Take Action: Tell the Bush administration to drop its plans for new nuclear weapons

Tell the Bush administration to drop its plans for new nuclear weapons

The National Nuclear Security Administration has submitted a draft plan for consolidating the nation's nuclear weapons complex, but the plan ignores reasonable alternatives that could reduce harmful environmental impacts and set the stage for eventual elimination of nuclear arsenals. Tell the Bush administration to revise its draft plan in order to reduce and eventually eliminate America's nuclear weapons arsenal.

Administrator Thomas P. D'Agostino

Dear Administrator D'Agostino,

(Edit Letter Below)

I strongly object to the current draft Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. The NSSA appears to have ignored thousands of public comments submitted during the scoping process that requested the agency to analyze the full range of reasonable alternatives for consolidating the nuclear weapons complex between now and 2030, including an alternative that would both support and reflect implementation of the U.S. obligation under the Nonproliferation Treaty to negotiate the progressive reduction and eventual elimination of its nuclear arsenal, in concert with the other nuclear powers.

The current draft analysis is guided by a widely discredited "Nuclear Posture Review Report" that former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld submitted to Congress in December 2001. Even at the time this now obsolete report was limited, in Sec. Rumsfeld's words, to "laying out the direction for American nuclear forces over the next five to ten years." It therefore cannot possibly serve as the basis for the present analysis, which will be in effect through 2030. This shortcoming is even more glaring in light of the pending nuclear weapons and nonproliferation policy reviews Congress mandated when it authorized national defense funding for fiscal year 2008.

The draft plan arbitrarily excludes review of consolidation options that would eliminate weapons complex sites that are no longer necessary, leaving a proposed complex for 2020 and beyond that looks remarkably like the complex of 1995. Maintaining two competing nuclear weapons design laboratories and an active test site almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War sends exactly the wrong message to the world. Under an alternative that presumes good faith compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties, the NNSA must examine closing its nuclear weapons test site in Nevada while consolidating nuclear design functions at Los Alamos National Laboratory and non-nuclear component production at Sandia National Laboratory, both in New Mexico. This alternative alone would reduce the nuclear weapons complex from eight sites in seven states to five sites in four states and save on the order of a billion dollars annually.

In sum, the draft SPEIS is unacceptable in its current form. I urge your agency to radically revise the draft to fully rectify the problems noted above, and then re-issue the revised draft for public comment.

Sincerely,

[Your name]
[Your address]

Sincerely,

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