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WORD
COUNT
688
JUNE 4, 2008
NEW
NUKES TO SAVE OLD JOBS – by Devin Helfrich
How
does an administration with a hunger for new nuclear bombs win over a
skeptical Congress and public? With the same philosophy as an
unscrupulous sports team owner: whatever works, no matter the cost. The
catch is that the price of playing the nuclear game is hundreds of
billions of dollars –- and the possibility of ending life as we know
it.
The
Bush administration has released a 1,600-page document outlining its
plan to upgrade the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex. The cornerstone of the
proposal is the construction of a nuclear bomb factory that would
annually produce 80 new nuclear weapon triggers. Complex Transformation,
as proponents call the overarching plan, would result in the first major
production of nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. The
administration must have an impressive game plan to justify this
ambitious policy, right? Wrong. They are constantly changing their
lineup of dubious reasons.
A year
and a half ago, the U.S. Energy Department (DOE), which
develops and maintains the nuclear weapons arsenal, warned that U.S.
warheads were aging and could soon malfunction. They said new
replacement warheads were needed immediately. In late 2006, a panel of
government-endorsed scientists concluded this assertion was false. It
turns out that warheads will last much longer than expected, and most
will last more than a century.
Undeterred, the DOE turned to its reserve bench for additional
justifications. They explained that a new nuclear bomb factory would
create a supposedly cheaper, safer, and environmentally friendly nuclear
arsenal. If that rosy picture failed to win over fans, the department
relied on scare tactics to do the job. The DOE claimed that the new
nuclear bomb production line was needed to “quickly react” to “new
threats.” What exactly are these “new threats”? And why does the United
States need more than 5,000 active and reserve warheads to react to
these threats? We haven’t been given an answer to that question yet.
Batting
clean up for the new bomb factory was the so-called Reliable Replacement
Warhead (RRW). RRW was the DOE’s plan to create a new family of warheads
that would replace the existing arsenal. This proposed weapon received
research funding over the past three years from Congress, but DOE could
not start manufacturing RRW without the new production line. Thus, RRW
was the administration’s seemingly foolproof argument to justify Complex
Transformation. Unfortunately for the administration, Congress ended the
RRW program in a spending bill that was signed into law by the president
the day after Christmas 2007. This effectively eliminated the new
nuclear bomb factory’s last best argument.
But the
game is not over. The Reliable Replacement Warhead and new production
line have plenty of powerful advocates, chief among them the nuclear
weapons laboratories. This brings us to the genuine reason that some are
pushing so hard for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex: JOBS. As
Robert Civiak, a former White House budget official in the George H. W.
Bush and Bill Clinton administrations stated, “The weapons labs are more
interested in job security than national security.”
The
U.S. nuclear weapons industry is losing relevance in the post-Cold War
world. Without a mission, many highly paid scientists and technicians
will be without work. Instead of attempting to rebuild the Cold War
nuclear infrastructure, the labs should consider a different kind of
transformation. With the supercomputers and brilliant scientists at
these weapons laboratories, our nation could undertake an Apollo-style
project to combat global warming, as Los Alamos National Laboratory
director Michael Anastasio himself recently suggested at a briefing in
Washington, D.C
Congress has also signaled that the labs need a new vision, and rejected
the administration’s nuclear revitalization game plan. The powerful
congressional appropriations committees dealt the DOE a series of
stunning defeats in 2007 by denying a proposal for a new mega-scale
nuclear bomb plant, and then zeroing all funding for the Reliable
Replacement Warhead.
So,
when you hear the game plan for the next new nuclear weapons program,
don’t believe the hype. The lineup of justifications may appear
formidable, but closer scrutiny reveals its weaknesses -- and the cost
of continuing this deadly game may be fatal.
--
Devin
Helfrich is a legislative assistant with the Friends
Committee on National Legislation in Washington, D.C., and
works on nuclear weapons issues.-- :
Devin@fcnl.org --
www.fcnl.org
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