by CKR
Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, has written an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in the May/June Foreign Policy.
There’s nothing new in it except that the author is Robert S. McNamara, and even that is not entirely a surprise. McNamara has been having conscience pangs about his role in the Vietnam war for some time now.
His argument is that the United States must immediately give up nuclear weapons as a tool of foreign policy. Main points (in no particular order):
The United States has never endorsed the policy of “no first use,” against nuclear or nonnuclear states.The president still has the nuclear “football” (communications package) with him wherever he travels.
The United States should remove all strategic nuclear weapons from “hair-trigger” alert.
US policies are seen by many to be in contravention of its responsibilities under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
There is no way to effectively contain a nuclear strike, and no guarantee against unlimited escalation once a strike occurs.
Plans being discussed by the Bush administration would require new production facilities for fissile materials and nuclear weapons.
The last point above has some interesting possibilites that McNamara doesn’t go into. The late Carson Mark, leader of the theoretical division at Los Alamos, proposed in 1989 that, since the tritium production reactors were shut down, an end to its production could serve as a gradual de facto means of nuclear disarmament. Tritium is a component of fusion weapons (“hydrogen bombs”), and it has a 12-year half-life, which means that half of it is gone in twelve years. So as the tritium decayed, the capabilities of the weapons would decay. Of course, an agreement would have to be worked out with the (then) Soviet Union to stop producing tritium, too.
Mark’s suggestion has gone by the board. Manufacture of tritium is expected to start up this summer at TVA reactors.
But let’s look at plutonium manufacturing. The United States has no facility for manufacturing the plutonium components (“pits”) of nuclear weapons. Rocky Flats (Colorado) used to do that, but it was shut down for environmental reasons in the 1980s. It won’t be reopening. The only facility in the United States that can work with plutonium is Los Alamos. An environmental impact statement has been approved that allows Los Alamos to manufacture up to 50 pits a year. (Hm…it used to be on line. But the DOE has been stashing all sorts of stuff away for the past couple of years.)
Who is going to want a pit factory in their back yard? Heck, Las Vegas doesn’t want the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository within a hundred miles and several hundred feet underground. There are some in job-poor southern New Mexico who would be happy to see it as an adjunct to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, but there are others in northern New Mexico who would fight it.
Now think about putting the Modern Pit Facility in more populated areas. The fights and paperwork would take many years.
But let’s consider those fifty pits a year at Los Alamos. If the lifetime of a nuclear weapon is 25 years,* then the stockpile that can be maintained by remanufacturing fifty a year is 50 x 25, or 1250 nuclear weapons. If we assume that half are kept in reserve and half are deployed, this is 625 deployed nuclear weapons, or a little more than a quarter of the maximum allowed by the Moscow Treaty. And, excuse me, can anyone list 625 reasonable targets for US nuclear weapons?
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*I’m assuming that this is also the life of a pit. That might be longer than the life of the weapon overall, but it wouldn’t be shorter.