Nuclear watchdogs want to consolidate weapon labs

[April 09, 2009]  ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Watchdog groups want the U.S. to reduce its nuclear weapons complex to just three sites as a step toward the nuclear arms-free world that President Barack Obama envisioned in a speech days ago in Prague.

"We have a different declared direction ... (that) makes our recommendations a whole lot more possible than they were before" Obama's speech Sunday, said Jay Coghlan of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, one of the authors of the report released Wednesday by the Nuclear Weapons Complex Consolidation Policy Network.

The group's proposal would cut nuclear weapons work to essential operations, Coghlan said during a telephone news conference.

The network says the only justification for nuclear weapons is to deter an attack on the United States. The authors say the nation needs no more than 500 nuclear weapons -- about one-tenth of current estimates of the U.S. stockpile.

The president said the U.S. -- the only nation to ever use a nuclear weapon -- has a responsibility to lead in ridding the world of "the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War." In his speech -- given fresh urgency by North Korea's rocket launch just hours earlier -- Obama said the U.S. would host a summit within the next year on eventually eliminating nuclear weapons.

Members of the policy network will discuss their plan with members of Congress and the administration in the coming weeks.

One of the network's key recommendations is for the U.S. to stop adding new military capabilities to existing weapons, stop designing new weapons and reduce research. Instead, they should simply be maintained and repaired when necessary, much like maintenance on a car.

"If the carburetor fails, I don't want to go to General Motors and have them design a new carburetor. I want to go to a mechanic," said the report's main author, Robert L. Civiak.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, in a statement released from its Washington, D.C., headquarters, said the U.S. must ensure weapons are safe, secure and reliable as long as it maintains a nuclear deterrent.

Undermining each nuclear site's unique mission "would be detrimental to national security and extremely costly to the taxpayer," NNSA spokesman Damien LaVera said.

The network recommends consolidating nuclear weapons operations by 2025: Surveillance and testing should be at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico; engineering at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque; and storage and dismantling work at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas. The three facilities are within 280 miles of each other.

The group also recommends eliminating funding for a new plutonium facility at Los Alamos and a uranium processing facility at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn. A Kansas City, Mo., plant responsible for procuring nuclear weapons components should be canceled, according to the group.

The recommendations would save about two-thirds of the current nuclear weapons complex budget, most of that within 10 years, said another of the report's authors, Christopher Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The network said it wants the NNSA to be redirected, not eliminated. The group proposed that weapons labs in California, Tennessee and South Carolina expand their non-weapons work, such as alternative energy research.

In December, the Department of Energy, then under the Bush administration, approved its own program to limit the most dangerous nuclear material to five sites and consolidate management of nuclear weapons.

The DOE recommended limiting plutonium, highly enriched uranium and production of tritium -- a gas that makes warheads perform more efficiently -- to five sites, compared with seven currently. None of the complexes would close.

[Associated Press; By SUE MAJOR HOLMES]

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