S. capacity to design super nuclear armament in the near future, and that by maintaining these "weapons research, development, testing and production capabilities at the laboratories" (Center for Defense Information (1995)) we are providing the breeding ground for a future Apocalypse.
Charles Curtis, Under-Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy of the Clinton administration, admitted that nuclear weapons research was still ongoing, although this was not directed towards designing new weapons bur rather to sustaining the old. Given the uncertainty of current global affairs, he felt strongly that America's security needs to be in place.
In 1995, a Special Task Force on Alternative Futures for the Department of Energy National Laboratories, also known as the Galvin Task Force met and its specific recommendations regarding the nuclear laboratories included that none of them should be closed, that the labs should continue to be funded with public money, and that weapons design work should be phased out at Lawrence Livermore and consolidated at Los Alamos.
Mean whilst, whilst the Department of Energy insists on retaining and upgrading these nuclear laboratories in case of eventuality, some are concerned of the way in which this 'stockpile management and stewardship will be interpreted by other countries' causing them, perhaps, to frantically accumulate their own stockpile, and critics of nuclear armament question too whether it might no be more effective to focus on persuading countries to reduce their nuclear pile rather than o build upon and maintain our own. The world...
has the capability to modernize new nuclear weapons and even to design new ones without having to resort to nuclear testing. This can easily instigate a covert race for nuclear armament.
There are in reality two fears: firstly that American retention of nuclear laboratories and their insistence and persistence on maintaining and continuing their research in the area will instigate other nations to do the same. And some of these nations are quire dangerous. The second concern is that we still have the task of cleaning up the radioactive and toxic chemical pollution of the 6 complexes that were closed under the Reagan era. We don't want to add to that. We want our country to be safe from internal and external threats of war and from contaminating substances.
For those two reasons, I argue that we actively work towards and pressurize policy that will guarantee active reduction of America's nuclear arsenal.
References
Biello, D."A Need for New Warheads?" Scientific American, November 2007
Center for Defense Information (1995) Managing America's nuclear arsenal http://www.cdi.org/adm/Transcripts/826/
Hansen, Chuck. U.S. Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History. Arlington, TX: Aerofax, 1988.
MacKenzie, Donald A. Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990
Schwartz, Stephen I. Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998.
