Bush Administration Unveils Plans to Produce 125 New Nuclear Weapons a Yea

[Flabbergasted]

http://www.fcnl.org/issues/item.php?item_id=1781&issue_id=2


Seeks Return to Cold War Nuclear Weapons Capabilities

The Bush administration unveiled plans Wednesday, April 5 to produce 125 new nuclear weapons a year. The plans include building a new nuclear bomb plant at an existing weapons site. The multi-billion dollar proposal was presented at a Capitol Hill hearing by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous federal agency in charge of nuclear weapons.

NNSA plans to consolidate its plutonium operations into one new bomb factory with the capacity to produce 125 nuclear weapons per year. Potential sites for the so-called Consolidated Plutonium Center include the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Pantex Plant in Texas, Nevada Test Site, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The agency also announced that it was canceling construction of the multi-billion dollar Modern Pit Facility at the Savannah River Site, but would instead include plutonium "pit" production in the larger new bomb plant. The new bomb factory would also house plutonium R&D activities now occurring at the Livermore National Laboratory in California and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The new facility, slated for completion in 2022, would also be the national storage site for plutonium. The Oak Ridge Y-12 plant in Tennessee would be designated as the national storage site for weapons uranium. Research activities at the two weapons labs not involving large quantities of weapons material would continue. The government's program for consolidating nuclear weapons materials is being driven primarily by security concerns since 9/11.

[Waya]

1. Fantastic.......

:nuke:


:sarcasm:

[blm]

2. Gore and Bush are the same. Kerry and Bush are the same. So some say.

Maybe this one LITTLE thing, though - Kerry would have CANCELLED all new nuclear weapons programs. He didn't believe in tactical nukes and was dead set AGAINST them.

Just another example of how wrong some on the left can be when it ignores reality while spewing wornout soundbites.

[Flabbergasted]

3. And for Bush: The Center of Military Dominance!

[flashdebadge]

4. Just what we need.... ................... ................ (SARCASM) eom.

[simonm]

5. look on the bright side

Bushitler is creating more jobs!

[MadMaddie]

6. Soooooo the US can create 125 Nukes a year....and then this

administration tries to prevent Iran and other countries from creating their own Nukes......hmmmmmm...not sure if this is going to go over well throughout the world...

[Flabbergasted]

7. We'll make um like it!

[Sinti]

8. OMG this MOFO is one long nightmare

You fall asleep at night thinking, this was a bad day, tomorrow will be better -- next day, it's worse. It never ends

[Flabbergasted]

9. Focus on Effective Tools

Boycott GE

[Sinti]

10. Already done, with many others :)

[Flabbergasted]

11. Thanks Spread the word. War is their business!

[Sinti]

12. Damn right. We need to give as little as we can to these monsters n/t

[cassiepriam]

13. * must lie awake nights thinking up bad things to announce every day.

What a nightmare, someone wake me up, now!

[Sinti]

14. It's hard work you know ;) n/t

[cassiepriam]

15. He's actually good at something :( nt

[OneTwentyoNine]

16. I can see why....we're down to our last 10,000 or so.....n/t

[OneTwentyoNine]

17. Remember... its OK for us to build and possess WMD

But...anyone else sitting on a shit load of Oil better not even think about it....

[Supersedeas]

26. strange logic, isn't it

[what the]

18. Recycling weapons

How many old nuclear weapons are going to be taken apart each year? They are routinely taken apart and recycled as they become aged or obsolete.

If 125 old weapons per year are taken apart, then the total number in the inventory is the same. If it's more than 125 per year, the inventory will decline.

[lyonn]

19. Who's to say when a nuke is "aged" or "obsolete?

Haven't heard much about the life span of a nuke weapon, warhead, or whatever. How many do we have now? This whole story, scheme, plan, sounds like bs. What about the treaties we have concerning nukes? Lots of questions, where are the answers.

Edit: Welcome what the.

[what the]

20. Old nukes

The hell-weapons get old. They have a lifespan. They become old, e.g., when there is a significant chance that that they will not detonate on command. Regarding retirement for being "obsolete," improvements such as more-secure locks, using new insensitive conventional explosive triggers (like TATB), and increased "shelf-life" also drive retirement and re-manufacture of warheads. If the U.S. were violating treaties that cap the total number of warheads, all hell would break loose -- Russia would press the issue right to the wall. Do not despair. I don't think the U.S. is increasing the number of warheads. If there are 10,000 warheads, 125/year is about 1%/year. 250/year is 2.5%/year. I think they are talking about maintaining what they've got, not increasing the total number.

[lyonn]

21. Well, your explanation gave me a vague idea why

old nukes May need replaced, barely. Detonation on command (couldn't they fix the detonator device? But what the hell is "insensitive conventional explosive triggers"? If we have anywhere near 10,000 nukes what could we possibly need that many for? How many exploding at one time could do the earth in? I am so ignorant on this subject so must use what little logic I have but bush's plan sounds like an end around to get some fancier nukes that are unnecessary. That man's plans, or whomever is running the show, for our country so far have been to control our courts and congress with lies and deceit. Next the world. Hell, I was once a repub., what happen to that party? Course I was stupid back then myself and was in denial.

[davepc]

22. nuclear material degrades over time.

I wrote out a big response but then found this article:
http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=jf04bergeron

The reason? Tritium is a key nuclear ingredient in U.S. nuclear weapons, essential for transforming an atomic bomb into a far more powerful hydrogen bomb. Each year about 5.5 percent of the tritium decays, making it the only nuclear ingredient of U.S. weapons that must be periodically "topped off" to keep them in proper working order.

For nearly two decades, ever since its tritium-producing reactors were shut down for safety reasons, the Energy Department has relied on a reserve supply to replenish tritium. Fortuitously, that supply has been increased as tritium has been recovered from weapons removed from the arsenal as a result of arms reduction agreements. No shortage has occurred.

But in the late 1990s, decision makers in the bomb business, apparently uncomfortable with the idea of depending on arms cuts to keep the active arsenal up to par, conceived of a way to create a relatively cheap new supply of tritium. They would use commercial nuclear reactors as neutronic ovens for converting lithium to tritium, thereby avoiding the need to build a new and expensive dedicated tritium production facility within the nuclear weapons complex.

...

The government has programs in place to monitor our nuclear stockpile: http://www-cms.llnl.gov/s-t/aging-weapons.html

[lyonn]

24. Thanks for explaining

That will keep my panic level under control, ha. Still, I figure a "few good nukes" ought to keep the wolves away. I better go back to worrying about our politicians and skip nuclear production levels.

Edit: Read the article and it did help get the picture.

[davepc]

28. The LA Times article is clearer then the alarmist press release...

By the Quakers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-nuke6apr06,0,5989419.story?coll=la-home-headlines

The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.

The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.

Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe.

Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack.

I don't trust Bush as far as I could throw him, but letting our nuclear capability atrophy and rot is a lot more criminal then maintaining it.

[what the]

25. Insensitive conventional explosive trigger.

Nuclear fission weapons are set off by a sphere of conventional chemical explosive. The sphere is detonated at many points (about 100) on its surface simultaneously and the explosion travels inward to compress a hollow sphere of nuclear material to critical density. This "implosion" has to be done with absolute perfection or else there will be no nuclear reaction. For a hydrogen bomb, the explosion of such a fission bomb is used to compress and heat fusion fuel.

The chemical explosives are a concern. What if the weapon is dropped-- will the chemical explosives detonate? They have in the past, for example in a B52 crash in Spain decades ago. The result of such an accident is dispersal of the nuclear material, rather than a nuclear blast. An extremely insensitive high explosive called triaminotrinitrobenzene (TATB) is now the chemical explosive of choice for nuclear bombs. It resembles TNT (trinitrotoluene) chemically and is approximately as powerful. TNT is difficult to detonate. TATB is very, very difficult to detonate.

[lyonn]

27. Thanks, you and Davepc

have set-out info that most people(?) don't realise is/are issues in this nuclear situation. When you have crazies running the show ya gotta be concerned with declarations like this.

[sakabatou]

23. Yay! Let's break more treaties!