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LANL still has responsibility to monitor Russian nukes after treaty suspension, lab head says

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Feb 27, 2023

One of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s jobs just became harder with Russia suspending its participation in an arms control treaty: verifying the country’s nuclear arsenal.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced this week his nation would no longer take part in the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, which calls for Russia and the U.S. to submit to inspections of their stockpiles and to cap the number of their warheads — a decision that will require the greater use of technology to gauge the arsenal, lab Director Thom Mason said in an online town hall Monday.

Although Putin intends to back out of the treaty, the lab is still tasked with finding ways to tally Russia’s nuclear weapons to see if it is complying with the treaty’s terms, Mason said.

Russia has actually granted less access to its weapons for a while, but the announcement suggests a more definite halt to inspections, he said, which will make the lab’s job more challenging.

“In the event that there are [treaty] partners who are not cooperative, we have a responsibility to try and understand what’s going on by other means,” Mason said. “We have to figure out what’s going on.”

A nuclear security manager who was on hand said the lab must keep tracking nuclear weapons as part of the non-proliferation effort.

“Non-nuclear-proliferation is still a cornerstone of our mission — it’s very critical,” said Ted Wyka, manager of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Los Alamos field office.

The town hall was held a few days after the anniversary of Russia invading Ukraine. Putin’s decision to withdraw from START was seen by the U.S. and allies as a statement Russia was removing its nuclear restraint in response to the West aiding Ukraine.

Still, Mason didn’t talk of Russia specifically when discussing the lab’s goal of producing 30 plutonium bomb cores, or pits, per year by 2026 to modernize the U.S. arsenal, which he contends is vital to boost the nuclear deterrent.

An audience member said the U.S. was antagonizing Russia and trying to launch a new arms race and then asked Mason why the lab and the nuclear security agency planned to make more pits instead of reducing the number of weapons.

Mason said the purpose of the pits was to sustain, not expand, the arsenal. The new pits will be key in replacing the outdated Minuteman missile with a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missile called the Sentinel, he said.

Greg Mello, who heads the anti-nuclear Los Alamos Study Group, asked Mason what value the lab’s pits would be to the nation between the time it produces the first one and when Savannah River Site in South Carolina begins producing an additional 50 pits per year.

Mason said the lab is expected to make six or seven prototypical pits, which is laying the groundwork for pursuing its goal of 30 “war reserve” pits that will be used as triggers for the new warhead.

In an email after the town hall, Mello complained Mason didn’t answer his question. Mello wrote the point he was making was the pits will have no purpose because the new warhead isn’t expected to be rolled out until the 2030s.

“So the question arises: What is the nation getting for the LANL production effort that merits the investment?” Mello wrote.

Other sources in the past year have either expressed doubt about the 2026 timeline or have hinted that jumpstarting pit operations could take longer.

In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office said time and cost estimates to produce pits, including 30 per year at the lab, are severely lacking and could make it difficult for federal managers to avoid cost overruns, delays and other problems.

Ramping up pit production demands detailed scheduling, a careful accounting of costs and clear estimates of how long various tasks will take — none of which are being done by the agency in charge of nuclear weapons, the GAO said in the report.

Without this essential information, any plans to gear up the facilities to make plutonium pits is unreliable and raise questions about whether production can be accomplished by the target date, the GAO said.

Mason said systems went into place in January to address the GAO’s concerns, such as the more detailed planning and scheduling needed for pit operations to get underway by 2026.

But a management plan for the lab described how the pit production deadline is more likely to be missed because of preparatory work being delayed for 13 months during a hard-hitting stretch of the pandemic.

Also, a deputy energy secretary’s memo describes moving in some of the minimum equipment necessary for pit production by 2030, several years past the current goal.

A spokeswoman for the nuclear security agency wrote in an email an increasing number of pits can be produced each year without all the new equipment.

As the lab pursues pit production, it has expanded its workforce to almost 15,400 people. The lab hired 2,100 workers last year, 60% of them from New Mexico, Mason said.

An audience member said explosions are heard at the lab, making some people wonder whether underground nuclear tests are taking place.

Mason said explosive nuclear testing has been banned in the U.S. since 1992. The lab uses supercomputers and other means to test the effectiveness of weapons, he said.

Non-nuclear explosive devices are tested on-site, he said.

Wyka said one of the lab’s roles is stockpile stewardship, which means ensuring the current weapons are in good shape.

“We need to have weapons that work,” Wyka said.


Greg Mello published comment:

Thank you for keeping on top of this and writing it up, Scott. This event was, as all such events are, a "modified limited hang-out," in Watergate terms. Very modified and very limited. The laboratory treats citizens like subordinate children that can't possible have any need to know what is actually going on. This is structural, so I don't mean disrespect for the staff who work to put these things together. A radically bright dose of sunlight would improve NNSA's operations at LANL. Two comments:

  • Russia has suspended implementation of New START, and says it will abide by the quantitative limits of the treaty, but did not withdraw from it. The treaty expires on Feb. 4, 2026, and there is a lot of fence-mending to do between now and then if this last arms control treaty between the two countries is not to die with no replacement.

  • It was hard to formulate the "what is the value of LANL pits" question in a way that would elicit a concrete response, given classification boundaries and political sensitivity. Thank you for including the issue. The now-expected production delays at LANL push its pit production out in time, closer to the expected startup of a much larger production facility at the Savannah River Site, which is a necessary facility if the U.S. is to maintain a nuclear arsenal, given the inadequacies, poor safety and reliability, and the age of LANL facilities. From other sources, we know that the SRS facility, which is and will be brand new and built to much higher safety standards, and is about five times the size of LANL's old production facility ( which also has other plutonium missions), will be able to make much more than "50" pits per year all by itself. There is also the possibility of running a second production shift there, as pointed out by the site manager two weeks ago in a talk. That might approximately double production from whatever the greater-than-50 pit baseline production is, according to prior DOE studies. From the arms control perspective, not rushing into an arms race would be a good thing. While Dr. Mason is correct that LANL pits will be used in the Sentinel system, he neglected to mention that the initial warheads to be fielded on that system already exist and are "safe" and reliable for a long time to come, as NNSA defines these terms. There are enough of these existing modern, well-studied, "safe" warheads to put one on each Sentinel missile, with several dozen to spare. So LANL production, which will cost about $15 billion to start up and entail enormous changes in the region, has nothing to do with providing "weapons that work," as Ted Wyka erroneously said. LANL could train a much smaller number of people, mostly for SRS, and demonstrate processes, without generating nearly so much waste or cramming so much work of all kinds into that old, cramped facility, with really no degradation to the U.S. so-called "deterrent." So what exactly is the deterrent value, in conventional terms, of the few pits LANL will be able to make in the interim? That was the question. The real answer is that this value proposition is still being worked out, since NNSA does not have an actual reliable schedule for LANL production. We believe Dr. Mason and his staff should have refused the production mission, as opposed to the technology stewardship and training mission, when it became apparent that 24/7 work would be necessary to fulfill it. As matters stand now, no NNSA study supports construction and operation of two pit production sites. That two-site decision was of a political nature, made under Trump to satisfy the New Mexico senators at the time (Heinrich and Udall) and the extreme nuclear hawks allied with them. For these senators, it was a nuclear-colonial economic development plan for New Mexico. For the arms control community, the realistic goal should be to delay pit production until it is actually needed, which would dampen contractor- and pork-barrel-driven aspirations for a lucrative arms race.

    I should have added that the headline is correct re "suspension" of the treaty. Their reasons for doing this do make sense, from their perspective. We have been warning about this for some years now.


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