After a 14-year absence, the United States now has the ability to make military-specified plutonium pits for nuclear warheads, Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Tuesday, drawing accusations that the United States is gearing up to produce a rash of nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos spokesperson Jim Danneskiold said the United States has not been able to produce the pits, which contain the plutonium required for nuclear fission in a bomb, since 1989 when the only U.S. plant capable of making them broke environmental laws and was shut down by the FBI.
Danneskiold said the achievement is significant because the ability to maintain its nuclear weapons stock is key to the U.S. defense system.
But critics interpreted the action as a signal that the United States is ready to get back into major weapons production.
\This is the first step in the Bush administration's plan to resume full-scale production of a new generation of nuclear weapons,"" said Bob Schaeffer, a spokesperson for the national group Alliance for Nuclear Accountability.
""At the very time the U.S. is aggressively telling other nations that they should not pursue nuclear weapons of mass destruction, you know, disarming Iraq, threatening North Korea, trying to control India and Pakistan ... the U.S. is demonstrating exactly the opposite behavior,"" Schaeffer said. ""[It's] adding on to the arsenal that already is the foremost nuclear power in the world.""
Officials from the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the National Nuclear Security Administration, have denied those accusations. NNSA spokesperson Bryan Wilkes said the government is interested in maintaining its aging nuclear stockpile, not increasing it.
As the plutonium in existing pits decays, Wilkes said, the government must replace them with new pits or else its stockpile will get too low.
""What we would be doing, essentially, is we would be very slowly unilaterally disarming,"" he said.
Wilkes denied that NNSA has been told to increase weapons
production.
""There have been no new requests from the White House or the Pentagon for more nuclear weapons or new nuclear weapons,"" he said.
Danneskiold said the laboratory will continue to make the pits until a permanent facility to manufacture them can be built. Wilkes said construction would not be complete until 2018. Meanwhile, Los Alamos will produce about a half dozen pits per year until 2007, when it will complete the certification process and begin making 10 pits per year.
""Between now and 2018 we need a way to make these plutonium pits, because, you know, I don't think the Russians are going to make them or the Chinese,"" Wilkes said.
