One-Sided Sandia/UNM Symposium Focuses on Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex and New Nuclear Bomb Designs

Concerned about the so-called future of nuclear weapons production in New Mexico? Here's info on a symposium that appears to be paid for in large part by Lockheed-Martin, which would benefit greatly from the resumption of weapons production in our state. Concerned citizens are encouraged to attend:

From the UNM OPST:
The University of New Mexico's Office for Policy, Security and Technology presents a symposium, "The Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and the Future of the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex," on Friday, Sept. 29, from 1:30 to 4 PM in the UNM Student Union Building Santa Ana rooms A and B. OPST is a joint venture of UNM and Sandia National Laboratories. The program will be preceded by a Women in International Security informational meeting from 12:15-1:15 PM and followed by a reception for speakers and participants.

The symposium features speakers from the National Nuclear Security Administration and Sandia National Laboratories. Confirmed speakers include Susan Stoner, science advisor, defense programs, National Nuclear Security Administration; Bruce C. Walker, director, NM Weapon Systems Engineering Center, Sandia National Laboratories; Linda J. Branstetter, Advanced Concepts Group, Sandia; Celeste Drewien, System Studies Department, Sandia; and Elizabeth A. Stanley, assistant professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government, Georgetown University.

Andrew L. Ross, director of the Office for Policy, Security, and Technology and UNM political science professor, said he is "delighted to have had the opportunity to work with WIIS and Sandia to develop the program." He is "looking forward to a serious examination of the requirements and plans for the Reliable Replacement Warhead Program and a broad-ranging discussion of its potential implications."

This event is free and open to the public. For additional information, contact Andrew L. Ross, Director, OPST at 505-277-7391 or aross@unm.edu.
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According to an Action Alert from the Los Alamos Study Group:

Those of you familiar with our situation in New Mexico know that UNM is very closely associated with the New Mexico’s two nuclear weapons laboratories and with the military and its contractors. In a 2001 ranking of universities’ military contracts by former Study Group associate Darwin BondGraham, UNM ranked #15 nationally in absolute value of its military contracts. 

For example, UNM has a $50 million grant from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the agency sponsoring the proposed 0.6 kiloton Divine Strake explosion meant to help perfect (or far more likely, to demonstrate) a low-yield nuclear earth-penetrating weapon. The head of DTRA at the time of the grant (and of the conception of Divine Strake), was Steve Younger, former head of weapons design at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and now manager of the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for the Northrup-Grumman led consortium running NTS. I am sure it is no accident that Dr. Younger was able to remember New Mexico and Senator Domenici when he made that huge DTRA grant. (A Sandian and former Reagan Administration official, , now runs DTRA). 

This ranking of #15 in military funding, high though it is, does not capture the full scope of UNM’s institutional obeisance to the nuclear-military complex or its role in training new workers for the labs and weapons plants. I want to go into the context of this panel just a little to illustrate how this is apparently working in this case. 

OPST was created by former SNL senior vice president and weapons manager Roger Hagengruber, who started up OPST in 2003, bringing with him a 5-year grant from SNL to UNM of $250,000 per year to establish OPST. The current director, Andrew Ross, took over for Hagengruber in 2005. 

Besides SNL and OPST, the other panel co-sponsor is WIIS, headquartered at Georgetown University. The funders WIIS mentions are here; its executive board is here. 

He who pays the piper calls the tune. In this case Lockheed appears to be paying, and there is nobody on the panel without direct ties to SNL or the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which funds most of SNL. The one person on the panel who does not work directly for the NNSA or a nuclear lab is Elizabeth Stanley, a member of SNL’s National Security Advisory Board.  Let us hope she is enough of a nuclear abolitionist to balance the four others. 

OPST does many things, including sponsoring a recent CIA speaker on the anniversary of 9/11/01 and sponsoring curriculum development, including a grant for "The Human Settlement of Space: Practical and Political Pitfalls and Possibilities," to Mohamed S. El-Genk, whose main interest is space nuclear power systems. There is nothing to suggest that entire ambit of OPST’s activities falls anywhere but inside the narrative of national security state, or what might be expected in a sort of “Lockheed-Martin University,” if we had one. Perhaps in a way we do. 

The warhead program in question. The RRW is a huge program that aims to remake the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with new untested warheads, at a cost that would certainly exceed $100 billion dollars between now and 2030 (a date NNSA is using as a milestone these days). 

The RRW program, in addition to making thousands of new warheads, is conceived as enabling the creation of a new “responsive infrastructure” of nuclear factories and labs, the mere existence of which is supposed to help “deter” America’s enemies, “dissuade” America’s competitors, yadayada. The pivotal and rate-determining step in this plan is the manufacture of plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) at LANL, which, contrary to statements you may have read, has not yet begun. (Practice manufacturing has begun, but no pits for the stockpile yet.)

I didn’t use the word “genocide” in the title of this action alert lightly. There is no use of nuclear weapons that would not involve mass destruction of human beings and the will to do so. It would not be an unfortunate “accident.” The terror of this in the heart of the enemy puts the “terr” in nuclear deterrence, as former Sandia President Paul Robinson used to say. Nobel Laureates and Manhattan Project veterans Enrico Fermi and Isidor Rabi said it somewhat differently in 1949 in their addendum to a report on the question of whether to develop a hydrogen bomb:

It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country…It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.

This quote and much more useful material can be found in the essay on the cover of the Call for Nuclear Disarmament brochure (pdf).