Weapons plan draws criticism despite trim at Livermore Lab

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Dec 13, 2006 | by Ian Hoffman

LIVERMORE -- Lawrence Livermore Lab could lose its fortress-like Superblock and all its plutonium, 10 square miles used for high explosives experiments and other tools once critical for designing and maintaining nuclear weapons.

But disarmament activists and neighbors wary of the

H-bomb lab in Livermore are hardly embracing a new federal vision for ridding the nation of redundant and less secure nuclear weapons facilities.

The reason is that vision, called Complex 2030 and presented here Tuesday at a public hearing, is centered on a new, multibillion- dollar factory for making plutonium fission cores and a plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with newly designed bombs and warheads.

Top weapons officials of the Defense and Energy departments meet Thursday to consider choosing the first of the proposed new "reliable replacement warheads" to top submarine-launched missiles and probably become the most numerous nuclear weapon in the arsenal.

The new, hardier bombs, plus the $150 billion modernized complex of weapons labs and factories to produce them, strike critics as a step toward perpetuating the U.S. nuclear arsenal and away from U.S. treaty promises in 1968 "to negotiate toward general and complete disarmament."

"We're just leading the rest of the world in thinking that nuclear bombs are OK," said Marlene Candell, a former schoolteacher. "We need to dismantle as soon as possible. On a moral plane, what you're doing is holding open the possibility of killing millions of people."

Federal nuclear weapons managers hatched plans for Complex 2030 partly because U.S. weapons factories are outdated and partly because of congressional pressure to cut the nuclear weapons budget. At least one powerful committee chairman, Rep. David Hobson, saw the new bombs as an incentive for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration to get behind a smaller nuclear arsenal and a smaller complex to care for it.

But the agency's rough-draft proposal for the new weapons complex was in trouble even before officials carried it on a 17-hearing tour across affected states in the South and West. They propose building the new bomb factory in South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico or Nevada.

The proposals have proved too timid for Hobson and too aggressively entwined with new bombs for arms-control advocates. Jackie Cabasso, head of the Oakland-based Western States Legal Foundation, dubbed the plan "fewer but newer nukes forever."

"Complex 2030 -- or should we call it what it is -- Bombplex 2030 is costly, illegal and dangerous," said Tora Dorabji, an organizer with a Livermore-based nuclear watchdog group, Tri-Valley CAREs. "What we want to see is an alternative that looks at rapid and complete disarmament."

In a letter last month to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, Hobson threatened to block funding for both Complex 2030 and the new warheads. Then a report based on research by U.S. weapons labs showed that plutonium in most existing U.S. nuclear weapons lasts at least 100 years.

In Livermore, a town flush with incomes from two nuclear weapons labs where teams are designing the new bombs, no one rose to defend the proposal in hours of hearings Tuesday.

George Allen, head of the NNSA's Office of Transformation, suggested the proposal might move forward without the new bombs.

"We're going to have to have transformation of the complex whether we have the reliable replacement warhead or not," he said.

Meanwhile, he said, the talk of new bombs and new facilities has started a national conversation on what nuclear weapons are for and what kind of complex is needed to care for them.

"This is a very exciting time in terms of change, and it's a time period when we're going to have to address these issues," Allen said.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com or at (510) 208- 6458.