U.S. trims its nuclear arsenal while spending billions to upgrade production
By DONALD BRADLEY
The Kansas City Star
The construction site of the new billion-dollar Honeywell plant in south Kansas City is quite the head-turner.
Workers everywhere, trucks scurrying about like mice, monster earth movers, cranes reaching to the sky and enough trailers to start a retirement community. All on 185 acres inside a perimeter fence and under a wind-whipped Old Glory.
But drive past the former bean field on Missouri 150 enough times and the thought occurs: Kansas City produces parts for every nuclear weapon now in our arsenal. The country is making more nuclear bombs, has been building them virtually non-stop for 65 years, hasnt used one against an enemy since 1945, and a significant new arms reduction treaty went into effect just this month.
Nine thousand warheads, about a quarter capable of being triggered tomorrow, is a lot of product sitting around.
Any is too many, critics said. Modernization is a joke, just more of the world-threatening, same-old, same-old madness.
Others counter that the world cannot disinvent the bomb. What the country needs, they said, is to scrap the big nukes in the stockpile hardly a deterrent for smaller, tactical ones that potential enemies think we would actually use.
The $85-billion upgrade of our bomb-making infrastructure in Kansas City with Honeywell and at other locations is occurring 50 years after President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the military-industrial complex and its potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Its also taking place two years after President Barack Obama told the world in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, that the United States was committed to ridding itself of nuclear weapons.
Today, I state clearly and with conviction Americas commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons, he said
to the cheers of 20,000 people.
He had the backing of the so-called Gang of Four former secretaries of state George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, all foreign policy heavyweights who called in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007 for worldwide nuclear disarmament.
Then late last year, Obama won Senate approval of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Under it, strategic nuclear missile launchers will be cut in half in seven years. More than 100 missile silos, bomber wings and submarine launch tubes will be taken off-line.
Americas immediately usable warheads will be halved to 1,550, with the option of possibly jamming a few hundred more onto bombers.
So what happened? How did the administration get from Prague to that soybean field in south Kansas City, where ever more non-nuclear warhead components the electronics, arming, fusing, firing packages will be churned out?
The answer, said experts, even those opposed to nuclear weapons, is that no matter how many START treaties are ratified, complete disarmament is unlikely to ever happen because the knowledge and technology are in the open.
The realistic and responsible course now is to maintain a safe, reliable deterrent to nuclear attack, they said.
More specifically, the experts go on, Obama needed Republican votes to get New START approved, so he agreed to continue the expensive modernization plan.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, in explaining his vote on the Senate floor in December made no effort to make the deal sound anything but quid pro quo:
I will vote to ratify the New START treaty with Russia because it leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker to kingdom come and because the president has committed to an $85 billion, 10-year plan to make sure that those weapons work.
A major protest by Midwest Catholic Worker groups is scheduled for May 2 at the new Honeywell site. Frank Cordaro, a Des Moines anti-nuke protester who has been arrested at the construction site, agrees a deal was made.
Obama needed the war mongrels to go along, Cordaro said. It was easy to flim flam Americans because the public is so militarized, so caught up in being an empire.
But James Carafano, a defense expert for the Heritage Foundation, said talk of a nuclear-free world was fantasy.
Disarmament is like cops giving up their guns, he said.
Noting that a nuclear blast over a major American city would kill thousands and cost trillions, he said, The consequences of getting it wrong are too great.
If you ask people if they want nuclear weapons to be safe and reliable, theyre going to say yes. Old ones that may or may not work are not a credible deterrent.
Experts agree that Obamas Prague speech was more global posturing than realistic policy goal and that our nation is unlikely ever to fold its top hand in the high stakes game of nuclear deterrent.
Uncertain shelf life
Since August 1945, when Little Boy and Fat Man ushered in the nuclear age, the United States and the Soviet Union have spent billions of dollars building and stockpiling nuclear weapons.
The U.S. arsenal peaked with about 30,000 warheads in the 1960s; the Soviets topped out at about 40,000 in the 1980s.
Conventional wisdom is that a nuclear bomb has a shelf life. They go bad ... maybe we think. Since nuclear testing has been banned since 1991, its hard to know for sure.
The uncertainty has kept plants like Kansas Citys busy. The military didnt want to risk duds, so bombs routinely were refit with new parts.
We used to think parts wore out after 20 years or so, said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. So we were constantly dismantling and putting on new parts.
Having even less confidence in their bombs, the Soviets assumed a 10-year shelf life.
Now, most experts think the U.S. components actually could be good for a hundred years.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 didnt change much, although Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine decided against being nuclear powers and turned their warheads over to Moscow.
Still, the nuclear club has grown, from the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China originally, then India, Pakistan, Israel and, most worrisome, North Korea.
Iran reportedly is enriching uranium but is believed to be some years from its first warhead.
Owen Cote at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it may be good politics to talk disarmament but the worry was that some weapons states could agree to dismantle but then keep those parts close to alert status.
We cant create conditions to get to zero, Cote said.
Cordaro disagrees. Other countries are simply following the U.S. lead, he argued.
Those other countries are no threats to us, he said. They are only aping us. They would stop if we would.
Although anti-missile systems are being debated and deployed against some nations, many believe the first nuclear attack on U.S. soil is more likely from an enemy undeterred by what sits in our silos or undersea-launch tubes.
The biggest worry is that a terrorist group, such as al-Qaida, could lay hands on a black market nuke or create a radiation-spewing dirty bomb. Even in that case, it would be hard to find a target at which to fire nuclear weapons in response.
Terrorism is a poor mans war, Cordaro noted. War is a rich mans terrorism.
The modernizing effort
On Feb. 18, 1943, with the outcome of World War II unsettled, ground was broken in Bear Creek Valley in rural Tennessee for a factory to enrich plutonium. A month later, J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived in New Mexico to discover that Los Alamos housing for his bomb designers wasnt ready, but the Army had arranged stays at dude ranches.
Sixty-five years later, those two facilities today remain vital to Americas nuclear weapons infrastructure.
The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge will get $6 billion in improvements and expansion as part of the modernization. The plant, which employs about 6,000 workers, makes the secondary for bombs the part that makes them thermonuclear.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, with 11,700 employees, is home to the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility, which is key to creating new plutonium pits, the primary components of warheads. New facilities there will cost about $5 billion.
The rest of the modernization funding will go over time for smaller facilities, clean-ups and for the new or refurbished weapons themselves.
From 2000 to 2010, the Kansas City plant shipped nearly 1,000 MSAD (mechanical safe arming detonator) kits, a safety component that prevents accidental or unintended detonation of a nuclear warhead.
According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, in recent years the plant, built during World War II to make engines for Navy fighter planes, has evolved into science-based manufacturing.
Now the facility is under fire by current and former employees, environmentalists and residents about issues of massive pollution and illnesses that remain unresolved. A cleanup could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Heres a quirk about the new plant:
Kansas City will be the only city in world that owns a weapons plant let alone a nuclear weapons plant, said Chris Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group.
There is absolutely no reason to build this plant. This place will have ponds and bike paths, a suburban monument to nuclear weapons.
Jay Coghlan of Nukewatch said the Clinton administration considered closing the Kansas City plant.
This terrified Kansas City politicians, even though it made no sense to build the new plant. They wanted to keep those jobs.
Bombs at Whiteman
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, formed by Manhattan Project veterans who started the Doomsday Clock, more than 9,000 warheads are stored at 18 locations in 12 states and six European countries.
Today, about 2,700 are considered operational, 2,500 in reserve and the rest awaiting dismantlement.
The biggest concentration of the operational nukes is at the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific at Bangor, Wash., which sends out Ohio-class submarines operating in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The Air Force has about 500 warheads on long-range bombers, such as the B-2A Spirits clustered at Whiteman Air Force Base east of Kansas City.
An additional 450 or so warheads are on ballistic missiles in the American West; the remainder at eight military bases spread through Europe. The United States is the only country that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries.
That means the push for more sophisticated weapons and delivery systems will continue because, as if in response to the famous Rodney King question, no, countries of the world cannot all get along.
But then doesnt that mean that this country will forever be building nuclear bombs?
Not forever, Carafano said.
Some day the suns going to burn out.
How many nukes?
The exact number of nuclear weapons is not known, as each country guards the number closely. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the global nuclear inventory is approximately 22,400. Most are in possession by the United States or Russia.
12,000 Nukes in Russias arsenal
9,400 Nukes in the United States arsenal
Read more: U.S. trims its nuclear arsenal while spending billions to upgrade production - KansasCity.com
By DONALD BRADLEY
The Kansas City Star
The construction site of the new billion-dollar Honeywell plant in south Kansas City is quite the head-turner.
Workers everywhere, trucks scurrying about like mice, monster earth movers, cranes reaching to the sky and enough trailers to start a retirement community. All on 185 acres inside a perimeter fence and under a wind-whipped Old Glory.
But drive past the former bean field on Missouri 150 enough times and the thought occurs: Kansas City produces parts for every nuclear weapon now in our arsenal. The country is making more nuclear bombs, has been building them virtually non-stop for 65 years, hasnt used one against an enemy since 1945, and a significant new arms reduction treaty went into effect just this month.
Nine thousand warheads, about a quarter capable of being triggered tomorrow, is a lot of product sitting around.
Any is too many, critics said. Modernization is a joke, just more of the world-threatening, same-old, same-old madness.
Others counter that the world cannot disinvent the bomb. What the country needs, they said, is to scrap the big nukes in the stockpile hardly a deterrent for smaller, tactical ones that potential enemies think we would actually use.
The $85-billion upgrade of our bomb-making infrastructure in Kansas City with Honeywell and at other locations is occurring 50 years after President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address of the military-industrial complex and its potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Its also taking place two years after President Barack Obama told the world in a speech in Prague, Czech Republic, that the United States was committed to ridding itself of nuclear weapons.
Today, I state clearly and with conviction Americas commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons, he said
to the cheers of 20,000 people.He had the backing of the so-called Gang of Four former secretaries of state George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger and former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, all foreign policy heavyweights who called in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in 2007 for worldwide nuclear disarmament.
Then late last year, Obama won Senate approval of the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty). Under it, strategic nuclear missile launchers will be cut in half in seven years. More than 100 missile silos, bomber wings and submarine launch tubes will be taken off-line.
Americas immediately usable warheads will be halved to 1,550, with the option of possibly jamming a few hundred more onto bombers.
So what happened? How did the administration get from Prague to that soybean field in south Kansas City, where ever more non-nuclear warhead components the electronics, arming, fusing, firing packages will be churned out?
The answer, said experts, even those opposed to nuclear weapons, is that no matter how many START treaties are ratified, complete disarmament is unlikely to ever happen because the knowledge and technology are in the open.
The realistic and responsible course now is to maintain a safe, reliable deterrent to nuclear attack, they said.
More specifically, the experts go on, Obama needed Republican votes to get New START approved, so he agreed to continue the expensive modernization plan.
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, in explaining his vote on the Senate floor in December made no effort to make the deal sound anything but quid pro quo:
I will vote to ratify the New START treaty with Russia because it leaves our country with enough nuclear warheads to blow any attacker to kingdom come and because the president has committed to an $85 billion, 10-year plan to make sure that those weapons work.
A major protest by Midwest Catholic Worker groups is scheduled for May 2 at the new Honeywell site. Frank Cordaro, a Des Moines anti-nuke protester who has been arrested at the construction site, agrees a deal was made.
Obama needed the war mongrels to go along, Cordaro said. It was easy to flim flam Americans because the public is so militarized, so caught up in being an empire.
But James Carafano, a defense expert for the Heritage Foundation, said talk of a nuclear-free world was fantasy.
Disarmament is like cops giving up their guns, he said.
Noting that a nuclear blast over a major American city would kill thousands and cost trillions, he said, The consequences of getting it wrong are too great.
If you ask people if they want nuclear weapons to be safe and reliable, theyre going to say yes. Old ones that may or may not work are not a credible deterrent.
Experts agree that Obamas Prague speech was more global posturing than realistic policy goal and that our nation is unlikely ever to fold its top hand in the high stakes game of nuclear deterrent.
Uncertain shelf life
Since August 1945, when Little Boy and Fat Man ushered in the nuclear age, the United States and the Soviet Union have spent billions of dollars building and stockpiling nuclear weapons.
The U.S. arsenal peaked with about 30,000 warheads in the 1960s; the Soviets topped out at about 40,000 in the 1980s.
Conventional wisdom is that a nuclear bomb has a shelf life. They go bad ... maybe we think. Since nuclear testing has been banned since 1991, its hard to know for sure.
The uncertainty has kept plants like Kansas Citys busy. The military didnt want to risk duds, so bombs routinely were refit with new parts.
We used to think parts wore out after 20 years or so, said Steven Pifer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. So we were constantly dismantling and putting on new parts.
Having even less confidence in their bombs, the Soviets assumed a 10-year shelf life.
Now, most experts think the U.S. components actually could be good for a hundred years.
The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 didnt change much, although Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine decided against being nuclear powers and turned their warheads over to Moscow.
Still, the nuclear club has grown, from the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China originally, then India, Pakistan, Israel and, most worrisome, North Korea.
Iran reportedly is enriching uranium but is believed to be some years from its first warhead.
Owen Cote at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it may be good politics to talk disarmament but the worry was that some weapons states could agree to dismantle but then keep those parts close to alert status.
We cant create conditions to get to zero, Cote said.
Cordaro disagrees. Other countries are simply following the U.S. lead, he argued.
Those other countries are no threats to us, he said. They are only aping us. They would stop if we would.
Although anti-missile systems are being debated and deployed against some nations, many believe the first nuclear attack on U.S. soil is more likely from an enemy undeterred by what sits in our silos or undersea-launch tubes.
The biggest worry is that a terrorist group, such as al-Qaida, could lay hands on a black market nuke or create a radiation-spewing dirty bomb. Even in that case, it would be hard to find a target at which to fire nuclear weapons in response.
Terrorism is a poor mans war, Cordaro noted. War is a rich mans terrorism.
The modernizing effort
On Feb. 18, 1943, with the outcome of World War II unsettled, ground was broken in Bear Creek Valley in rural Tennessee for a factory to enrich plutonium. A month later, J. Robert Oppenheimer arrived in New Mexico to discover that Los Alamos housing for his bomb designers wasnt ready, but the Army had arranged stays at dude ranches.
Sixty-five years later, those two facilities today remain vital to Americas nuclear weapons infrastructure.
The Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge will get $6 billion in improvements and expansion as part of the modernization. The plant, which employs about 6,000 workers, makes the secondary for bombs the part that makes them thermonuclear.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory, with 11,700 employees, is home to the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement facility, which is key to creating new plutonium pits, the primary components of warheads. New facilities there will cost about $5 billion.
The rest of the modernization funding will go over time for smaller facilities, clean-ups and for the new or refurbished weapons themselves.
From 2000 to 2010, the Kansas City plant shipped nearly 1,000 MSAD (mechanical safe arming detonator) kits, a safety component that prevents accidental or unintended detonation of a nuclear warhead.
According to the National Nuclear Security Administration, in recent years the plant, built during World War II to make engines for Navy fighter planes, has evolved into science-based manufacturing.
Now the facility is under fire by current and former employees, environmentalists and residents about issues of massive pollution and illnesses that remain unresolved. A cleanup could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Heres a quirk about the new plant:
Kansas City will be the only city in world that owns a weapons plant let alone a nuclear weapons plant, said Chris Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a national environmental group.
There is absolutely no reason to build this plant. This place will have ponds and bike paths, a suburban monument to nuclear weapons.
Jay Coghlan of Nukewatch said the Clinton administration considered closing the Kansas City plant.
This terrified Kansas City politicians, even though it made no sense to build the new plant. They wanted to keep those jobs.
Bombs at Whiteman
According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, formed by Manhattan Project veterans who started the Doomsday Clock, more than 9,000 warheads are stored at 18 locations in 12 states and six European countries.
Today, about 2,700 are considered operational, 2,500 in reserve and the rest awaiting dismantlement.
The biggest concentration of the operational nukes is at the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific at Bangor, Wash., which sends out Ohio-class submarines operating in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
The Air Force has about 500 warheads on long-range bombers, such as the B-2A Spirits clustered at Whiteman Air Force Base east of Kansas City.
An additional 450 or so warheads are on ballistic missiles in the American West; the remainder at eight military bases spread through Europe. The United States is the only country that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries.
That means the push for more sophisticated weapons and delivery systems will continue because, as if in response to the famous Rodney King question, no, countries of the world cannot all get along.
But then doesnt that mean that this country will forever be building nuclear bombs?
Not forever, Carafano said.
Some day the suns going to burn out.
How many nukes?
The exact number of nuclear weapons is not known, as each country guards the number closely. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the global nuclear inventory is approximately 22,400. Most are in possession by the United States or Russia.
12,000 Nukes in Russias arsenal
9,400 Nukes in the United States arsenal
Read more: U.S. trims its nuclear arsenal while spending billions to upgrade production - KansasCity.com
