Plutonium Sampling at Los Alamos National Laboratory
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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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U.S. sees a new era of nuclear risk dawning in China-Russia cooperation – Japan Times
“To avert miscalculations, nuclear-weapons states must engage on existing and potential threats, from Iran’s atomic ambitions to the use of artificial intelligence for decision-making during crises,” — Pranay Vaddi, the National Security Council’s senior director for arms control.
JAPAN TIMES | May 6, 2023 japantimes.co.jp
An undated image released in July 2021 shows what researchers say are missile silos under construction in the Chinese desert. | 2021 PLANET LABS INC. / VIA AFP-JIJI
The deepening cooperation between China and Russia threatens to overturn decades of international stability in nuclear arms control, according to a top adviser to U.S. President Joe Biden.
“We’re entering a different period,” Vaddi said after talks at the International Atomic Energy Agency. “It requires a little bit of experimentation.”
Assessments that China is expanding its nuclear arsenal, along with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its disavowal of arms-control agreements, are adding to concern about an era fraught with new dangers. Unlike the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union maintained atomic parity and agreed to limit certain types of arms, more nations are developing the technologies and materials needed for weapons of mass destruction.
Never Give Artificial Intelligence the Nuclear Codes – The Atlantic
“AI offers an illusion of cool exactitude, especially in comparison to error-prone, potentially unstable humans. But today’s most advanced AIs are black boxes; we don’t entirely understand how they work. In complex, high-stakes adversarial situations, AI’s notions about what constitutes winning may be impenetrable, if not altogether alien. At the deepest, most important level, an AI may not understand what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev meant when they said, ‘A nuclear war cannot be won.’”
By Ross Andersen – THE ATLANTIC | May 4, 2023 rsn.org
The temptation to automate command and control will be great. The danger is greater.
No technology since the atomic bomb has inspired the apocalyptic imagination like artificial intelligence. Ever since ChatGPT began exhibiting glints of logical reasoning in November, the internet has been awash in doomsday scenarios. Many are self-consciously fanciful—they’re meant to jar us into envisioning how badly things could go wrong if an emerging intelligence comes to understand the world, and its own goals, even a little differently from how its human creators do. One scenario, however, requires less imagination, because the first steps toward it are arguably already being taken—the gradual integration of AI into the most destructive technologies we possess today.
Nuclear Waste Storage in New Mexico Angers State, Cheers Locals – Bloomberg News
America’s Nuclear Waste Capital Wants More of It, Against State Wishes
Burying the country’s nuclear weapons waste brought an economic lifeline to Carlsbad, New Mexico. State leaders worry it’s become a dumping ground.
By Daniel Moore – BLOOMBERG NEWS | May 2, 2023 bloomberg.com
Photographer: Daniel Moore/Bloomberg
A half-mile underground beneath a windswept field in the southeast corner of New Mexico, hundreds of workers haul drums of radioactive waste into a salt mine that will entomb them for at least 10,000 years.
Up on the surface, federal officials overseeing the Energy Department’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) are working harder than ever to smooth over tensions with state officials and skeptics in the state capital so the facility can meet its mission: cleaning up the country’s nuclear weapons production sites.
Dealing with a debacle: A better plan for US plutonium pit production
“There is…another concern about the NNSA’s plans: The designs of new warheads in which new plutonium pits would be used may depart from designs that have been previously tested. This could result in demands to resume explosive testing, which would undermine the moratorium on nuclear testing that has been observed by all nuclear-weapon states (other than North Korea) since 1998.”
By Curtis T. Asplund, Frank von Hippel, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | April 27, 2023 thebulletin.org
For two decades, the Pentagon and Congress have been increasingly concerned that the United States does not have a reliable capability to produce plutonium “pits,” the cores of US thermonuclear warheads. In 2018, the agency responsible for the production and maintenance of US nuclear warheads, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), responded with a plan to build, on a crash basis, pit production lines in New Mexico and South Carolina at the same time, with a combined production capacity of 80 pits per year.
Video Indicates that Lida Air Base Might Get Russian “Nuclear Sharing” Mission in Belarus
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the only Belarusian Air Force wing equipped with Su-25 aircraft––is the most likely candidate for Belarus’ new “nuclear sharing” mission announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
– FEDERATION OF AMERICAN SCIENTISTS | April 19, 2023 fas.org
The Belarusian MoD’s military channel features a Belarusian pilot standing in front of a Su-25 aircraft at an unidentified air base.
The video shows the pilot standing in a revetment with a Su-25 in the background. The interview takes place at a grassy location with trees in the distance along with several distinct features, including two drop tanks flanking the Su-25 on either side, and objects behind the aircraft. The revetment itself is also somewhat distinct, as the berm wraps around three sides of the hardstand and the size and orientation of the six rectangular tiles across the opening are clearly visible in the video.
Although the pilot is announcing the completion of their training that occured in Russia, the footage was filmed and released by the Belarusian Ministry of Defense. This factor seemed to indicate that the filming location took place in Belarus instead of at the training center in Russia. Additionally, while Su-25s have operated out of other air bases in Belarus throughout the war, including Luninets Air Base, the only Su-25 wing in the Belarusian Air Force is based at Lida.
NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby Offers Frank Answers On LANL Plutonium Pit Production And More During Hybrid Town Hall Meeting In Santa Fe
“We are working around the U.S and we are working with our international partners to develop verification technologies some of which are associated with imagining a world without nuclear and some that are associated with a test treaty with Russia and/or China,” Hruby said, saying to Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester that while she knows his vision is clear, she wanted to make these comments about “where NNSA is today so that it’s understood and not misunderstood”.
Nuke Watch New Mexico Executive Director Jay Coghlan told Hruby it strikes him that NNSA has been avoiding an update pit life study. He mentioned a 2005 Jason Study that concluded that plutonium pits last at least 100 years.
BY MAIRE O’NEILL, LOS ALAMOS REPORTER | April 11, 2023 losalamosreporter.com
DOE-EM Senior Advisor William ‘Ike’ White, DOE NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby, center, and Santa Fe County Commission Chair Anna Hansen following Tuesday’s town hall meeting in Santa Fe. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
It was described by some as a somewhat momentous occasion last Tuesday evening (April 4) when Jill Hruby and William “Ike” White joined Santa Fe County Commission Chair Anna Hansen on the dais for a hybrid town hall meeting at the Santa Fe Convention Center, which was attended by some 250 people in person and another 200 online.
Crowd turns out for town hall on plutonium pits, nuclear waste storage
“…Residents of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Los Alamos and beyond asked questions and made comments about nuclear production and disposal in New Mexico. The crowd addressed a pair of officials from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management. There was hardly an empty seat in the auditorium; 150 others attended the town hall virtually. Speakers at the town hall generally focused on three main issues: increased production of plutonium pits, ramped up disposal of transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, and nuclear proliferation.”
By Alaina Mencinger / Journal Staff Writer, ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL | April 5, 2023 abqjournal.com
Archbishop John Wester, left, and Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, listen as different people speak against plans to start pit production at LANL. (Eddie Moore/Albuquerque Journal)
