LANL Officials Defend Pit Production Proposal

Top managers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico launched a public relations drive this week to shore up support for a plan to increase the site’s production of plutonium pits used as nuclear weapon triggers, the Albuquerque Journal reported (see GSN, March 3).

Under a National Nuclear Security Administration proposal to overhaul the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, Los Alamos would become the nation’s sole pit production center.  The move is intended to revive a limited capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons, a capability officials say could become necessary to counter new threats or replace aging weapons in the U.S. stockpile.

However, skeptics have argued that new pit production is unnecessary because nuclear weapon cores could be reused as they are removed from older nuclear weapons as part of planned force reductions.

“Say ‘no’ to the continued production of nuclear weapons,” Marlin Good of the Albuquerque Mennonite Church said at a public hearing Tuesday in the city.  Such work is “immoral and unjustifiable,” he said.

The Energy Department agency plan to hold 20 public hearings across the country to discuss the wider proposal before the Bush administration decides later this year whether to move forward with the effort.

Los Alamos Associate Director Terry Wallace defended the pit production plan at the hearing Tuesday while other officials talked to various news organizations.  Officials said they have attempted to dispel “myths” about the plan, such as the belief that it would expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

“That’s not true,” said Glenn Mara, head of nuclear weapons production at Los Alamos.  “We’re at a major crossroads. … It is time for the public to be as informed as I can make them.”

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group, an organization opposing continued nuclear weapons production, said officials at Los Alamos and elsewhere are pushing to win approval for the plan before the imminent retirement of Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the nuclear weapons program’s main supporter in Congress, and the end of President George W. Bush’s term in office in January.

“What you’re seeing now is a desperate effort,” Mello said (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, March 12).

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