How
Breaches In The US
Nuclear-Weapons Program
Endanger You
By Heather Wokusch
23 December, 2006
Countercurrents.org
"My message to the
Iranian people is you can do better than to have somebody try to rewrite
history. You can do better than somebody who hasn't strengthened your
economy. And you can do better than having somebody who's trying to
develop a nuclear weapon that the world believes you shouldn't have.
There's a better way forward." - George W. Bush,
December 20, 2006
Last
week, the watchdog Project on Government Oversight reported that workers
at Pantex, a Texan nuclear-weapons plant, had almost accidentally detonated
a W56 warhead in the spring of 2005. A W56 has 100 times the Hiroshima
bomb's yield.
A similar incident occurred
there in 2004 when workers discovered a crack in a W56 warhead; they
ended up patching it together using "the equivalent of duct tape."
BWXT, the Texan plant operator, paid safety-violation fines totalling
less than $125,000 in each case.
Unfortunately, the sloppiness
and lack of oversight demonstrated at Pantex characterize the running
of many US nuclear-weapons facilities.
For example, all classified
work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico was temporarily
stopped in July 2004 due to a security breach; two "removable data
storage devices" with top-secret information couldn't be located.
Just two months ago, police doing a drug bust in Northern California
were surprised to come across "Secret Restricted" Los Alamos
data, potentially involving nuclear-weapons information and underground
testing detection.
Police found classified nuclear-weapons
data in a drug bust.
In June 2006, the National
Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) revealed its database had been
hacked and the personal records of at least 1,500 employees and contractors
stolen. The NNSA amazingly took over seven months to report the theft
to the Energy Department.
Classified information leaks
are not the only kind of security violation threatening US nuclear-weapons
facilities. The Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee, for instance,
made headlines in March 2004 when it reported missing 200 keys to protected
areas. This discovery followed reports of missing master keys in both
the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California.
Then in early 2004, news
surfaced that security personnel guarding the nation's nuclear stockpiles,
including tons of enriched uranium at Y-12, had been cheating on their
antiterrorism drills. An Energy Department investigation discovered
that contract security guards at the Y-12 plant had been given access
to computer models of antiterrorism drill strikes in advance, thus rendering
the tests useless. Amazingly, a representative from the longtime government
contractor charged with securing the facility, Wackenhut, still had
the audacity to claim that security at Y-12 was "better than it's
ever been." Few were convinced.
Wackenhut was back in the
news in September 2006, when a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) study
revealed serious security breaches at a nuclear power plant near Houston,
Texas. The UCS report detailed that "vehicles enter protected areas
of the reactor unsearched, surveillance cameras don't work, and the
cleaning staff has easy access to firearms." Yet guards faced retaliation
when they tried to alert their supervisors to the problems.
Most recently, officials
at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) admitted in October 2006
that the facility does not meet government security standards. ORNL,
which the Project on Government Oversight calls "the most poorly
protected site in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex," stores enough
highly enriched uranium for 14,000 nuclear warheads, yet the Bush administration
has denied funding to upgrade its security. Not much stopping terrorists
from entering the place, stealing highly enriched uranium and within
minutes, constructing an improvised nuclear device with a yield similar
to that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
The Bush administration's
profligate spending on nuclear-weapons is largely to blame for the ongoing
scandals, having created a wild-west mentality of companies trying to
cash in on Armageddon. Even worse, the outlay is unbalanced. The Department
of Energy's budget for FY 2006 requested over $6.6 billion for nuclear
"Weapons activities," for example, yet cut funds for "Nuclear
waste disposal" by over 12%. The administration's FY 2007 budget
request for nuclear "Weapons activities" was $6.4 billion,
but only $107 million (a fraction of one percent) was slated to go towards
expanded efforts to secure and/or remove "at risk nuclear or radioactive
material worldwide."
Let's hope that it doesn't
take some tragic accident or terrorist incident to alert the US public
to the dangers of its own nuclear-weapons programs. The atomic bomb
is ticking...
Action Ideas:
1. Curious where the world's
(known) nuclear weapons are located? Check out Greenpeace's "Zoom
on Doom: Easy-to-find nuclear weapons map" at http://archive.greenpeace.org/wmd/
2. Just in time for the 110th
Congress, visit the Physicians for Social Responsibility action page
on Congressional legislation (www.psr.org)
and the Council for a Livable World, (www.clw.org)
which provides financial and other support to arms-control-friendly
congressional candidates.
A linked version of each article is available at www.heatherwokusch.com
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