Military Spending

May 4, 2015 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Obama Administration’s Nuclear Warhead Production Budget Larger than under Reagan and Bush—Again

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015

By Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group

ALBUQUERQUE—On February 2, the Obama Administration released its proposed fiscal year 2016 budget, including its budget for the Department of Energy and the nation’s nuclear warhead program in the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In it, NNSA warhead activities are proposed to increase from roughly $8 billion in the current fiscal year, to over $8.8 billion in fiscal year 2016—an increase of $839 million or 10.5 percent.

US nuclear warhead design and production is fully privatized and the above figures do not include the costs for NNSA’s administration of the program, which in fiscal year 2016 is expected to be $284 million. So, a more accurate total warhead program cost is $9.131 billion.

This is well above the comparable Reagan peak of $8.13 billion in 1985 for the same kind of work, the G.W. Bush peak of $8.28 billion in 2004, and Obama’s previous record last year of $8.27 billion.

The budget request explains that in 2014, the Nuclear Weapons Council* decided to “refresh,” that is replace, the conventional high explosive in the W-88 high-yield warhead for the Trident, submarine-launched ballistic missile, when those warheads are taken to Pantex, Texas, to be fitted with upgraded arming and firing systems beginning in 2020. The purpose is to extend the use of the W-88 into “the late 2030s,” allowing further postponement of the proposed first “interoperable” warhead. Last year, the Obama Administration and Congress deferred the “interoperable” warhead program for five years. Multiple sources told the Los Alamos Study Group that the Navy does not support the program and is not budgeting money or missiles for testing the new warhead.

The NNSA’s budget proposal notes these new details for its planned plutonium warhead core (“pit”) production at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Lab (LANL):

The Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Nuclear Facility—opposed for years by the Los Alamos Study Group and the object of years of litigation—has been formally cancelled.
A new $675 million project is announced to modify, partially bring up to code, and re-equip the brand-new, $396 million Radiological, Utility, and Office Building to handle larger quantities of plutonium. This brings the project’s total investment to $1.07 billion, making it by far the most expensive single construction project in the history of New Mexico.
A new $1.365 billion project is announced to modify the interior of the main LANL plutonium facility and install new equipment to handle higher production rates, in addition to multiple other items.

Obama’s military budget request would accelerate development of the air-launched Long-Range Standoff Cruise missile by 1.25 fiscal years. Work on this proposed warhead, a W-80 modification, has been moved up by two years.

Strategic bombers are counted as “one warhead” under New START, even though each B-52H bomber can carry up to 20 nuclear-armed Cruise missiles and/or many nuclear-armed gravity bombs. (The B-2 bomber also carries Cruise missiles and the Long-Range Strike Bomber is being designed for this mission as well.) Long-Range Standoff warheads will not be counted under New START.

Overall this is a status quo budget, one that generally follows prior projections and plans. The proposed big spending increase was expected. There are no sudden departures. Contractor greed and waste are still being rewarded in the three big national labs [Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia]. The contractors are still basically in charge. The dead-man-walking “interoperable warhead” program is still on the books despite its lack of support in the military. No old warhead types are being retired. No ICBM bases are being closed.

Looking deeper, morale and management problems will continue and are certain to explode in unpredictable ways. The fiasco created by LANL at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in New Mexico is a harbinger of further trouble down the line, because nothing fundamental has been fixed. (See p. 6)

There is no way to have a well-managed nuclear weapons program. It’s a fiasco-generating contradiction that NNSA has to live with every day.

Sooner or later nuclear weapons will be gone. The question they pose is whether we will exit at the same time—either because we finally open the “nuclear umbrella,” or because our investments in the mushroom cloud preclude the solidarity needed to save a living planet from the other threats we’ve created.

In this budget we see NNSA’s nuclear weapons “life extension program.” What about a life extension program for humanity, for our civilization?

—Greg Mello is a Director of the Los Alamos Study Group.

*The five-member Nuclear Weapons Council, operated jointly by the departments of Defense and Energy, includes the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics; the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Energy Department Under Secretary for Nuclear Security; the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the head of US Strategic Command.

October 10, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

New US Bomb-Building Biz

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris report in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the Obama administration has approved development of a new nuclear warhead, the latest version of the B61 known as the B61-12.* If completed, it is to be used in future nuclear war planning involving gravity bombs.

The B61-12 is a 50-kiloton hydrogen bomb, 3.3 times the size of the Hiroshima bomb that incinerated seven square miles and 140,000 people in 1945. All else being equal, the new B61 could demolish 23 square miles, an area equivalent to the Island of Manhattan. In the bunker mentality of today’s nuclear war planning, this is called a “low yield” nuclear warhead.

The B61 has been a steady 50-year-old jobs program for the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Bomb builders there have engineered 15 different versions of this warhead since 1963.

Five B61 versions are still in the stockpile: the B61-3, -4, -10 and (340 kiloton) -7; and the B61-11 “earth-penetrating” bomb (400 kilotons). The administration is planning to retire three of these and convert the B61-4 into the B61-12.

Of the roughly 820 B61s still in use today — 500 of which are versions -3, -4, and -10 — the Bulletin says only 300 are deployed at bases with B61-capable aircraft.

About 250 B61-7 and 50 B61-11 bombs are stored at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The B61-12 has been in an engineering phase since 2013, and the first production bombs are set to roll out in 2020. About 480 could be built through the mid-2020s.

At a cost of about $12.2 billion (up from $4 billion in 2010, and $8 billion in 2012), the B61-12 is probably, the authors note, the most expensive nuclear bomb program in US history. At approximately $25 million apiece, and weighing 700 pounds, each one is estimated to cost more to produce than if it were made of solid gold ($14.6 million).

Approximately 180 of the B61 Mods 3 and 4 are still deployed at six bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, the United States being the only state in the world to deploy nuclear weapons offshore.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Barry Blechman and Russell Rumbaugh point out that, “One NATO exercise in 1962 estimated that 10-15 million German civilians would be killed in a tactical nuclear exchange.”+

Even the US’s European Command (EUCOM) has given up “advocating for maintaining nuclear weapons in Europe,” the authors report, and EUCOM leaders told an oversight task force in 2008 there would be “no military downside to the unilateral withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Europe.” The task force review quoted one senior US military official saying “… they have no military value.”

According to Blechman and Rumbaugh, former Secretary of Defense “Colin Powell favored abandoning them in the 1990s when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” and other “prominent critics … have long argued that the military rationale for keeping nuclear weapons in Europe is an anachronism.” — JL

* “The B61 family of nuclear bombs,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 2, 2014

+ “Bombs Away: The Case for Phasing Out US Tactical Nukes in Europe,” Foreign Affairs, July/Aug. 2014.

July 18, 2014 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

More Nuclear Weapons, Less Security

Follow the Money

Editor’s note: This report focuses on the Air Force’s B-61 gravity bomb, still deployed in five European countries that have “nuclear sharing” agreements with the United States: Holland, Belgium, Germany, Turkey and Italy. About 180 B-61s are still used on F-16s and Tornado jet fighter-bombers in Europe.

The program to replace the B-61s with a new “model 12” — rather than retiring them permanently — has been condemned by US allies in NATO, Congressional budget hawks and the entire arms control community. Even former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright has said the B-61’s military value is “practically nil.”

Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists interviewed Joe Cirincione, President of the Ploughshares Fund March 12. Cirincione said, “This decision represents the triumph of entrenched nuclear interests over good government. The B-61 is no longer relevant for US national security, but continues to rob billions of dollars from programs that would make America safer.”

The B-61’s 300-to-500 kiloton “variable yield” thermo-nuclear device has 24 to 40 times the destructive power of the US bomb that killed 170,000 people at Hiroshima and destroyed everything within seven square miles. Yet its threat of indiscriminate destruction is still called “tactical” by US nuclear war planners.

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

By Marylia Kelley, Citizen’s Watch, Spring 2014

Want to know a nation’s real policies? Skip over the government speeches and carefully groomed headlines. Read its budget. This is where true priorities are revealed. Federal budgets are a country’s policy in action, and, as such, are worthy of attention.

In March, the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration sent its Fiscal Year (FY) 2015 budget request for nuclear weapons and related activities to Congress. The budget request consistently indulges nuclear bomb development over nonproliferation and environmental cleanup.

Especially blessed by the budget request is the Life Extension Program (LEP) to “modernize” the B-61 nuclear bomb by giving it provocative new military capabilities. Plundered in order to pay for the bomb is the program that secures the world’s most vulnerable nuclear materials.

Also caught in the budgeting vise are funds for slowing or preventing toxic and radioactive poisons moving downwind and downstream from contaminated nuclear weapons facilities.

Here are a few of the key numbers. The budget request for the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration is $11.7 billion. Of that, the largest chunk by far, $8.3 billion, is for Nuclear Weapons Activities, an increase of $534 million, or seven percent, above the FY 2014 level, which was already far too high.

Increases for the B-61-12 nuclear bomb

Notably, a major increase is requested for Directed Stockpile Work. The increase is mostly for the LEP to combine four versions of the B-61 into a new B-61-12 bomb, a risky enterprise that is neither desirable nor necessary. Additionally, there is a B-61-12 LEP-related increase proposed in the nuclear weapons Readiness Campaign budget.

The total estimated cost for the B-61-12 has risen from $3.9 billion in 2010 to $10 billion today, not including an additional $1 billion in funding for a new tail kit. At this price each of the new B-61-12 nuclear bombs will cost twice its weight in solid gold, according to the Ploughshares Fund.

Here are the near-term costs. The FY 2015 request for the B-61-12 Life Extension Program stands at $643 million, a 20 percent increase over 2014. Worse, the budget documents state that this bomb’s LEP is slated to remain well above the $600 million mark in 2016 and 2017, and then rise to more than $725 million each year starting in 2018. As the B-61-12 LEP costs keep rising, the time line to actually produce the first new bomb is falling behind. The FY 2015 request extends the date for the first production unit to 2020, due to the complexity of the design changes the contractors want to make.

Moreover, this bomb’s presence in NATO countries contributes to rising tensions in the region and to global instability. A growing number of elected officials in the NATO countries that house the B-61s are objecting to the B-61-12 LEP and also to a future role for nuclear weapons in NATO. A logical step would be for the US to retire the B-61s rather than spend $11 billion “shLEPping” them into a new bomb design.

Nonproliferation funding takes the hit

In contrast to the nuclear weapons activities budget, the DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s nonproliferation accounts get a big cut in the FY 2015 request. It is fair to say that nonproliferation is being raided to pay for the B-61-12 and other ill-advised bomb programs. Here, too, the government’s priorities are showing.

Graphic from the May 2014 report by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability: Billion Dollar Boondoggles: Challenging the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Plan to Spend More Money for Less Security.

The budget request for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation is down from about $2 billion in FY 2014 to $1.56 billion in the FY 2015 request. … Funding for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which helps secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the world, is slashed from $442 million to $333 million — a 25 percent reduction. Other nonproliferation projects are also reduced in the FY 2015 request.

Scott Yundt, Tri-Valley CAREs’ Staff Attorney, called the precipitous drop in the nonproliferation budget “a dangerous policy,” adding that, “the DOE likes to talk about reducing nuclear dangers, yet is cutting the very funds it needs to properly accomplish that mission. The US and the world need to better safeguard, package and store nuclear materials, not create new variants of nuclear bombs.”

Reduced cleanup funding

The FY 2015 budget request does not express a commitment to cleanup needed by the people living near nuclear weapons facilities. Sites being cleaned up with DOE Environmental Management funding will see a slight drop in total funding, from $5.83 billion in 2014 to $5.63 billion in the 2015 request.

The funding for Superfund cleanup of leaking toxic and radioactive wastes at Livermore National Lab in California comes mostly from the National Nuclear Security Administration’s cleanup budget and partly from the Environmental Management budget. While Livermore’s Environmental Management funds are down slightly from last year, it appears that the FY 2015 cleanup monies will be sufficient for the Lab to cover its major activities. Still, measures that residents want in order to expedite cleanup would not be funded.

The budget request also contains a wholly new program called the “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative” (OGS), a “wish list” that if funded would … shower even more money disproportionately on nuclear weapons activities. As the budget process unfolds in the coming weeks, Congress should reject the OGS entirely and, instead, move a significant portion of the funds requested for weapons activities into nonproliferation and environmental management.

Some calls you can make

Obama’s FY 2015 budget request has gone to Congress, where the House and Senate will decide how much funding each of these programs will actually receive. We have a window of opportunity now to make sure our voices are heard.

US Representatives and Senators can be reached via the capitol switchboard, (202) 224-3121. Ask to speak to the “defense aide” about the nuclear weapons budget, and ask the aide to keep you informed of the legislator’s position on it. Also ask to be informed of any action the lawmaker takes on a specific program, like the B-61-12 LEP or the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, or DOE’s Environmental Management program.

Here is what Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said about the budget request at a recent committee hearing she chaired: “What I see are additional cuts to well-managed programs that have made this country safer from nuclear terrorism at the expense of increased funding for poorly managed nuclear weapons programs.”

July 18, 2014 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Depleted Uranium Munitions Still Making Money, Wreaking Havoc

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

By John LaForge

The US Army has awarded General Dynamics a $12 million contract to deconstruct and dispose of 78,000 so-called “depleted” uranium anti-tank shells. The Pentagon’s May 6 announcement calls for “demilitarization” of the aging shells, as newer depleted uranium rounds are added to the US arsenal.

The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW) in Manchester, England, reports that the armor-piercing shells to be disassembled are thought to be the large 105-millimeter and 120-millimeter anti-tank rounds.

General Dynamics Corp. originally produced and sold some of the very same 120-millimeter anti-tank rounds to the Army. One of the largest weapons builders on earth, General Dynamics has 95,000 employees and sells its wares in 40 countries on six continents.

Depleted uranium, or DU, weapons are made of extremely dense uranium-238. More than 700,000 tons of DU has been left as waste in the US from the production of nuclear weapons and fuel rods for power reactors. Uranium-238 is left over when the fissionable uranium-235 is separated from natural ore. DU is only “depleted” of most of this uranium- 235. It is still a toxic heavy metal and an alpha-particle-emitting radioactive waste. Because DU is such an expensive government liability and an environmental nightmare, it is given away free to weapons builders like General Dynamics, Aerojet, Alliant Techsystems and others.

The Pentagon is replacing some older DU shells in spite of international appeals for a global moratorium on their use. According to ICBUW, the military is set to buy 2,500 of the large anti-tank rounds just this year at a cost of $30 million or over $10,000 each from Alliant Techsystems, formerly headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The Army’s long-term disposal plans for the uranium from 78,000 shells were not outlined in its May 6 statement. Uranium in the shells is often alloyed with titanium or molybdenum, and if these metals are not recycled, they could become part of the government’s vast stockpile, requiring indefinite storage as intermediate-level radioactive waste. Other parts of the munitions are currently disposed of as low-level waste in spite of its plutonium content.

In 1991, during the 40-day, 1,000-sorties-per-day bombardment of Iraq, US forces used between 300 and 800 tons of DU. Another estimated 170 tons were used in the 2003 US bombing and takeover. The toxic, radioactive contamination left from the use of these weapons (on impact, DU burns and turns to aerosolized metallic fumes or dust) has been linked to the skyrocketing incidence of birth abnormalities in southern Iraq and to Gulf War Syndrome among tens of thousands of US combat veterans.

After the US/NATO bombardment of Kosovo in 1999, our DU weapons were discovered to be spiked with plutonium and other isotopes, and the Energy Department admitted that the entire US stock of depleted uranium was contaminated with plutonium, americium, neptunium and technetium. UN investigators in Kosovo found sites hit with DU to be poisoned with all four isotopes. The Nation reported in April 2001 that about 150,000 tons uranium-238 was dirtied with plutonium-239 and neptunium-237 and that “some apparently found its way to the Persian Gulf and Balkans battlefields.”

Plutonium is 200,000 times more radioactive than uranium-238 and ingesting less than 27 micrograms of plutonium-239 — a millionth of an ounce — will cause lung cancer.

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Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015

By Greg Mello, Los Alamos Study Group

Nukewatch Quarterly Spring 2015

Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2014

Follow the Money

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

By Marylia Kelley, Citizen’s Watch, Spring 2014

Nukewatch Quarterly Summer 2014

By John LaForge

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