Below is an alert we sent to some of our supporters on the nuclear pork in the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Click on the following committee links to check if your representative is a member of a key committee that decides how much funding nuclear weapons will actually get. If your representative is on either the House Armed Services Committee or the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, please take action and email your representative.

Next year’s budget has just been released and while it has a spending freeze for most domestic programs, there’s plenty of nuclear weapons pork. The nukes budget comes in at roughly $7 billion, getting a ten percent increase.

It’s outrageous, unnecessary, and expensive.

Worst of all, the budget has hundreds of millions in nuclear pork for several new facilities that would enable the U.S. to increase its capacity to create new nuclear weapons in the future. A new plutonium pit facility in New Mexico would allow for a huge increase in the production of plutonium pits – the bomb cores of nuclear weapons. These facilities could cost taxpayers $3 billion each in the long run. Meanwhile, funds to dismantle nuclear weapons we no longer need have been slashed.

The budget has millions for new nuclear weapons facilities we don’t need. Ask your representative to cut nuclear pork today!

The international community is coming together in May to evaluate progress on the cornerstone treaty of nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligates nuclear weapons states – like the U.S. – to work toward nuclear disarmament in exchange for non-nuclear weapons states not acquiring them. Other countries are looking to the U.S. for signs that we are serious about living up to our nuclear disarmament obligations, and this budget undermines our credibility.

Last year, your emails and calls created the grassroots pressure that successfully eliminated pork for the nuclear weapons complex from the economic stimulus. Please email now and ask your representative to cut funding for these new facilities.

Analysis of the Fiscal Year 2011 Budget Request

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

“Proposed DoE funding also includes large increases for a facility that will expand plutonium production in Los Alamos, New Mexico and for a new highly enriched uranium production facility near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, each estimated to cost about $3 billion. The Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project (CMRR) plutonium facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory increased from $97 million in FY 2010 to $225 million in FY 2011. Y-12’s Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) also increased to $115 million from $94 million in FY 2010.”

Click here to download a PDF of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation’s budget briefing book.

Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

Click here for ANA’s press release.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico

Click here for their blog post on the budget.

Project on Government Oversight

Click here for their blog post on the budget.

Tri-Valley CAREs

Click here for their press release.

Upcoming activities on nuclear weapons

1. For Peace and Human Needs: Nuclear Disarmament Now! is a new website with resources on activities and demonstrations being planned for the May NPT Review Conference. Hundreds of organizations from the U.S. and around the globe are taking new steps to renew the commitment to a nuclear free world. The website includes an online petition on nuclear disarmament.

2. Groundbreaking is expected in April for a major new production facility, the Kansas City Plant, that will be responsible for 85% of all components for possible new designs and/or half-century life extensions of existing U.S. nuclear weapons. Protests and demonstrations in Kansas City are currently being planned, just before the NPT Review Conference that begins May 3. Contact Nuclear Watch New Mexico for more information.

Photo by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cjbrenchley/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

For all the talk coming from The White House, if you want to know where the U.S. is really (and always has been) headed, just listen to the talk coming from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Of course the name alone should make us all shudder. Since when was there really any security in anything nuclear???

The NNSA is pushing ahead with its plans for “Complex Modernization”, a program initiated by our previous President; you know, the one who said “nucular.” The program would expand two existing nuclear bomb production facilities to essentially build new plutonium pits and other bomb parts out of enriched uranium. You may remember previous names for this plan; first there was Complex 2030, and then it was Complex Transformation. Heaven knows what they will come up with next.

Although the NNSA speaks of the plan in terms of “transforming… the complex into smaller and more efficient operations while maintaining the capabilities NNSA needs to perform its national security missions”, what it really means is that NNSA wants to keep building bombs.

Los Alamos National Laboratories would be building the new plutonium pits (up to 80 per year), while the Y-12 facility in Oad Ridge, Tennessee would be engaged in enriched uranium processing. A fundamental question surrounding all this planning is how this will affect current disarmament and non-proliferation efforts. Will these pits be simply replacing “aging” pits in currently deployed warheads, or are we talking brand new weapons???

Everybody is currently waiting anxously to see whether they get the thumbs up or thumbs down regarding the go ahead for Complex Modernization. That will depend on the recommendations of the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). I suspect that the NPR will promote Complex Modernization; there seems to be strong support, primarily from the military side, for getting the biggest bang for our buck.

And therein lies the rub; just how long can those pits (even though plutonium has a very long half life, it still loses its original properties over time) sit in warheads before they will just fizzle (or at least lose a megaton or two in yield) when detonated. That very question brought the brightest minds in the U.S. weapons complex together in 2006 to determine the lifespan of plutonium pits in the U.S. arsenal. Their findings, which were peer reviewed by the JASONS, were that the plutonium in most nuclear weapons would be “reliable” for at least 100 years, and that “the majority of plutonium pits for most nuclear weapons types have minimum lifetimes of at least 85 years.” Hmmmm…

The vast majority of U.S. deployed nuclear warheads are cruising the seven seas in Trident submarine launch tubes waiting patiently to unleash their hellish fury. The Trident D-5 missile was first deployed in 1990. The relatively young warheads on these missiles coupled with the fact that sea-based missiles are currently the “centerpiece” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal would counter any argument for a need to build new pits. We simply do not need them; the warheads of the U.S. premier “deterrent” force (Trident) are so new that you can almost still smell the fresh paint!

Tell President Obama that we have plenty of nuclear weapons (too many in fact), and that if we can’t do away with all of them long before they reach their “use by” dates, the world will be in deep trouble. Now is the time to act decisively for disarmament and non-proliferation. And while you are at it, tell your members of Congress.

Email President Obama at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.

Find your Congressional contact info at http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml.

Peace,

Leonard