Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2016

By the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

The Obama Administration’s nuclear weapons policy is revealed much more by its spending plans than its rhetoric. On February 9, the Fiscal Year 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) budget request will illuminate the programs that President Obama wants to pass on to his successor.

Will it increase funding for additional nuclear weapons programs despite warnings that “modernization” is leading to a new arms race? Will the President keep faith with communities harmed by nuclear weapons activities and request the funds needed to stabilize nuclear materials and clean up contaminated land and waters at DOE sites?

The DOE Fiscal Year 2017 budget request will answer these and other questions of great importance to the American people and the world. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), a 29-year-old network of groups from communities downwind and downstream of US nuclear sites, will be looking at the following issues. For details, contact the ANA leaders listed at the end of this Advisory.

* Does the budget request boost spending on a new Long-Range Stand Off warhead to ride atop a new air-launched cruise missile, with a combined $20-$30 billion cost and incalculable proliferation risks?

* Will funding for transforming the B61 bomb into the world’s first “smart” nuclear weapon remain at about $640 million annually? Is the National Nuclear Security Administration on track to produce the first B61-12 in 2020?

* Will the dismantlement budget increase beyond its current, inadequate $50 million given that there is an estimated backlog of 2,000 nuclear weapons awaiting disassembly?

* Will more than $300 million be provided for Livermore Lab’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), which repeatedly failed to achieve ignition even though taxpayers have already spent nearly $9 billion?

* What is the request for the plutonium fuel (MOX) project at Savannah River, which DOE admits is financially unsustainable: zero, cold standby (~$200 million), or enough to barely survive (300+ million)?

* Will the budget continue to fund the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) bomb plant in Oak Ridge, TN, without requiring a formally approved plan? Given that more than $2 billion has been spent on designing UPF, when will the Administration tell taxpayers how much it intends to spend?

* Does the budget increase funding for expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores at Los Alamos? Why is more production needed when experts conclude that existing pits are durable?

* Does the Environmental Management (EM) cleanup budget (currently $5.3 billion) increase to meet all legally mandated milestones? States say agreements at a dozen DOE sites are underfunded.

* Why did the budget savings from DOE facilities that had a quick cleanup, such as Rocky Flats and Fernald, go to new weapons rather than to other cleanup sites as promised?

* Does the budget include $0 for Yucca Mountain? No funding is consistent with past requests that terminate this technically flawed site that is strongly opposed by Nevada state officials and the public.

* What are the lifecycle cost estimates to clean up the legacy of past nuclear weapons production? Chronic underfunding of DOE environmental programs leads to ever-increasing lifecycle clean-up costs—from $308.5 billion in FY 2013 to $341.6 billion in FY 2016.

* Why is there increased funding for the shutdown Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) when its re-opening is behind schedule and over budget? How much more money is requested for the Idaho National Lab, Los Alamos, Savannah River, and Oak Ridge because of the shutdown?

* Does the Hanford budget (more than $2.3 billion) protect workers from toxic chemical exposures, provide an Operational Readiness Review of Waste Treatment Plant safety, and fund construction of new double-shell tanks to replace the leaking ones?

* Does the budget increase funding (currently $29.15 million) for the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) to provide independent oversight of DOE projects that have many cost over-runs, schedule delays, safety culture issues and technical problems?

* Is funding for design and licensing of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) (currently $62.5 million) increasing again even though SMRs are not technically or financially viable? Since private financing is lacking, will DOE reaffirm that it will not finance SMR construction?

For information about specific DOE nuclear weapons sites and programs, contact:

• Los Alamos Lab and Life Extension—Jay Coghlan: (505) 989-7342; jay@nukewatch.org
• Livermore Lab, NIF and Life Extension—Marylia Kelley: (925) 443-7148; marylia@trivalleycares.org
• UPF and Dismantlement—Ralph Hutchison: (865) 776-5050; orep@earthlink.net
• Savannah River and MOX Plant—Tom Clements: (803) 240-7268; tomclements329@cs.com
• Environmental Management, WIPP—Don Hancock: (505) 262-1862; sricdon@earthlink.net
• Hanford—Tom Carpenter: (206) 292-2850 x22; tomc@hanfordchallenge.org
• Idaho National Lab—Beatrice Brailsford: (208) 233-7212; bbrailsford@snakeriveralliance.org

 

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2016

Editorial

North Korea’s January 6 announcement that it conducted an H-bomb test was both ridiculed as completely implausible and condemned as highly “provocative.” Its February 7 satellite launch was likewise denounced as a “cover” for long-range ballistic missile development. Without hard evidence that North Korea has even a single nuclear weapon, official “concern” over the North’s nuclear program needs to be manufactured if our own nuclear arsenalists are to stay in business.

With the enormous Y-12 nuclear weapons complex in his home state desperately searching for an enemy, it is no surprise to hear Senator Bob Corker, R-Tenn. and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chant that he wants the US “to take a more assertive role in addressing North Korea’s provocation.” Anna Fifield, the Washington Post Bureau Chief in Tokyo, who should at least pretend to be an impartial observer, wrote January 6 that the underground bomb test was a “brazen provocation and a clear defiance of international treaties.” Fifield later told National Public Radio that she wouldn’t want to speculate about what motivated North Korean President Kim Jong Un, because the inside of his head “is a scary place.” The NPR interviewer let this unsubstantiated assertion go unchallenged, like it was common knowledge.

North Korea is such a military, economic and political nothing, that it is disgraceful to see the national media parrot official Pentagon and State Department fear-mongering about Pyongyang’s supposedly terrible, belligerent, and aggressive intentions, and pathetic to see public opinion crystalized in unison.

When was the last time North Korea bombed, invaded, militarily occupied, or installed puppet regimes in other lands? Those brazenly provocative violations of international treaties were committed by the United States. When has North Korea placed 5,000-man, “super carriers,” (the largest ships in the world, each carrying 60 aircraft) in the Persian Gulf and attacked Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan using Reaper drones and jet fighter-bombers? Oh yes; that was the United States.

In 1999, US-led NATO air forces bombed Serbia and Kosovo for 78 days. That wasn’t long after US cruise missile attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan—which in turn barely followed Bill and Hillary Clinton’s 1998 Christmas bombing of Iraq. That of course was only an intensification of the ongoing carrier-based campaign of bombing Iraq two or three times every week for the 12 years between 1991 to 2003. That year, under false pretenses, the Bush and Cheney regimes with extreme prejudice proceeded to cause at least 370,000 civilian deaths that can be blamed on the 1991 (Bush I) and 2003 (Bush II) wars on Iraq.

In 2003, protesters in nearly every capital city on Earth carried “Most Wanted” posters declaring George W. Bush a fugitive from justice, a war criminal and a danger to world order. At least Barak Obama has a Nobel Peace Prize with which to conduct undeclared, unconstitutional war in four countries, indiscriminate, unaccountable drone war on two continents, and force-feeding torture of hunger striking suspects, indefinitely detained without charges at an extra-legal off-shore penal colony—known as “I promise to close it.”

Now with private contractors and US-picked presidents running failed police states in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is easy to see how global public opinion, in a Gallop poll of Feb. 2014, declared the United States the most dangerous country in the world. But forget the opinion of the Earth’s 95 percent. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported without attribution that, “US military planners view [North Korea] as the world’s most dangerous state.” North Korea, with two-thirds the population of California, no oil, and having endured a famine in the mid-1990s that killed one-tenth of its people, is certainly more threatening than the US which has over 600 military bases in 38 countries, 10 aircraft carriers (Russia and China each have 1), ten nuclear missile-firing submarines, and 48,000 troops in Japan, 37,000 in Germany, and 27,000 in South Korea.

According to US intelligence services, North Korea is suspected of having perhaps six nuclear weapons and an annual military budget of $7.5 billion (2014). The US’s roughly $600 billion military allotment includes maintaining 4,000 nuclear warheads on alert. Any one of the eight giant Trident submarines in the Pacific is capable on its own of burning down the entire Korean landmass.

The gross imbalance of military might begs a question never asked by the commercial media, by the Senators from Lockheed-Martin, or the Representatives from Northrop-Grumman. Even if North Korea had a rocket that could aim straight, and a warhead that could detonate,what could it expect to gain by attacking South Korea, Japan or the US? The answer is obvious: Absolutely nothing but self-destruction.

With luck, the US tiger will just hold its breath and tremble at the mousey shadow of North Korea, which never stops provoking. A few years ago it even had the nerve to ask the White House for a promise that it won’t be preemptively attacked.

—John LaForge