In this briefing we discussed some of the misconceptions floating around in the news media and elsewhere about plutonium warhead core "pit" production, what a better and more practical policy than the present one might be, what pit production at this time is really all about (one of the biggest misconceptions), and why the arms race which Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) pit production aims to enable is doomed to fail.
Topics included: 1) The actual purposes of stockpile pit production, so far ahead of any actual stockpile need related to pit aging or any similar malarkey, at LANL (hint: those purposes centrally include increasing, as rapidly as possible, the number of deployable, highly-accurate, MIRVable warheads, greater accuracy being a potent "force multiplier" in nuclear war-fighting); 2) Pit aging: why it is not the main driver of pit production; why we cannot say that we know that pits last "100 years or more" as some people are doing; 3) Why did the NNSA decide, six years ago, never to build two pit factories, and never to depend on LANL's old plutonium facility -- and why did NNSA change its mind? 4) What are some of the geographic, engineering, and managerial realities which ensure that the nuclear weapons establishment in the Executive, Congress, and the military will never abandon the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF) until the U.S. needs no more pits? 5) Why not produce just "10-20" pits per year at LANL for the time being, once production gets going there, pausing or abandoning the SRPPF project? We'll tell you!
And a lot more
