The Radioactive Game

How does an administration with a hunger for new nuclear bombs win over a skeptical Congress and public? With the same philosophy as a shady sports team owner: whatever works, no matter the cost. The catch is that the price of playing the nuclear game is hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars and the possibility of ending life as we know it.

Last week, the Bush administration released a 1,600-page document [1] outlining its plan to build a new nuclear weapons production line. The cornerstone of the proposal is the expansion of a nuclear bomb factory that would produce 80 new plutonium pits, or nuclear weapon triggers, per year. Complex Transformation [2], as proponents call the overarching plan, would result in the first major production of nuclear weapons in two decades. The administration must have an impressive game plan to justify this ambitious policy, right? Wrong. The administration changes its lineup of reasons on a regular basis.

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A year and a half ago, the U.S. Energy Department (DOE), which develops and maintains the nuclear weapons arsenal, warned that U.S. warheads were aging and could soon malfunction. They said new replacement warheads were needed without delay. In late 2006, a panel of government-endorsed scientists concluded this assertion was false [4]. It turns out that warheads will last much longer than expected, and most will last more than a century.

Undeterred, the DOE turned to its reserve bench for additional justifications. They explained that a new production line would create a supposedly cheaper, safer, and environmentally friendly nuclear arsenal. If that rosy picture failed to win over fans, the department relied on scare tactics to do the job. The DOE claimed that the new nuclear bomb production line was needed to “quickly react” to “new threats.” [5] What exactly are these “new threats”? And why does the United States need more than 5,000 active and reserve warheads to react to these threats? We haven’t gotten an answer to that yet.

Batting clean-up for the new production line was the so-called Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). RRW was the DOE’s plan to create the new family of warheads that would replace the existing arsenal. This proposed weapon received research funding over the past two years from Congress, but DOE could not manufacture RRW without the new production line. Thus, RRW was the administration’s seemingly foolproof argument to justify Complex Transformation. Unfortunately for the administration, Congress ended the RRW program [6] in a spending bill that was signed into law by the president the day after Christmas. This effectively eliminated the production line’s last best argument.

Unfortunately, the game is not over. The RRW and new production line have plenty of powerful advocates, chief among them the nuclear weapons laboratories. This brings us to the genuine reason that some are pushing so hard for a revitalized nuclear weapons complex: jobs. As Robert Civiak, a former White House budget official in the Bush I and Clinton administrations stated [7], “The weapons labs are more interested in job security than national security.”

The U.S. nuclear weapons industry is losing relevance in the post-Cold War world. Without a mission, many highly-paid scientists and technicians will be without work. Instead of attempting to rebuild the Cold War nuclear infrastructure, the labs should consider a different kind of transformation. With the supercomputers and brilliant scientists at these weapons laboratories, our nation could undertake an Apollo-style project to combat global warming, as Los Alamos National Laboratory director Michael Anastasio recently suggested [8] at a briefing in Washington DC.

Congress has also signaled that the labs need a new vision, and has not bought into the administration’s nuclear revitalization game plan. The powerful congressional appropriations committees dealt the DOE a series of stunning defeats in 2007 by rejecting a proposal for a new nuclear bomb plant, and then zeroing [6] all funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

So, when you hear the game plan for the next new nuclear weapons program, don’t believe the hype. The lineup of justifications may appear formidable, but closer scrutiny reveals its weaknesses -- and the cost of continuing this deadly game may be fatal.

Devin Helfrich [9] is a legislative assistant with the Friends Committee on National Legislation [10] in Washington and works on nuclear weapons issues.