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70 Years of Making Nukes: The Lowdown on U.S. Production

Mary Ann McGivern, Board Member, Peace Economy Project
Its been 70 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, killing more than 200,000 people. There were protests August 6-9
around the world, including a four-day fast promoted across Europe,
commemorations in Japan and smaller demonstrations and acts of civil
disobedience in the U.S.some at the plants that make the bomb.
Where are these plants and what do they do? Heres a short primer on U.S.
nuclear weapons production.
The pit of the bomb, known as the primary, is manufactured at Los Alamos,
NM, using plutonium with a tritium reservoir. It is fissile fuel that explodes,
acting as a trigger for the massive thermonuclear implosion. The size of a
pit is somewhere between a tennis ball and a bowling ball.
The sparkplug or secondary, made of highly enriched uranium, lithium
deuteride, depleted uranium and other materials is manufactured at the Y12 plant in Oak Ridge, TN. It is the fusion fuel that implodes, ignited by the
pit.
Engineering research and testing to extend the life of nuclear warheads
and perhaps to modernize them is done at the Sandia and Lawrence
Livermore Laboratories.
The non-nuclear parts are made at the plant in Kansas City, MO, newly
built at a cost of about $700 million. The plant was privately built, but the
city of Kansas City invested at least $40 million in land and infrastructure.
The operations budget for 2013 and 2014 was about $550 million annually.

Pantex in Amarillo, TX, assembles all the parts and also stores thousands
of plutonium pits from retired warheads. This plutonium has leaked into
groundwater and in 1994 the Pantex Plant was listed as a Superfund site.

The long version is long indeed. The Department of Energy plans life-extension
to the year 2075. This life extension is expensive. The Congressional Budget
Office estimate is $335 billion over the next ten years and a trillion dollars over
thirty years, including new submarines, missiles and bombers plus the trillion
dollars for the F-35 joint airstrike fighter and bomber not to mention cost of
clean-up at current and past weapons manufacturing sites. These costs exclude
Congressional wish lists for new construction at Los Alamos and at the
Savannah River former uranium enrichment plant in South Carolina.
Then theres the question of whether this so-called life-extension is in violation of
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In so far as the U.S. is modernizing our
weapons, not merely extending their lives, we are violating the treaty. Our treaty
obligation as stated in Article VI is to disarm at an early date.
The moral and humanitarian issues are another matter for consideration. More
than a hundred non-nuclear nation-states are collaborating with NGOs to identify
the human cost of spending all that money on nuclear weapons and remind us all
of how destructive to our world even a small nuclear war would be. Besides the
immediate more-or-less local mayhem, dust rising to the stratosphere would
result in 25 percent less food production and world-wide famine and food wars
lasting at least ten years.
Finally, there is the question of whether our nuclear laboratories can or may
actually do what they have been commissioned to do, i.e. extend the life of or
modernize the weapons.
A Closer Look
The flagship facility for modernization now is the Uranium Processing Facility at
Oak Ridge. By the end of next year, more than $2 billion will have been spent
designing the UPF.
The sole mission of the UPF is to produce thermonuclear secondaries. It will cost
more than $6 billion dollars (estimates of earlier iterations of the plan went up to
$19.8 billion). Stopping the UPF is a priority goal of the Alliance for Nuclear
Accountability and the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.
The Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge produces thermonuclear cores (the secondaries) for
the life extension program; enriches uranium; and stores the secondaries and
the enriched uranium. Storage security is a problem here as we saw when three
protesters gained entrance and sang songs and painted a wall of the storage
facility while they waited for the guards to learn that security had been breached.

Regarding the Sandia and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, the issue is that
while they can modernize the weapons, according to the NNPT, they may not
modernize them. The designs use radar evasion, making the bombs invisible.
The life-extended or perhaps modernized B61-12 is a nuclear all-purpose
gravity bomb and as such erases the distinction between tactical and strategic
nuclear weapons. You may say that these are esoteric distinctions. That is part of
the long debate. It is also the fuel driving Russian and Chinese research.
Security at the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico has not been challenged and the
lab is not designing new enhancements of its pits, only planning to make more of
them. But the plant has had trouble manufacturing plutonium pits due to cost and
safety issues.
Los Alamos was designed to produce up to 450 pits a year, though why we
would need so many goes back to questions about compliance with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. However, that question is moot because the plant has
been limited by Congressional and Department of Energy strictures to produce
no more than 20 pits a year. And it has not been able to do that.
Rocky Flats made the pits until 1989 when production there was shut down. The
move to Los Alamos production was slow and by 2012 the plant had produced
30 plutonium pits over five years. This history is murky. There were fires and
spills and leaks how dangerous we dont know. Its classified.
But we do know that production of plutonium pits grows more and more
expensive every year because it is difficult and dangerous. In 2012 the plants
very limited production was halted and proposals were made to build expanded
and safer production and waste containment facilities. These proposed facilities
are estimated to cost $6.5 billion by the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research
Replacement Project at Los Alamos. [Note: Three years ago, President Obama
prioritized the UPF in Oak Ridge over the CMRR-NF at Los Alamos. The CMRR
was subsequently put on hold, and now NNSA is looking at a different approach
at LANL for pit production.]
Currently, according to Nuclear Watch New Mexico, There are no plutonium pits
scheduled for production, nor does the existing stockpile need any. Future
plutonium pit production is for new-design nuclear weapons, created through Life
Extension Programs that transform existing weapons and give them new military
capabilities.
However, the House Armed Services Committee wants those plutonium pits. The
FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act requires a nuclear capability and
capacity to produce 50 to 80 pits a year. But this is authorization, not
appropriation of actual dollars.
How did we respond?

Around the world, people gathered to mark the 70th anniversary of the U.S.
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to promote the abolition of nuclear
weapons. In the U.S. there were many actionssmall ones in cities and missile
deployment sites and larger ones at the plants themselves. For some 30 years,
people have been fasting in Europe from August 6 to 9, the days the bombs were
dropped. !
In Hiroshima, survivors, political leaders and ordinary citizens gathered at 8:15
a.m. August 6 to mourn the moment the city unwillingly became victimized by the
dawn of the nuclear age. At a ceremony near the shell of an exhibition hall
preserved as a monument to the attack, Japans Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
renewed a longstanding Japanese pledge to seek worldwide elimination of
nuclear weapons.
Last December Pope Francis sent a message to the Vienna Conference on the
Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. He stated that the policy of
deterrence is not longer an acceptable moral strategy. He concluded his
message with these words: The security of our own future depends on
guaranteeing the peaceful security of others, for if peace, security and stability
are not established globally, they will not be enjoyed at all. Individually and
collectively, we are responsible for the present and future well-being of our
brothers and sisters. It is my great hope that this responsibility will inform our
efforts in favor of nuclear disarmament, for a world without nuclear weapons is
truly possible. !
The communities standing in resistance to the United States manufacture and
deployment of nuclear weapons are indeed taking responsibility for guaranteeing
the peaceful security of us all.