Nuke War, Nuke Accidents — the Forgotten Menace

“A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

That’s the Reagan-Gorbachev Principle from the summit the two leaders held in 1985. That same sentence is what Jessica T. Mathews, long time president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, would like to see endorsed today by the five original five nuclear powers — U.S., Russia, the U.K., France and China.

The virtual impossibility of keeping a “limited” nuclear exchange truly limited, and the radioactive contamination that would ensue even from a highly restrained use of so-called low-yield “clean” weapons, not to mention the physical destruction, makes the endorsement of the 1985 principle a necessary counterbalance to what many worry will become a new arms race as the major powers seek to update their still vast, world-destroying nuclear arsenals.

We’ve heard these last weeks, especially from speakers at the Democratic Convention, a hearteningly intensified awareness of the “existential crises” of pandemics, climate change, a global economic depression, GOP voting suppression and most recently super hurricanes. But the old dread monster in the closet, the one that those of us who grew up in the1950s and 1960s were taught to dread above all — nuclear Armageddon — has become the forgotten odds-on looming catastrophe that literally no one, not even Democrats, really wants to even mention anymore.

And now, New Mexico will become the major manufacturing site for this potential new arms race to Armageddon, building plutonium pits (the explosive core of thermonuclear weapons) at a new facility in Los Alamos at the National Laboratory there, perhaps hundreds of them for many years to come. LANL’s history of hazardous waste management and pollution control since the 1940s is a well-documented mess of befouling, with radioactive emissions not only in the water of the Rio Grande but also the air up and down the Española Valley, not to mention the 2,100 rather casually overseen nuclear waste storage sites at LANL itself. Despite a state ordered clean up, LANL’s waste management remains largely beyond public scrutiny.

And to top that off, despite our governor’s courageous and right-minded opposition to a proposal by Holtec Corp., it seems that southeastern New Mexico could well become the dump site for all 90,000 metric tons of America’s used commercial nuclear fuel rods, stored now at some 34 sites around the country. Along with the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) near Carlsbad, which stores thousands of barrels of plutonium-touched waste, and the Urenco National Enrichment Facility near Eunice, which generates weapons and commercial-grade Uranium 235, the Holtec Consolidated Interim Storage Facility near Carlsbad would turn southeast New Mexico into something of a nuclear no man’s land. The highly dangerous toxic spent fuel rods would be shipped to the Holtec facility by rail, potentially endangering every train-served town and city along the way.

Whether generated by the military or by commercial uses, radioactive waste is the lethal price New Mexicans have been forced to pay since the first atomic bomb test at Trinity in 1945. Many of us have opposed for decades our state being used as a nuclear latrine. Many of us in the southern part of the state think it’s good business. And business is winning out, as usual, over public safety.

I urge you to read Jessica T. Mathew’s essay in the August 20, 2020 New York Review of Books, entitled “The New Nuclear Threat.” She develops calmly and logically, but with horrifying detail, why updating nuclear weapons — weapons that must never be used — is a hair-trigger folly as catastrophic as climate change and the pandemics they spawn.

She writes of the dangerous mixed messages swirling around the ideas of fighting a “limited nuclear war” and the “deterrence” effect created by the idea that “mutually assured destruction,” MAD, would be the inevitable consequence of an all-out nuclear exchange. She makes it clear that the idea of a limited nuclear war is preposterous.

“Many plans for limited nuclear war have been created on paper,” she writes, “but they immediately raise yet another critical question: Can there really be such a thing? To assert the answer is yes, one has to believe that intentions can be clearly signaled (‘I’m attacking you but with much less firepower than I might have otherwise used.’), accurately interpreted by the other side, and responded to not in rage or fear but in calm reasonableness (‘I’m retaliating but much more lightly than I might have.’). There are all kinds of technical reasons to doubt that this is more than a fantasy.”

And here we are in the Land of Enchantment, once again about to be the place where nuclear winter is manufactured and stored in grapefruit-sized spheres of plutonium, stuff that’s so radioactive, so hot, and so volatile that you can’t get the spheres too close to each other for fear of setting off highly toxic nuclear fires.

And there is already enough of them all over the world in what’s known as the nuclear triad — in planes, in submarines and in silos — to put an end to everything resembling life in our little corner of the solar system.

It’s truly time right now to at least try somehow to think our way out of this madness. As Mathews writes, “Of the three legs of the triad, ground-based ICBMs are both the most threatening weapons to the enemy, because of their number and huge megatonnage, and the most vulnerable, because they sit in fixed, easily targeted silos. They are therefore ‘use them or lose them’ weapons that must be fired on warning of an attack.” And there is nothing “limited” about them.

Our current president wants to rebuild our arsenal back up to more than 30,000 warheads, from the current world-destroying 3,500 usable ones we now possess. And if we reload, so will the Russians, the Chinese and anybody else who can.

More nuclear warheads will not make “America great again” or Russia or China or anywhere else. For most of the world’s people, nuclear weapons are nothing more or less than devices for involuntary, planetary suicide. And for the people of New Mexico, manufacturing such warheads and bearing the insidious burden of storing the radioactive waste that manufacturing produces, is not only an insult to our way of life but a grave and ever-present danger to our collective health and well being.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it