On August 8th, six of the seven members of the self-described “UC Weapons Inspection Team” arrived in New Mexico for an 11-day volunteering stint with the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG). Our first day here took place at an appropriately frenetic pace. Within hours of our arrival, we were whisked away to a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) hearing regarding -- and I’m not describing the purpose of the event using anything close to official language -- the NNSA’s plans to make the Los Alamos National Laboratory the nation’s new plutonium bomb core factory, with a production rate of (ultimately) over 100 new plutonium pits per year.

With respect to its activist culture, New Mexico is a lot different from California (and that will, no doubt, be my biggest understatement of this blog entry). The entire state is essentially a colony of the U.S. military industry, with nuclear weapons at the core of that colonization. My favorite bumper sticker I’ve seen so far on the trip reads:

“Nuclear Weapons…
Iraq: 0
Albuquerque: 2,500”

Yes, that’s how many nuclear weapons are stationed at the Kirtland Air Force Base, in New Mexico’s most populous city. Meanwhile, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumann, and other military-industrial corporations have large offices in the state. The University of New Mexico belongs squarely on that list of military-industrial corporations as well. One other of the nation's three official nuclear weapons laboratories, Sandia National Laboratory, is located here. The Department of Energy has a massive office in Albuquerque. The Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a nuclear waste dump featuring hundreds of tons of transuranic waste, is located in the southern part of the state.

The disposition of most people we’ve met strongly reflects these spiritually, psychologically, and physically oppressive circumstances. Although they don’t always explicitly convey it, it seems that most -- though certainly not all -- folks who would otherwise take a forceful stand against the nuclear weapons complex feel powerless, isolated, alone in their struggle. Even many who do speak out express their views only tepidly.

All that aside, the NNSA hearings -- the one in Los Alamos, as well as the ones the following two nights in Espanola and Santa Fe -- were marked by a large, unequivocal outpouring of opposition to plutonium pit production. At least 70 people spoke, combined, at the three hearings. Not a single one spoke in favor of pit production, or even of the idea of a “U.S. nuclear deterrent.” The sentiment was unanimous: New Mexicans want real security, not a toxic bomb-trigger factory in their backyard.

The UC Weapons Inspection Team stood out strongly at each of the hearings, thanks in part to our handy lab coats bearing “UC Weapons Inspector” on the back and embroidered patches that read (in part) “University of California - In Bombs We Trust” on the front.

At the first two hearings, though we spoke passionately and were very well-received by most people, we didn’t quite find our best voice. This was particularly the case in Espanola, one of the poorest cities in New Mexico, despite -- or, perhaps, as a consequence of -- being adjacent to Los Alamos, which receives over $2 billion in funding annually from the federal government and fancies itself, with absolutely no justification, as an economic godsend for those who live nearby. Many of the UC Weapons Inspectors felt hesitant about strongly asserting their anti-lab views in a place where, as Greg Mello and Trish Williams-Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group informed us beforehand, many people are strongly pro-military and roughly ¼ of the population works at LANL.

(For the record, our fears turned out to be misplaced, since the participants in the Espanola hearing were perhaps more fervently opposed to pit production than those at any of the other two).

At the third hearing, in Santa Fe, we seized the moment. Buoyed by the relatively trenchant resistance we had taken part in the previous two nights, we (semi-politely) took over the hearing mid-way through, then facilitated a democratic decision-making process for those in attendance to decide what they’re actually going to do to stop plutonium pit production, as part of the larger process of working for nuclear abolition. Given that every single person who spoke at each of the hearings is against plutonium pit production, we suggested, the question at hand is no longer what people think about pit production, but what actions they’re going to take to put a halt to it.

The crowd’s reaction told the story. Smiles brightened many people’s faces. Their eyes lit up. When we asked who among them would be interested in meeting with New Mexico legislators to tell them “no nukes,” the vast majority raised their hands. When we asked who would like to take part in non-violent civil disobedience to halt pit production, about half raised their hands. When we asked, at the outset, whether we should be allowed to conduct a democratic decision-making process despite the moderator’s protestations, virtually everyone’s hands shot up.

One group of people that wasn’t feeling us at this moment was the NNSA security guards, who had been hiding away in a separate room and started to approach us as soon as what we were doing became clear. In other words, we tried to introduce a bit of democracy into a process set up to be authoritarian and largely a waste of energy for virtually everyone involved, and we were nearly hauled out of the building as a result.

Though the non-violent civil disobedience we proposed probably won’t take place anytime soon, the meetings with legislators will happen in the coming days. More important, the fact that a group of young people would come all the way from California, in part to speak out at these hearings, has made a powerful impression on people. Despite having to scramble to be even psychologically prepared to be part of the meetings, let alone speak at them, we likely inspired more people in New Mexico during our first three nights here that we previously thought possible.

In the coming days, I’ll recount some of our other activities in New Mexico, as well as provide more information on the current activities of the Los Alamos lab, and pictures from the trip.

UC and LLNL
1. 25% of PhDs come from the UC
2. 400 students and post docs at the Lab
3. 3 of LLNL inventions rank in UC's 25 top-earning inventions.

The recent round of reporting on the RRW was, not unexpectedly, extremely lacking.

Uber-Orwellian LA Times headline notwithstanding (“Rival U.S. Labs in Arms Race to Build Safer Nuclear Bomb”), the central purpose of the RRW is to increase the destructive capacity of the US nuclear weapons arsenal. The nuclear arsenal may become "safer" as a bi-product, but concerns regarding "safety" have little, if anything, to do with this program. Not even the slightest hint that this is the case in the aforementioned articles.

Parsing the terminology isn't the only way to deduce that this program is about making US nuclear weapons more lethal. There's a long trail of largely irrefutable documentary evidence to demonstrate that that's exactly what this program is for. The RRW program evolves out of the several-years-old Submarine Warhead Protection Program (SWPP), a program “to provide the navy with two certifiable new warhead options to augment its stock of high-yield W88s,” at least one of which was, even then, “slated to eventually replace what the navy called in 1995 the ‘exiting’ W76 and W88 warheads.”

It also evolves, to a large degree, out of the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator program, under which the nuclear weapns labs were designing a new "tactical" nuclear weapon bunker buster to be used in "conventional war-fighting scenarios" (I here use the words of the Bush administration's 2001 Nuclear Posture Review).

As the Los Alamos Study Group has written, “Despite occasional denials, [the National Nuclear Security Administration] has stated that the evolving nuclear arsenal, for which evolution RRW is to be the primary means, will provide new military capabilities as well as foster a ‘responsive’ production infrastructure.”

Now what, exactly, does any of that have to do with making “safer” nuclear weapons?

Secrecy, lies, and bureaucratic obfuscation are embedded at the core of the nuclear weapons complex. In other words, nuclear weapons are based on deceit. Otherwise, nuclear weapons would not have been created -- and they would not continue to exist.

Over the years, the US nuclear complex -- which is not a homogenous entity, though its working parts work in an interconnected way -- has released millions of tons of radioactive toxins into the environment and tried to cover it up. It has intentionally irradiated tens of thousands of American in a series of little known "human radiation experiments" and tried to cover it up.
It has poisoned workers at its facilities and tried to cover it up. It once massacred 210,000 civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tried to cover up the real reasons for the bombings, as well as the effects that they had. It has poisoned indigenous communities and tried to cover up the poisoning. It has orchestrated tests of nuclear weapons and covered them up.

Recently, it had designs on orchestrating a 700-ton conventional weapons test to simulate the conditions of a nuclear nuclear bomb and tried to cover up the fact that the test had anything at all to do with nuclear weapons.

The list goes on…

In this case, the nuclear weapons complex has been working for years to research, design, and, indeed, manufacture new nuclear weapons. The United States is spending more than 1.5 times what it spent during the Cold War, adjusting for inflation, largely in order to do so. As a result, the nuclear weapons complex, with the labs the UC manages (or co-manages, now, in the case of Los Alamos) leading the way, are on the verge of leading the world into a new nuclear arms race. And Los Alamos and Livermore have, naturally, gone to great lengths to try to cover up these activities, while diverting the public’s focus away from them. They have used benign-seeming monikers such as “Stockpile Stewardship” and, now, the RRW, to describe these programs in order to do so.

Given the nuclear complex’s record for covering up – to use a currently popular phrase – inconvenient truths, it’s abundantly clear that everything its representatives publicly state merits rigorous and pointed questioning and criticism. By contrast, those who accept what they say at face value – the Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, and other mainstream media outlets – are, whether knowingly or unknowingly, complicit with deceit. Not harmless deceit, but the deceit of murderers and murderers’ accomplices.

The UC plays a principal role in perpetuating this deadly deception. Remember, a big reason why the UC became manager of the Los Alamos lab in the first place was to ensure “proper public relations”.

The fact that nuclear weaponeers need “proper public relations” to ensure the continuation of their work is a tacit admission that the nuclear emperor has no clothes. Nuclear weapons have no legitimacy. They are fit only to be abolished.

The students of the University of California, by virtue of their connection to one of the world’s leading military-industrial corporation, can – and must -- play a leading role in exposing the nuclear emperor.

Officially, the UC has 50-50 partner status in its relationship with Bechtel within the Los Alamos Security LLC framework. In reality, it seems that Bechtel is mostly running the show; the UC's primary function is to provide a veneer of academic legitimacy to the privatization of new nuclear weapons production, which is set to take place in earnest at LANL in the coming years.

A phenomenal analysis of what this means in the greater scheme of things is posted at the Los Alamos Study Group's web site. If you ask me, the LASG piece is must reading for any regular visitor to this site, and I'll soon be posting a permanent link to it in the "Bids for the Bomb Labs" feature (which is badly in need of an update), which can be accessed from the left-hand sidebar.

Ugh!

The gist of the article - that the critics believe the massive number of nuclear weapons we now have is suitable - seriously depresses me. Who said thousands of nukes are fine? This discourse has always been dysfunctional, but it's getting ridiculous. Where are the voices of real opposition?

A congressional committee took major steps this week toward financing the Bush administration's controversial program to build new generations of nuclear warheads, roughly doubling the budget for the design of the new weapons while reducing the money for maintaining the old stockpile.

The House Energy and Water Subcommittee passed on Wednesday a budget that increases funding for what is known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, or RRW, from the roughly $25 million the White House requested to $52.7 million.

That is a relatively modest amount of money for a program that could end up costing more than $100 billion over the next several decades. The committee, however, took other steps that suggest a firm transition toward the new program is commencing even though the debate over the need for the warheads remains unresolved.

Many arms controls experts have complained that the new RRW program is unnecessary because the existing stockpile is expected to remain in working condition for decades, making the new warheads a huge waste of money.

"They are making an error in shifting resources from a well-proven program of maintaining the stockpile to something that is not proven," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, which favors arms reductions. "I think this is premature and will come back to haunt them."

Click here for the full article.