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2010 budget cuts key nuke program
Peace activists elated with Obama administration move
Feb. 27, 2009
President Obama (CNS photo)
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PDF versionAnti-nuclear weapons advocates warmly welcomed President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget as it has eliminated funding for research and development of a new-generation nuclear warhead called the Reliable Replacement Warhead.
"Development work on the Reliable Replacement Warhead will cease, while continued work to improve the nuclear stockpile's safety, security, and reliability is enhanced with more expansive life extension programs," the budget document said.
"It’s dead and this is a very important development,” said John Isaacs, Executive Director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation where his work focuses on national security issues. "This is a very positive sign."
Jane Stoever, a long-time Kansas City peace activist, in an email, called the move "an honest-to-God victory for those of us who've fought the nuclear weapons machine for so many years."
Isaacs said that the significance of the development was the ending of the spending and not the amount, which amounts to “tens of millions” and is a small portion of an estimated $52 billion spent on nuclear weapons related programs in fiscal year 2008, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment.
Despite Isaacs’ pleasure, he cautioned: “We have seen other (nuclear weapons systems ) killed only to come back to life.”
Adding to the excitement have been news reports that the Obama administration is preparing to advance an ambitious arms control agenda that calls for dramatic cuts in American and Russian arsenals. The Boston Globe reported that the Obama administration would seek ratification of a global nuclear weapons treaty.
The Reliable Reduction Warhead project envisions a new design for future nuclear weapons that can replace current stockpiles and can be developed without resuming nuclear testing.
It was launched under the administration of former President George W. Bush to study detailed design and costs. The Energy Department was seeking to start producing the weapons in 2012.
Meanwhile, Congress is in the process of approving the Fiscal Year 2009 Department of Energy budget – without funding for new nuclear weapons.
Just two weeks ago, Congress removed a billion dollars for nuclear weapons infrastructure that quietly made its way into the stimulus package.
It apparently remains uncertain whether the new administration will eventually provide money for a new generation of nuclear weapons. The Council for a Livable World, sister organization to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, issued an alert Feb. 26, telling its members to stay vigilant.
“There is still a chance that the National Nuclear Security Administration, the government department that controls our nuclear weapons programs, could fund a similar program under a different name. We are continuing to monitor the issue closely, and will alert you when key moments arise for you to help influence this critical debate.”
The question of whether the plutonium and other nuclear warhead components suffer from aging has been a major topic of research at weapons laboratories in recent decades. One government study concluded in November 2006 that “most plutonium pits have a credible lifetime of at least 100 years.” The oldest pits currently in the US arsenal are still less than 50 years old.
The concept underlying the Reliable Replacement Warhead program is that the US weapons laboratories could design new nuclear weapons that are highly reliable and easy and safe to manufacture, monitor, and test.
Advocates believe the program is needed to maintain nuclear weapons expertise in order to rapidly adapt, repair, or modify existing weapons or develop new weapons as requirements evolve.
Critics of the program believe it has nothing to do with making US weapons safer or more reliable, but is merely an excuse for designing new weapons and maintaining jobs at the weapons laboratories. They add the program is contrary to the “general and complete disarmament” of atomic weapons required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which the U.S. has signed.
(Thomas C. Fox is NCR editor and can be reached at tfox@ncronline.org)
WHY is the USA playing around
WHY is the USA playing around with these deadly weapons while several European countries are on the toally negative side????
Are we at the level of third grade boys on the playground???
So Obama the leader of what
So Obama the leader of what Cardinal Stafford called the party of death, now leads us back toward sanity and a more Christ-like stance. I knew there were many good Christian reasons to vote for the man.
I'm in love with President
I'm in love with President Obama. Any and all gains in the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons is to be applauded. Beware the "military-industrial complex". Ike was right. Bush played it for all it was worth. Hope watchdogs are in place to keep it from rearing its nasty head. Hurray Mr. President!
Nuclear weapons made with old
Nuclear weapons made with old technology are less stable; as they get older, it is increasingly questionable if they would even work; and if they were ever tampered with or even stolen, they have relatively few safeguards from being detonated.
Newer weapons would be more stable; there would not be a reason to wonder if they would work; and they can be designed so that even if stolen, they have good safeguards against being detonated.
Hmmm...easier to detonate by the wrong people, vs. harder? Obama chose easier.
Less stable...or more stable? Obama chose less stable.
Less certain they will work, or more certain? Obama chose less certain.
On that latter point. I realize how distasteful it is to talk about being sure your nukes work. We don't want ever to use them. "Just get rid of them!" comes the response. Very well, that's a great objective.
However, as long as you are going to have them, having nukes that you wonder may not work does not make anyone safer! It can only add a bit more temptation on the part of an enemy; it can only cause this country to plan to fire more of them if--God forbid they were to be used--and it only makes reductions in numbers of weapons harder to achieve, because you have to discount the effectiveness of the ones you keep.
Finally, the jibe about keeping people working misses a key point: if you don't have anyone actually working on designing and building these things, for decades, that means the people who are still around who actually have practical vs. theoretical knowledge of such things, get older and older. It seems to me its in our best interest to have a good supply of capable people who have real experience with such things. How are we better off if unfriendlies know more about such things than we do?
Don't confuse the age of the
Don't confuse the age of the plutonium pits with the age of the surrounding physics package. Nearly all of the old weapons built during the 50's and 60's are gone, completely dismantled and the pits reused in newer models. The sole survivor from the 60s are fifty B53 bombs (built from 1962-65), which are in inactive storage (disassembled parts) as part of the US enduring stockpile. While the B61 design was first created in 1966, the existing modifications and active weapons of that type date from 1979 and later.
While the current actively deployed weapons are designs from the 70s and 80s, the particular weapons themselves were not necessarily built only during that timeframe, and in any case have undergone modifications to extend their lifetimes or to replace the chemical explosives with more insensitive types. The US military is confident that the existing weapons in our stockpile will work and have safeguards against being detonated accidently or by unauthorized parties.
You can be sure that with newer arms reductions agreements to be negotiated, the military will retain the newer models and dismantle the older ones. But as far as I'm concerned, the sooner we can rid ourselves of these things the better.
I'm disappointed by people
I'm disappointed by people who grasp at straws and refuse to see the truth. The RRW has been defeated every year in the Congress. While it's nice that it's not in the President's budget this year, it wouldn't have been funded anyway. Obama is tossing this token crumb to us while embarking on a highly militarized policy. He won't even tolerate having a single peace person in his Administration, having appointed a "nest of hawks" into key positions.
Obama has sent additional troops into Afghanistan. He has ordered military strikes on Pakistan, an ostensible ally. He has announced that the U.S. military will stay in Iraq indefinitely. 50,000 troops will remain after the "combat brigades" leave to fight elsewhere, and one of their stated missions will be "conducting targeted counter-terrorism missions" - in other words, engaging in combat.
[The x after my name is to get around NCR's new policy of forbidding comments from registered users. I'm a registered user.]
Just like President Bush did every year, he has proposed to spend over half of all discretionary spending on the military. He proposed increased military spending, increasing the size of the Army, and increasing the size of the Marine Corps. Those last two were resisted by President Bush, who instead proposed beginning to close bases abroad to make troops available. Obama appears intent on retaining our imperial presence around the globe - 737 major military bases in 63 foreign countries.
As far as militarism goes, I'm not sure Obama is any better than McCain would have been. Perhaps worse, because towards the end of the campaign, he was indicating he would look at the military for budget savings.
Obama is a consistent death ethic President. He is a firm militarist, dedicated to mass murder. He is a pro-abortion extremist. He favors the death penalty. I don't understand why people are treating him like he's the Messiah. He's more like the Spectre of Death.
The campaign's over. You can
The campaign's over. You can stop spinning Rush, I mean Bill.
I think this is a good move
I think this is a good move by Mr.Obama and it will definitely be appriciated by the world.
The bottom line is, there are
The bottom line is, there are too many nukes in the world. If this is a token gesture as an entree to global arms reduction, so be it. I think the worries above about maintaining nuclear expertise are cogent, but there is still a lot of money being pumped into the maintenance and recycling of nuclear ordnance, so I think the expertise is still being maintained. After all, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge are far from being closed down. Another thing to remember is that the first nukes we detonated, worked on the first try.
Someday down the pike, we may need nukes for asteroid deflection, so I think we'll still need them, and I mean fusion bombs, in our toolbox, perhaps under international control.
The Bush-Cheney era is over.
The Bush-Cheney era is over.
We cant waste tens of millions of dollars just to maintain these jobs. Not when we have a war to win. Lets support our new commander in chief and win the important war, the war in Afghanistan. That money could buy dozens of Predator robot bombers, each one capable of taking out dozens of villages.
Brother Chaynes, Let me see
Brother Chaynes,
Let me see if I understand your writing:
"That money could buy dozens of Predator robot bombers, each one capable of taking out dozens of villages."
Have you read the so-called just war theory, the one our present and past Popes have declared obsolete due to the impossibility under current warmaking of assuring discrimination and proportionality?
Under what clause of the Just War Theory do you find the "taking out of dozens of villages" permissable?
(ANSWER: none. It is unjust, immoral and wrong, and directly condemned by our Popes.)
your poorest servant,
frere charles
Time to develop a catholic
Time to develop a catholic view of the Atomic world.
I’m happy to read of the cuts in new-generation nuclear weapon development by President Obama, and go on to say that I believe it is the very wholeness, and implicit holiness of the Atomic world and nuclear energy itself, that is waiting to be researched. And this is work that the Catholic Community, more than any, have the insight and instinct to develop.
I’d preface my comments by saying that as a young man, I worked as a geologist in Western Canada, searching for uranium. From that first meeting with the subject of atomic energy, I came in time to see that our knowledge of the atom and nuclear processes is as yet quite incomplete.
The quickest insight I can offer on this subject is to say that our understanding of nuclear physics comes entirely from our ingrained habit of studying the particle world always with protestant eyes.
I mean no disrespect for the Protestant faith. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the scientific methods which describe the Atomic world to us, follow a philosophy of detachment and rational thought which is typically protestant and typical of our left brain processes.
In other words, we have developed a knowledge of the particle world which entirely ignores the subjective information and insights which come from a catholic kind of awareness for this same small world, which is in part also within us.
It is a kind and compassionate awareness and concern for the particle world that is missing from all our knowledge and perception of the particle world.
Far from being airy fairy and speculative, I find that by attending to the subjective nature of the effects and processes and energy in the atoms - most especially in the fission process - that the highly social nature of the particles and the spiritual nature of the energy between them becomes very evident.
We are clearly working in a dimension that is far more lively and sentient and sensitive than our scientific mind has so far cared or dared to consider.
I have created a web site to discuss this whole way of looking. The URL is: www.nuclearnewcomer.com
It is not perfectly written. I’m not a writer so much as a man curious about the spiritual nature of myself and inevitably, the whole Universe. I was raised within a protestant household and society, but married a catholic Irish woman. I’ve learned from her how there are values which are second nature to the catholic eye (and ear) but which never appear on the protestant radar. We always have to work together to make good sense of things.
To go further than just halting weapons research, I would say that our real task is to develop an holistic understanding of the Atomic world and the energy within it. The prevailing knowledge, upon which we have built our reactors and weapons, ignores about half of the information available to us. We can not hope to resolve any of the nuclear issues by simply staying with the entrenched narrow single-minded views of science and our left brain, even while that view is correct in itself.
I don’t mean to point up the fault line in our present approach so much as to emphasise the remarkable creative situation we are in, of being able now to develop an holistic or holographic knowledge of the Atomic world. A knowledge which merges protestant perception with catholic experience.
For me, there was an enormous coming home feeling when I took the time to look with catholic interest into the particle world, and began to recognise the parallel and parable nature of this small world.
Atoms are the family systems of the particle population. And fission is a process of divorce and separation we impose upon the family and community systems of the particle world.
The painful emotional energy (what our protestant mind labels - radiation) can be sensibly understood to be a measure of the suffering and despair which arises in the particle world as a direct consequence of the break up of family life down there.
This is such a big subject. We have an excellent knowledge of the physics of the atom. The next step is for us to have the wisdom and determination to develop an equal knowledge of the metaphysics of this same small world.
There is immediate work waiting and needing to be done, to follow up on this very obvious and long overdue insight.
I don’t allude to this religious metaphor so much in my web site. When I was preparing the site, I was addressing in my mind a secular scientific audience, trying to show the benefits of opening to this wider deeper looking part of ourselves.
There is so much waiting for us to discover. Or rediscover. Not only about the universal nature of the energy in the atoms, there’s also the universal nature of the energy in ourselves. It surely looks and acts and feels like the same stuff. Which affirms for me the sensible and intelligent and symmetrical and family-based nature of our whole and holy Universe.
All in all, a divine sort of place. How good it all is. How God it all is.
Thanks for the opening and opportunity to comment.
With good wishes.
Ian Turnbull
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