| October 23, 2008 |  |
Bush Administration to Downgrade Plans for Nuclear Weapons Complex
UCS Media Alert
Tomorrow the Bush administration will formally release a more modest plan for the nuclear weapons complex than it proposed in January, leaving key decisions to the next administration. In particular, the United States will maintain its annual production capacity of about 20 plutonium "pits"—the explosive core of modern nuclear weapons—rather than increase it to 50 to 80 pits annually, as the administration recently proposed, or to 125 to 450 a year, as it initially sought.
"The Bush administration is getting closer to accepting reality in its plans for U.S. nuclear weapons production," said Stephen Young, a senior analyst in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). "While it is still planning to build major new facilities without a long-term plan for the arsenal, for now it has dropped plans to dramatically increase the number of new nuclear weapons the United States can make."
The plans appear in the "Final Complex Transformation Supplemental Programmatic
Environmental Impact Statement," which will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow. The document, a mandatory environmental review of major federal projects, precedes the official "Record of Decision" that implements the choices described in the document.
New facilities that remain in the plan include the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Building Replacement Facility (CMRR), which would allow the United States to increase its production of plutonium pits, and the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF), which will manufacture new "secondaries," the components that produce most of the weapons' explosive yield.
"Until the government comes up with a new nuclear weapons policy, there's no way to determine the right size for new facilities," said Lisbeth Gronlund, co-director of UCS's Global Security Program. "If the next administration makes needed changes in our policy, including cutting the arsenal size and consolidating the nuclear weapons complex, we won't need many of these facilities."
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