Stop Making More Nuclear Bombs

Republican Senators, led by Arizona’s Jon Kyl, are demanding a dramatic expansion of US nuclear bomb production capabilities in current budget negotiations. They want to ensure $12 billion in 2012 funding for new or greatly enlarged facilities in Kansas City, MO; Los Alamos, NM; and Oak Ridge, TN that would quadruple current nuclear warhead production from 20 to 80 per year. This is part of the $85 billion they seek to lock in over the next ten years for the weapons programs of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

President Obama acquiesced to the 2011 funding of these programs to secure last year’s Senate ratification of the New START treaty with Russia. But that is where it should stop. Building new warhead production facilities wastes money and decreases our national security. The New START treaty mandates dismantling warheads and reducing fissile materials worldwide.

The U.S. has a backlog of over 4,200 nuclear warheads currently slated for dismantlement. This could take up to 15 years at current rates. The speed of dismantling existing weapons has greatly decreased in recent years. The same facilities are being used instead to “modernize” our active nuclear arsenal of 5,113 warheads, and we are waiting for another new plant to be built at Savannah River, SC to reprocess the plutonium from weapons into expensive and dangerous “MOX” as fuel for nuclear reactors.

We need to stop these four new facilities immediately, and redouble efforts to dismantle our warheads and rid the world of tons of excess plutonium through relatively safe nuclear waste disposal methods such as “vitrification” and burial.

Ask them, in the 2012 budget, not to fund any expansion of our nuclear weapons making or plutonium processing facilities, and to spend a fraction of the funds saved to quickly process the backlog of weapons waiting to be dismantled, and to safely neutralize the plutonium they contain.

Via their websites: www.senate.gov

Telephone: 202 224-3121 (senate switchboard)

Write: Senator (first & last name)

US Senate, Washington, DC 20510

Photo credit: Mushrooms, Nass River, BC, 1971, by Charles Sprague.