Nuclear Weapon Core Delivered to Pantex Plant

The first nuclear weapon “pit” produced by the United States in nearly 20 years has been delivered from Los Alamos National Laboratory to a Texas manufacturing site for assembly in a nuclear warhead, the Energy Department announced yesterday (see GSN, June 11).

The pit — the softball-sized plutonium core of a nuclear weapon —was delivered to the Pantex warhead assembly site near Amarillo (National Nuclear Security Administration release, July 2).  

The pit is to be placed on a W88 warhead for a submarine-launched missile, the Associated Press reported.

Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Representative Heather Wilson (R-N.M.) gathered yesterday in Los Alamos with officials from the Energy and Defense departments to “congratulate the lab for a job well done,” said laboratory spokesman Kevin Roark.

Pit production halted in 1989 with the closure of the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado.  Los Alamos was assigned to create new pits, the first of which received NNSA certification in early June, AP reported.

The administration, a semiautonomous DOE agency that manages the nuclear weapons program , has asked the Los Alamos laboratory to produce 10 pits each year for the near term.

Jay Coghlan, executive director of the Nuclear Watch of New Mexico watchdog group, said the federal government restarted the pit program to “produce newly designed pits for new types of nuclear weapons.”

We have too many weapons and they ought to be retired anyway,” he said.  “There’s 10,000 intact weapons and there’s 15,000 pits in storage in Pantex.”

The nation’s nuclear laboratories could be put to better use working on non-nuclear issues such as pandemic disease and climate change, said Mike McCally, executive director of Physicians for Social Responsibility,

”If I were a lab director, I would see nuclear weapons production as a fading industry,” he said (Matt Mygatt, Associated Press/Houston Chronicle, July 2).

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