Two recent announcements—ten days and worlds apart—capture both the history and the current landscape of U.S. nuclear warfare.
On October 1, the Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that it had successfully created, for the first time since the Cold War, a “War Reserve” plutonium pit, the igniting heart of thermonuclear weapons. It was designed for a new W87-1 warhead at the tip of new Sentinel intercontinental missiles located in 400 remodeled silos across the upper Midwest.
Ten days later, survivors of the world’s first and only nuclear bombs used in war, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
The contrast of the visions of bomb makers and bomb survivors could not be starker. The two stories, though occurring independently, are linked by a historic chain that runs from the birthplace of the atomic bomb to its first use for mass destruction, then back, seventy-nine years later, to new creations of unimaginable destructive power. Postured as deterrence, as the country’s first line of defense against a growing number of nuclear-armed enemies, the new weapon joins a renewed nuclear arms race.
The Nobel laureate group Nihon Hidankyo (the Japan Confederation of A-and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations) estimates that 200,000 people were killed in the two bomb attacks in 1945. In the mid 1950s another 650,000 were recognized as survivors or “hibakusha” (bomb-affected people). With an average age of eighty-five, many survivors have suffered from a wide variety of cancers, intellectual disabilities, and impaired growth. Now, the number of survivors is dwindling at a rate of hundreds each month.
Niklas Elmehed/Nobel Prize Outreach
The Nobel Committee says that it “wishes to honor all survivors who, despite physical suffering and painful memories, have chosen to use their costly experience to cultivate hope and engagement for peace.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. National Security Enterprise (NSE), which is the complex of laboratories and factories that make nuclear weapons, has awakened from its Cold War atrophy. The W87-1 “is reinvigorating and transforming the production complex such that NSE can once again produce all of the components typically required for modern nuclear warheads. This work will give the nation expanded options for maintaining an effective nuclear deterrence posture for decades to come,” according to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which designed the warhead.
It is a cruel irony that this revival was launched by President Barack Obama, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 for negotiating the arms-reducing New START treaty with Russia. In a famous speech in Prague, he envisioned a world without nuclear weapons. But to win Senate approval of the treaty, Obama accepted a thirty-year nuclear “modernization” program whose budget has metastasized to $1.7 trillion. It now entails a complete replacement of the U.S. nuclear triad with new nuclear bombs and warheads and new planes, missiles, and submarines to deliver them.
At Los Alamos, the new plutonium pit is being celebrated for exhuming the science and metallurgical expertise that produced tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, many of them containing a plutonium ignitor. The first atomic bomb, Trinity, which was exploded in New Mexico on May 7, 1945, contained thirteen pounds of plutonium surrounded by explosives and uranium that brought the total weight to five tons. The new pit weighs seven pounds in a sphere the size of a grapefruit. Its certification as a “war reserve” was made after tests were conducted for physical and chemical purity, which ensure that it will explode as designed, and is signified by a one-inch diamond-shaped stamp applied with indelible ink. It joins a stockpile of 14,000 pits warehoused in Pantex, Texas.
Los Alamos has been directed by Congress to eventually produce thirty pits per year. Another fifty are to be produced at the Savannah River Site. But on September 30, a federal judge in South Carolina ruled that the government’s plan violates the National Environmental Policy Act for failing to consider alternative production sites.
U.S District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis found that the plan’s purpose had changed from its original justifying analysis, which did not consider pit production at two sites. The court allowed work to continue at Los Alamos pending negotiations between the government and five watchdog groups which brought the lawsuit. But the decision will require the government to make a “thorough analysis of the impacts of pit production at [Department of Energy] sites throughout the United States, including radioactive waste generation and disposal,” according to the plaintiffs.
Meanwhile, in Norway, the Nobel Committee took note of growing nuclear arsenals along with threats by Russia and North Korea to use them. “At this moment in human history, it is worth reminding ourselves what nuclear weapons are: the most destructive weapons the world has ever seen.”
One day the hibakusha will no longer be among us as witnesses to history, the Committee wrote. “The hibakusha help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons.”