Los Alamos Environmental Impact
    By Willem Malten
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Wednesday 06 September 2006

    When over 80% of the American public has expressed a desire for mutual nuclear disarmament and still the US nuclear labs (Los Alamos and Sandia in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore in California) keep pursuing nuclear weapons upgrades - and now a new plutonium warhead core ("pit") factory - there is something seriously wrong. The sheer magnitude of nuclear weapons and everything that comes with them - the research and testing, the production, the contamination, the ever-increasing security - is simply incompatible with a functioning democracy. Now that democracy may have to be rebuilt from the bottom up.

    The latest nuclear insult to democracy, common sense and morality is described in a document called the "Draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement," or SWEIS for short, for the operation of Los Alamos National Laboratory. In it, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), an autonomous fiefdom within the Department of Energy (DOE), describes the first 5 years of its plan to turn Los Alamos into a nuclear bomb factory.

    Few details of this plan are provided, despite nearly 2,000 pages of text. In sum, the SWEIS says Los Alamos will be making 80 new plutonium pits per year by 2012. Allowing for defective pits and pits needed for testing, NNSA expects to be building 50 brand-new nuclear weapons per year by that date, pits being the limiting factor in the whole nuclear bomb-making business. After 2012, production is expected to ramp up to 200 pits per year or even more. Billions of dollars in new construction funds are planned.

    Pits are hollow shells of fissile material, usually plutonium, and other metals. When surrounded by high explosives, they make an atomic bomb. In a thermonuclear weapon, this first (or "primary") fission stage ignites a second stage (the "secondary").

    The SWEIS purports to examine the environmental impact of the waste and contamination that will be generated in pit manufacture - as if Los Alamos could be trusted in this regard, and as if writing a big book about the problem somehow fixed it. In reality, the SWEIS is a bit of a macabre sideshow, with multiple levels of absurdity, like talking - and just talking, mind you - about reducing the smoke from the ovens of Auschwitz.

    Much more than just environmental impact is at issue here. What's not mentioned in the SWEIS is the psychic environment that goes hand in hand with the manufacturing of Weapons of Mass Destruction - that is, the denial of any sort of future for our children and what that disturbing realization does to them. Is it a coincidence that New Mexico has among the very highest rates of juvenile suicide of any state?

    We should be equally concerned about the international "environment" created by trashing treaties like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). It is our own complicity in the nuclear build-up, this bad faith, that gives people all over the world reason to see us as enemies. If the world's largest conventional army needs nuclear weapons, doesn't every country?

    And what about moral contamination? Nuclear weapons help condemn most of humanity to live in a perpetual state of fear, slavishly following a global master elite, being brainwashed to accept the propaganda slurry that masquerades as education or news.

    What about the commercial "environment?" How are we going to control a privatized corporate nuclear-weapon industry, especially now that the contract for Los Alamos' Weapons of Mass Destruction Factory has gone to Bechtel and its cronies. Corporations work to maximize profits for their shareholders, in this case fomenting global conflict to support a lively market for their "product." We need more Congressional and regulatory oversight, not less. Concern about rogue contractors is not farfetched: remember, the FBI had to raid Rocky Flats Plant to shut it down.

    The vision behind making new pits is a combined nightmare of Fascism and Hibakusha. The threshold of Fascism is crossed when spying and fear become tools of control, when torture is condoned and when civilian targets become commonplace. Originally, the term Hibakusha referred to the survivors of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of the Hibakusha, even those who at some point were able to function again in some semblance of normalcy, are marked by scars that will never heal from the torture that was perpetrated on them in one single flash of human madness.

    The Hibakusha phenomenon has been spreading over the whole world since 1945. Now we have Hibakusha in the Bikini Atoll, in Australia, in Kosovo, Afghanistan and in Iraq. We have Hibakusha in the Ukraine, and Belarus. We have Hibakusha here in America itself like the Shoshone Nation (the most bombed nation on earth) in Nevada, or here in our backyard, New Mexico, we have Hibakusha in Laguna, Acoma, in Grants, in Navajo, and in Espanola. If it were up to corporations like Bechtel, BWTX, Lockheed Martin, the Washington Group, plus the University of California, we soon would all be Hibakusha.

    Declaring war on ill-defined concepts like "terror" or "drugs" involves the prospect of endless wars, without any measure of victory and with a totally arbitrary distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." The only winners are the corporations that make the weapons, which gives them an interest in "privatizing conflict" and in managing the public perception by media control. In a world where most of the money is spent on weapons, most of the problems start looking like military problems and most of the solutions look military as well.

    We need to understand the bankruptcy this has wreaked on civil society. This blind militarism is the cause for proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs, worldwide. Nuclear weapons are the very spear point of this culture of violence - the ultimate failure of diplomacy - highlighting our inability to talk with each other as humans among humans. People have to understand that the Fallujahs of our time are just a prelude to the use of nuclear devices. These weapons are not just aimed at the people of the world, they are not just taking away the resources of the next generations - these weapons are aimed at the heart of human dignity. Yet our whole foreign policy rests on the fear that these weapons instill. They provide a kind of "civilized terrorism" as a tool for the commander in chief.

    Neighborhoods, communities and cities are now the vehicles that express the people's will and have to represent the changes we are seeking. True security and democracy comes from a stronger sense of community, from getting closer. This is why it is significant that Santa Fe adopted a second resolution against pit production in Los Alamos and in favor of strengthening the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and other disarmament treaties. Being a City of Peace and Holy Faith (Santa Fe) at this point means we must resist the Weapons of Mass Destruction Facility called LANL on a mesa nearby. The people of the world are watching and wondering if We the People are up to the task. Brothers and sisters, let's take courage: It started here, let's stop it here.

    Los Alamos Study Group: http://www.lasg.org/

    http://www.lasg.org/campaigns/PUPitProd.htm

    http://www.lasg.org/NNSAPrivatization.pdf

    Additional research for this article was provided by Greg Mellow.