We must abolish nuclear weapons now, part 2

As the only nation to have used nuclear weapons, the U.S. is the worst nuclear offender. Our country now has around 5,400 active and available nuclear weapons, 900 on hair-trigger alert and 1,900 of them lie in a bunker near the Albuquerque airport and around 20,000 are stored in Amarillo, Texas, at the Pantex assembly/disassembly plant. All of these instruments of mass destruction are allegedly needed as “deterrence.”

Don’t forget that “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945), which are minuscule bombs by today’s standards, murdered (even vaporized) 200,000 innocent civilian human beings. Hundreds of thousands died later from various cancers. The U.S. has never been held to account for this crime.

Since 1950, the U.S. has had 32 nuclear weapons accidents, including six bombs lost and never recovered. “Broken arrow” accidents included accidental launching, firing, theft or loss of a nuclear weapon, as well as such events as a flock of geese, a ruptured gas pipeline or faulty computer codes being interpreted as hostile missile launches.

The privately-contracted U.S. nuclear industry, such as in Los Alamos or the Savannah River Site in North Carolina, is ramping up to produce 80 plutonium pits (nuclear bomb “triggers”) each year. This is despite the fact that Los Alamos Labs has successfully produced 30 pits/yr only once during 64 years of operation, not without numerous accidents and contaminations. This article explores criticality accidents (near explosions) at Los Alamos (LANL): science.org/content/article/neardisaster-federal-nuclear-weaponslaboratory-takes-hidden-tollamerica-s-arsenal. In 2013 LANL’s main plutonium facility was shut down for over three years because of chronic nuclear criticality safety concerns. I doubt you’ve heard about the several “mishaps” that occurred there in the past year.

Los Alamos activities have already contaminated the local aquifer with hexavalent chromium. Radioactive cancer-causing elements plutonium, strontium 90, etc. have been found even in food grown in neighboring areas and in people’s attics, presumably from radioactive smoke wafting from fires near Los Alamos.

Meanwhile the lab sits on an area of volcanic tuff that is vulnerable to earthquakes. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has sounded the alarm that Los Alamos Lab’s buildings are not sufficiently reinforced to withstand a possible earthquake. Recent phenomenal growth in the oil and gas fracking industry in N.M. enhances the probability of earthquake. We have seen in Oklahoma that earthquake occurrences went from almost none historically to 900 earthquakes in 2015 alone due to fracking activities.

The lab has succeeded in avoiding public scrutiny of expansion plans, bypassing the legally required Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS). The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. This includes interface with the public and a finding of no significant environmental impact. Rather, LANL is relying on a previous and obsolete impact statement for the formerly proposed CMRR building which was ostensibly mothballed in 2008. The plan has mushroomed into a wholly different configuration with multiple buildings and tunnels. Neither our Congressional delegation nor our Governor has voiced disapproval of bypassing the required SWEIS for these burgeoning plans.

Our N.M. legislators have always stood firmly behind the labs. “Jobs, jobs, jobs” is the mantra. But the billions of dollars poured into the labs have benefitted few New Mexicans. NM’s poverty rate is 3rd highest in the country; its child poverty rate is the worst in the country, beating out even Mississippi. There is no “trickle down.” In fact, the NNSA’s own documents explicitly state that expanded pit production would have no significant positive effect on job creation and the regional economy. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2021 that the U.S. will spend a total of $634 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and “modernize” its nuclear arsenal.

Here’s the good news. The voice of the Catholic Church, lead by Pope Francis and Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, is now taking a firm stand against nuclear weapons. Pope Francis states: “The use of nuclear weapons is immoral. Not only their use, but also possessing them: because an accident or the madness of some government leader, one person’s madness can destroy humanity.”

So long as accumulating nuclear weapons makes massive amounts of money for defense contractors, and so long as designing, producing ,“modernizing” and deploying new “generations” of nuclear stuff advances careers, the truth about deterrence theory, verging on theology, remains obscured. We the people must speak out against nuclear weapons now internationally recognized as illegal.