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Where the Weapons Are

By Jay Cogland

et’s start by reviewing the weapons of mass destruction. I would assert that there is only one class of weapons that is a true weapon of mass destruction. That of course is nuclear weapons. No other—chemical, biological don’t come anywhere close—nothing else has the military precision that military planners count upon in waging war. I assert that chemical and biological weapons are actually weapons of mass terror. Perhaps they’re even better called weapons of mass confusion. Will they kill people? You bet they will. But nuclear weapons are just orders of magnitude above chemical and biological weapons. I could easily go off on a political rant that we can’t find these WMDs in Iraq. Not only are they not there, but they don’t have true weapons of mass destruction when you compare it to our arsenal. It’s really self-serving for the United States to enter into conventions against both chemical and biological weapons—conventions which the United States doesn’t fully observe to begin with. It’s not out of some kind of grand altruism that this country enters into those conventions. It’s because we have the weapon of choice. We have the weapons of mass destruction...

New Mexico is such a cool state. We’re so much better than any other state. There are three nuclear weapons laboratories and we have two of them. We are hot dogs. Not only that but if New Mexico were to secede from the Union—which I don’t particularly think is a bad idea—we’d probably be the third or fourth nuclear power in the world, in terms of the weapons that are physically present in the state. So that you can enjoy the next time that you fly in or out of Albequeque International, if you know where to look, about two miles to the east of the end of the runway, there is a low-lying facility that’s partially buried. It’s estimated that there’s nearly 3000-4000 warheads sitting right there. I deeply love New Mexico. It’s such a superior state for many reasons. So there you go...

I’m going to head toward the stockpile stewardship program. I do follow the Bob Woodward theory of follow the money. In terms of constant dollars, the average spent on core nuclear weapons research, development and production programs throughout the Cold War was $4 billion. What we know [has been] proposed for fiscal year ’04 is $6.8 billion. So to put this in a historical perspective, ’04 will be the highest year ever in terms of money, second only to the peak year of the Ronald Reagan buildup. I particularly wanted to point out that we’re talking [about] a level of funding exceeded only by that peak year of Reagan’s. If there is anything I want to do today it is to help motivate you all to grapple more with these nuclear issues.

Intelligence
Now I don’t need to tell you how badly things are going with the Bush administration, that the picture has so radically changed. One serious thing that has changed is that the entire concept of national security is different. It’s now geared toward pre-emptive strikes. What’s so weird to me is this idea of pre-emption: Are these weapons to be used against targets that we actually know are there? That we have the “intelligent intelligence” to pin down?

Just look at the case of Iraq. Don’t be under any illusions whatsoever. This new military doctrine of pre-emptive strikes very much includes nuclear strikes if they are deemed necessary. With what I believe will be an escalating crisis with North Korea: As nutty as Kim Jong Il may be, we essentially have pushed this crazy guy into a corner. He’s fully aware of the fact that the United States came out with a nuclear posture review, that North Korea was now being explicitly targeted with nuclear fighting plans. So you take an already paranoid guy and give him plenty of basis for paranoia, and we see an end game where now nuclear war is very, very possible.

Going to the robust nuclear earth penetrator real quick—this is essentially a first-strike weapon. The proposed rationale is to go after chemical and biological weapons that are deeply buried targets. This is a matter of physics: you can’t get a warhead to penetrate more than 50-60 feet. There are two weapons currently being modified to be this earth penetrator. One is the V61, the other is the B83, a Lawrence Livermore design. The B83 is a one-megaton weapon. I use this to illustrate the point—don’t be fooled that this is going to be a mini-nuke. It could be a very large weapon that could throw up millions of cubic meters of soil that will come back down as fallout. It is not going to be a surgical, clean weapon. First of all, there is no such thing with a nuclear weapon anyway. On mini-nukes, it’s really serious that the labs are getting back into it. But I want to emphasize that they’re getting back into it.

We’ve had mini-nukes since the ’50s. If anyone goes down to Albequeque, I highly recommend going to the Atomic Science Museum down there. It is so weird. You can go see backpacks that guys were supposed to put on their backs and then go crawl through a tunnel in Germany, bring a wire back 400 yards and blow this sucker up. So we’ve had mini-nukes for a long time already. What I fear—what I actually know—is that the nuclear weapons complex and especially the three laboratories are simply highly self-serving as an institutional matter. They are now lavished with appropriations and a very decent lifestyle. You ought to see these yuppie-looking characters in their jogging outfits running around Los Alamos in this nice environment. They’ve got themselves a cushy life. They definitely intend to keep it.

I want to get down to the modern pit facility. You all watch out for this one. A plutonium pit is the critical core of a nuclear weapon and the pun is intended when I say critical. It’s roughly grapefruit-sized. When detonated, it compresses and reaches criticality. It’s now used as the trigger for modern thermonuclear weapons. This is what Rocky Flats is all about. What they’re looking to do now is create this modern pit facility. Sounds so generic, but what it really is is a new superbomb factory. That’s all there is to it. They want to produce pits on the order of up to 500 a year. This is approaching Cold War rates. They claim that these capacity requirements are justified by classified analysis that we’ll never see. These will never be revealed to the public. So as I stand here and pontificate, your government is making decisions to resume nuclear weapons bomb production at rates approaching the Cold War. Where’s the Soviet Union? Where’s the resurgent Russia? It’s not out there. This is nuts.

Finally, this is explicitly stated by the U.S. Department of Energy, they want this modern pit facility for the purpose of producing new design nuclear weapons. Molly [Mechtenberg-Berrigan and] Frida [Berrigan] have already referred to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. How is it possible that we might resume testing in the future? Well, get ready for this: a $4 billion facility that has the express purpose of producing new-design nuclear weapons. I urge you all to take a greater interest in what I regard as these most serious of issues, and please get active about it

Contact: Nuclear Watch, 551 W. Cordova Rd. #808, Santa Fe, NM 87505; (505)989-7342; info@nukewatch.org.

Jay Cogland is the director of the New Mexico-based NuclearWatch.