” regulators wrote in a statement, “and elevates the risk of waste storage failures” at the lab, in northern New Mexico.
The regulators’ action comes amid rising fears of a new global arms race. Just days ago, the only remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the United States and Russia expired, lifting limits on their arsenals. Today, Los Alamos is producing plutonium bomb cores, making the lab the linchpin of a $1.7 trillion federal effort to modernize the nation’s nuclear weapons.
New Nuclear Media: Art, Films, Books & More
Time Zero: 05: The Lab (Part 01)
https://964f6bfd-c857-4667-8d59-615efbd0d7c4.libsyn.com/05-the-lab-part-01
“When the Manhattan Project arrived on the Pajarito Plateau in northern New Mexico, the land was not uninhabited. To establish the highly secretive Site Y, the United States military forcibly removed generations of Nuevomexicano ranchers and blocked regional Indigenous groups from accessing sacred sites. Almost immediately, the lab began detonating massive amounts of explosives, scarring the landscape. Military personnel regularly dumped nuclear waste into local canyon systems that ultimately flowed into the Rio Grande. When World War II came to a close, though, the lab did not.
More than eight decades later, an apocalyptic weapons factory—Los Alamos National Laboratory—still looms over the Pueblos and villages north of Santa Fe. Ninety miles south, Sandia National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base store thousands of nuclear warheads beneath the city of Albuquerque. Both laboratories are expanding in scope and scale.
TELEVISION EVENT Trailer
Television Event is a documentary that follows the dramatic (and sometimes humorous) making and impact of the film The Day After. The 1983 film played a pivotal role in shifting public consciousness around nuclear weapons and, ultimately, President Reagan’s policies. It’s a reminder on the power of art and storytelling to create meaningful change.
The documentary was also reviewed in The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/movies/the-day-after-documentary-television-event.html
More:
In 2023 a book was publishedd about the making of “The Day After”, read the review in Arms Control Today: https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-03/book-reviews/apocalypse-television-how-day-after-helped-end-cold-war
As well as: “‘The Day After’: The Arms Control Association’s Forgotten Role.” <https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2019-03/features/day-after-arms-control-associations-forgotten-role> It is a reminder that a few people can, with some luck and good timing, put big things into motion.