Alliance for Nuclear Accountability

For Immediate Release September 16, 2010
Contact: Susan Gordon 505-473-1670

ANA APPLAUDS SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE VOTE
ON NEW START TREATY: WARNS INCREASED WEAPONS SPENDING
WILL UNDERMINE NATIONAL SECURITY AND WASTE BILLIONS

Today’s vote by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to move the New START Treaty out of committee is a positive step in arms reductions, according to a national network of nuclear weapons watchdog groups. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), said the full Senate should now move quickly to ratify the treaty to protect U.S. security. There has been strong bipartisan support for New START, demonstrating the importance of further reductions in nuclear weapons stockpiles in the United States and Russia.

While ANA applauds today’s vote, it is still only a step toward securing treaty ratification. ANA is appalled, however, at the demands made to secure the votes. Several Senators have called for further increases in spending for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in order to expand U.S. capacity to produce nuclear weapons.

The Obama Administration’s 2011 budget called for $80 billion to be spent over the next ten years to rebuild the nuclear weapons complex including three new production facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory in NM, the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, TN and the Kansas City Plant. This is a 14% increase over the past year’s budget.

Despite this pledge by the Administration, a handful of Senator’s continue to demand even more money for NNSA claiming a $10 billion shortfall for construction of new production plants.

“The Obama Administration has provided more than enough money for NNSA. We have yet to see justification that large investments in nuclear weapons are needed,” said Susan Gordon, ANA director. “In addition, Obama is playing a dangerous game that trades expanding nuclear weapons production capacity to securing treaty ratification. Spending more money on nuclear weapons programs sends the wrong message to other nations, and undermines U.S. leadership in calling for a nuclear weapons-free world.”

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability is a national network of three-dozen grassroots and national groups representing the concerns of communities near U.S. nuclear weapons sites that are directly affected by 65 years of nuclear weapons production and waste contamination.

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published Monday, May 17, 2010

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 14, 2010

Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch, 505.989.7342, c. 505.920.7118, jay@nukewatch.org

Obama Bails Out Chance for Arms Reduction Treaty by Dramatically Increasing Nuclear Weapons Budgets

Santa Fe, NM – Yesterday President Obama submitted the new bilateral Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia, which makes modest reductions to the two countries’ nuclear weapons stockpiles, to the Senate for ratification. At the same time he submitted a modernization plan required by Congress that “includes investments of $80 billion to sustain and modernize the [U.S.] nuclear weapons complex over the next decade.” Given that two-thirds of the Senate is required for treaty ratifications a large political fight was always expected over a second attempt at ratifying the previously rejected Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). However, last December all 40 Republican senators plus one independent wrote to President Obama demanding modernization of both the stockpile and complex as a condition for New START ratification. Meanwhile, the prospects for ratification of the CTBT (first proposed by Prime Minister Nehru of India in 1954) look increasingly dim.

published Tuesday, February 02, 2010

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Tuesday, Feb. 2, 2010
By Martin Matishak
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration yesterday unveiled a spending plan that would increase funding for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to $11.2 billion in the next fiscal year (see GSN, Jan. 29).

The agency, a semiautonomous branch of the Energy Department, would receive a 13.4-percent budget increase in fiscal 2011 to maintain the country's nuclear stockpile and conduct nonproliferation activities around the globe, according to the White House funding request.

More than $7 billion would be devoted beginning Oct. 1 to "weapons activities," which ensure the safety and performance of the nation's atomic stockpile. The amount is a $624 million increase from this year.

Another $2.7 billion would be funneled to the agency's Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation program, a hike of 25.8 percent above fiscal 2010. That effort seeks to secure nuclear materials around the globe that could be used for weapons and convert them for peaceful purposes.

published Wednesday, January 27, 2010

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Alliance for Nuclear Accountability a national network of organizations working to address issues of nuclear weapons production and waste cleanup
http://www.ananuclear.org

for further information, contact:
Nickolas Roth 914-673-6666
Susan Gordon 505-577-8438
or local contacts listed at end of advisory

for immediate release Wednesday, January 27, 2010
WHAT TO LOOK FOR IN THE U.S. DEPT. OF ENERGY FY 2011
NUCLEAR WEAPONS BUDGET REQUEST

The FY 2011 budget request will be released on Monday, February 1, 2010. The Obama administration has laid out an aggressive nonproliferation agenda that includes deep reductions in nuclear stockpiles, ratification of a nuclear test ban, and decreased prominence for nuclear weapons in US defense policy. Despite this agenda, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) budget request will ask Congress to significantly increase nuclear weapons activities, including funding for construction of new facilities that will expand U.S. warhead production capacity. The DOE request will not reflect recent independent scientific conclusions that existing nuclear weapons can be reliably maintained for decades under current, well-established programs.

The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability (ANA), a national network representing communities downwind and downstream from U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, is concerned that increased funding for nuclear energy and weapons research and production will rob precious resources for needed environmental cleanup and clean, sustainable energy solutions.

Items of interest:

published Monday, January 25, 2010

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Published on National Catholic Reporter
by Joshua J. McElwee

The Obama administration is moving ahead with the development of new nuclear weapons components at three key weapons facilities at the same time it is conducting a sweeping review of U.S. nuclear weapons policies that could lead to further slashing the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

For the moment, U.S. nuclear weapons policies appear to be running in contrary directions, and while some critics of U.S. nuclear policy are cautiously optimistic, they are also worried President Obama’s nuclear disarmament vision is not yet being supported by concrete policy actions.

published Wednesday, January 06, 2010

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Wall Street Journal Article Makes Ill Advised Recommendations on the Future of Nuclear Weapons

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed supporting recommendations made in a letter sent to the President by 40 Republican Senators and Senator Joe Lieberman. The op-ed supports construction of new facilities and new warheads. The following is ANA’s analysis of the letter:

Modernization takes focus away from investments in nuclear weapons complex expertise that actually do need to be made.
- Verification: The national nuclear laboratories can uniquely develop technologies that will contribute to detecting nuclear tests around the world and facilitate verification of nuclear weapons reductions under arms control treaties with Russia.
- Safeguards: The national laboratories can improve technologies to detect diversion for military purposes of nuclear power technology or materials in countries without nuclear weapons.
- Dismantlement: The Labs can increase the rate of dismantlement (process by which nuclear warheads are removed from the stockpile, disassembled, and disposed of) to support permanent reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
- Threat reduction at the source: Consolidation, reduction and elimination of stockpiles of nuclear weapon and nuclear weapons-usable materials where these materials are produced and stored worldwide. Increasing funding for these efforts advances U.S. ability to reduce and lock down vulnerable nuclear materials and reduces the risk of nuclear terrorism

published Wednesday, September 30, 2009

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By Matthew Cardinale, North American Correspondent, Inter-Press Service; and News Editor, The Atlanta Progressive News (September 30, 2009)

ATLANTA, Georgia, Sep 30 (IPS) - Despite statements by U.S. President Barack Obama that he wants to see the world reduce, and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons, the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration continues to push forward on a programme called Complex Modernisation, which would expand two existing nuclear plants to allow them to produce new plutonium pits and new bomb parts out of enriched uranium for use in a possible new generation of nuclear bombs.

Originally published at http://atlantaprogressivenews.com/news/0522.html

published Monday, September 14, 2009

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Originally published at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090910_a_hundred_holocausts_an_insiders_window_into_us_nuclear_policy/
Posted on Sep 10, 2009
By Daniel Ellsberg

Editor’s note: This is the first installment of Daniel Ellsberg’s personal memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.” The online book will recount highlights of his six years of research and consulting for the Departments of Defense and State and the White House on issues of nuclear command and control, nuclear war planning and nuclear crises. It further draws on 34 subsequent years of research and activism largely on nuclear policy , which followed the intervening 11 years of his preoccupation with the Vietnam War . Subsequent installments also will appear on Truthdig. The author is a senior fellow of theNuclear Age Peace Foundation .

American Planning for a Hundred Holocausts
One day in the spring of 1961, soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth, not—so far as I knew then—all humanity or life, but the destruction of most cities and people in the Northern Hemisphere.

What I was handed, in a White House office, was a single sheet of paper with some numbers and lines on it. It was headed “Top Secret—Sensitive”; under that, “For the President’s Eyes Only.”

The “Eyes Only” designation meant that, in principle, it was to be seen and read only by the person to whom it was explicitly addressed, in this case the president. In practice this usually meant that it would be seen by one or more secretaries and assistants as well: a handful of people, sometimes somewhat more, instead of the scores to hundreds who would normally see copies of a “Top Secret—Sensitive” document.

published Friday, September 04, 2009

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE September 4, 2009
Contact: Jay Coghlan, Nuclear Watch NM, 505.989.7342, c. 505.920.7118, jay@nukewatch.org

Santa Fe, NM – Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM) has discovered Los Alamos National Laboratory viewgraphs showing that the U.S. nuclear weapons labs want to leverage “stockpile modernization” through formal Safeguards attached to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty during Senate ratification. This modernization would include “large changes” made to existing nuclear weapons refurbished during existing Life Extension Programs, and/or complete “replacement designs” as early as 2015. Congress has rejected funding a new-design “Reliable Replacement Warhead” (RRW) for the last two years, but the labs have clearly not given up. Moreover, there is a danger that the Obama Administration might concede to some form of RRW in order to win the Congressional supermajority of 67 needed to ratify the CTBT. Further, Obama has just reappointed a formerly strong proponent of RRW to again head up the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

A decade ago, under President Clinton, the Senate rejected CTBT ratification. This last April, while declaring that a world free of nuclear weapons is a long term U.S. national security goal, President Obama pledged, “my Administration will immediately and aggressively pursue U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.” The Treaty’s declared purpose has always been to cut off the advancement of nuclear weapons. But the American labs, now endowed with supercomputer simulated testing, obviously believe that a ban to physical tests no longer blocks the deployment of new nuclear weapons designs. In contrast, they now even seek to enshrine the capability for major modifications and possible new-designs in CTBT Safeguards.

Ratification of the CTBT by the U.S. will be viewed internationally as a concrete sign of America’s commitment to fulfilling the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty’s mandate for nuclear disarmament. CTBT ratification before the May 2010 NPT Review Conference at the United Nations would be a diplomatic victory, if the Obama Administration can win the necessary Senate votes. Ironically, possible CTBT Safeguards enshrining new or heavily modified U.S. weapons designs could derail the strengthening of the global nonproliferation regime by demonstrating to other countries that the U.S. is not really serious about nuclear disarmament.

published Monday, August 10, 2009

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Sixty-four years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we host a roundtable discussion on the present nuclear landscape. We speak with nuclear physicist and disarmament activist Pervez Hoodbhoy, peace activist Frida Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Over the next year, Ellsberg will release regular installments of his insider’s memoir of the nuclear era, “The American Doomsday Machine.”

Frida Berrigan, Peace activist and senior program associate of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation. Previously, she served for eight years as deputy director and senior research associate at the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York City.

Daniel Ellsberg, the country’s best known whistleblower. In 1971 he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. .

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Nuclear physicist and disarmament activist. He is chair of the Physics Department at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

Fuel Video can be seen at: http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/10/for_the_64th_time_no_more

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