PLUTONIUM SAMPLING AT LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
Cost of RECA Chart
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Trump’s Talk of Nuclear Tests Recalls Fears of the Cold War
“Yes, we can learn things by nuclear testing. But when you look at the big picture, we have much more to lose by going back to testing than we have to gain.”
– SIEGFRIED S. HECKER, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was created, after President Trump’s call to resume nuclear testing revived a Cold War debate. The New York Times nytimes.com
“There is nothing comparable in our history to the deceit and the lying that took place as a matter of official Government policy in order to protect this industry. Nothing was going to stop them and they were willing to kill our own people.”
— Stewart Udall, United States Secretary of the Interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson.
He was the father of Senator Tom Udall (who ended up being a vigorous supporter of expanded nuclear weapons “modernization” plans).
In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
NEW & UPDATED
Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”
A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.
Norman Solomon| June 9, 2026 thenation.com
A few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”
The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”
When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Early in his professional life, Ellsberg had become a “national security” insider, with expertise in the command and control of nuclear weapons along with strategic planning. Access to official calculations made him aware of scenarios for initiating Armageddon. Some classified plans for starting a nuclear war, with a first strike on the Soviet Union and China, were beyond shocking.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated in 1961 that the effects of our carrying out those plans, the annual operational plan for which the weapons existed and were on alert, they estimated it would kill 600 million people. A hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg says in An Ordinary Insanity. “When I saw that estimate in the White House, I thought that was the most evil planning that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”
As scientific research advanced and climate modeling discovered nuclear winter, estimates like 600 million became outdated.
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS Congressional Briefing: Choices Before Congress on Plutonium Pit Production for New Nuclear Warheads
Sample Comments for the Draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS)
Why should you comment? This process produces valuable information, increases government accountability and transparency, and creates a legal administrative record that has led to important litigation in the past. The Trump administration is severely limiting and removing key opportunities for public comment and objection. Significantly, there is no other legally required opportunity that enables the public to comment on the “modernization” program to keep nuclear weapons forever.
BACKGROUND: The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is aggressively expanding the production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico has been capable of producing plutonium pits since 1996, and until 2018 production was capped at no more than 20 pits per year. NNSA now plans to produce up to 205 pits every year for the new arms race, with at least 80 pits per year made at LANL and at least 125 per year at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina.
Grassroots activist organizations Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, NM; Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, SC; the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia, and Tri-Valley CARES of Livermore, CA successfully sued the NNSA over its failure to complete a required nationwide “programmatic environmental impact statement” (PEIS) for its plan to massively expand plutonium pits production. A draft of this PEIS was released in April 2026, kicking off in-person hearings in Livermore, CA, Santa Fe, NM, Aiken, SC, Kansas City, MO, and Washington, DC, as well as a 90-day public comment period ending July 16, 2026. This provides a unique and critical opportunity for public scrutiny of and formal comment on the government’s plans to make new nuclear bombs for a new arms race!
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Public Hearing in Santa Fe, NM, Thurs May 14, 2026
Plan to increase nuclear pit production at Los Alamos lab gets heavy pushback at Santa Fe forum
“The environmental impact statement was produced as a result of a January 2025 settlement between the National Nuclear Security Administration and various groups, including Nuclear Watch New Mexico. The lawsuit claimed the federal government failed to appropriately consider the impacts of production of plutonium pits at LANL and the Savannah River Site, under national environmental law.”
| May 14, 2026 santafenewmexican.com
A draft environmental impact statement on the production of the trigger devices for nuclear weapons faced overwhelming public pushback Thursday evening at a Santa Fe hearing.
The roughly 130 people who attended the meeting at the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute in person and 100 more who joined online were almost all against plutonium pit production in their backyard — and many criticized the nuclear industry.
Sean Arent, a member of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility, brought up that state’s long cleanup process at the Hanford Site, a defunct and decommissioned plutonium production site.
The hearing was one of five scheduled around the country this month and follows meetings in South Carolina, Missouri and California. The final hearing is planned for May 20 in Washington, D.C., and does not have a virtual option.
Nuclear Weapons Issues & The Accelerating Arms Race: May 2026
Nuclear Weapons:
https://www.twz.com/nuclear/new-nuclear-bunker-buster-bomb-plans-revealed
New Nuclear Bunker Buster Bomb Plans Revealed The Department of Energy is seeking millions of dollars for work in part on a new bunker-busting nuclear weapon called the Nuclear Deterrent System-Air-delivered (NDS-A) in its latest budget request… Beyond that it will be air-delivered, there are also no details currently available publicly about the weapon’s design, including whether it will be based on something already in the stockpile.
See the graph below found on the Kansas City National Security Complex website. There are three future new-design nuclear weapons on the right above the W93 (“F” is all 3 cases means “Future”). These new-design nuclear weapons presumably will have new-design pits like the W93.
COMMENT TRAINING for the Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Kansas City-Focused Training May 6, 2026
Learn more about the government’s plan to mass produce new plutonium pits for nuclear weapons, Kansas City’s role in this program, and how to give a well-informed and impactful testimony at the public comment hearing in Kansas City on May 7 or submit written comments until July 16.
Presented by PeaceWorks KC, Physicians for Social Responsibility KC, Veterans for Peace KC and special guests from Nuclear Watch New Mexico and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
See more info at https://PitPEIS.com
https://peaceworkskc.org/plutonium/
Plutonium Pit Production Draft PEIS – Recording of Public Hearing North Augusta, South Carolina, Tues May 5, 2026
Kansas City: Inside America’s Nuclear Weapons Capital, As It Builds the Newest American Bomb
“For seventy-seven years, Kansas City has built most of nearly every American nuclear weapon. On May 7, the federal government will hold a hearing to ask if Kansas City consents to the next chapter.”
By | May 6, 2026 kansascitydefender.com
His hands did the work. Maurice Copeland was a tool and die supervisor at the Kansas City Plant for the last twelve of his thirty-two years there, and for most of that time he passed chemicals he did not know were poison across a workbench to men he supervised.
He was a Black Vietnam veteran when Bendix Corporation hired him in 1968, one among thousands of Black returning soldiers Bendix brought in as the Cold War pushed weapons assembly to wartime pace.
The plant at 1500 East Bannister Road sat at the edge of Troost Avenue, the apartheid line that has divided this city since before he was born. What Copeland and the men he supervised handled with their bare hands, included benzene, beryllium, trichloroethylene, polychlorinated biphenyls, asbestos, mercury, lead, and depleted uranium. Group 1 carcinogens.
New Nuclear Bunker Buster Bomb Plans Revealed (Updated)
“There has been talk for decades about a true successor to the specialized deep bunker-busting B61-11 nuclear bomb.”
By Joseph Trevithick| May 1, 2026 twz.com
The Department of Energy is seeking millions of dollars for work in part on a new bunker-busting nuclear weapon called the Nuclear Deterrent System-Air-delivered (NDS-A) in its latest budget request. At present, there is only one specialized air-delivered deep-penetrating weapon known to be in America’s nuclear stockpile, the B61-11 gravity bomb, and there have been discussions about a potential successor for decades now.
The Fiscal Year 2027 budget request for the Department of Energy, which was released last month, includes a new line under Weapons Activities for Future Programs. The Department is asking for $99.794 million in the next fiscal cycle to support those efforts.
CRITICAL EVENTS
Endless Nuclear Waste Storage in NM?? Not On Our Watch…
Keep up with the Stop Forever WIPP Coalition to learn how to take action against the Federal Government’s Plan to Expand WIPP and keep it open indefinitely.
Visit the Stop Forever WIPP Coalition’s website and social media:
Website: www.StopForeverWIPP.org
Facebook: facebook.com/StopfvrWIPP
Twitter: twitter.com/stopforeverwipp
Instagram: instagram.com/stopfvrwipp
Stay Informed of All Permit-Related Happenings at WIPP! Sign Up for Updates:
The New Mexico Environment Department maintains a Facility Mailing List to which you can add your name and address to get the latest information – just email Ricardo Maestas at the New Mexico Environment Department at ricardo.maestas@state.nm.us and ask to be added to the list. Or mail your request with your mailing address to:
Continue reading
New Nuclear Media: Art, Films, Books & More
Daniel Ellsberg vs. “Ordinary Insanity”
A new documentary issues an urgent warning about our dangerous nuclear delusions.
Norman Solomon| June 9, 2026 thenation.com
A few days before Thanksgiving in 2021, Daniel Ellsberg looked directly into a camera lens and talked about nuclear preparations for annihilating almost everyone on Earth. “That is insane,” he said. “And you have to call it a kind of ordinary insanity, because it’s so widely shared.”
The new film An Ordinary Insanity condenses Ellsberg’s essential message into a half hour. It follows the acclaimed 2009 documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Judith Ehrlich—who codirected that Oscar-nominated movie and is the director of An Ordinary Insanity—says that “as his understanding of nuclear war evolved, Dan confronted it for us and dug deep into its roots.”
When Ellsberg gave the 7,000 pages of the top-secret Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, he was risking the rest of his life in prison for exposing the official deceptions behind the Vietnam War. That brave act, causing him to be vilified and beloved, began his five decades of tireless antiwar efforts. Through it all, his main preoccupation continued to be reducing the risk of nuclear war.
Early in his professional life, Ellsberg had become a “national security” insider, with expertise in the command and control of nuclear weapons along with strategic planning. Access to official calculations made him aware of scenarios for initiating Armageddon. Some classified plans for starting a nuclear war, with a first strike on the Soviet Union and China, were beyond shocking.
“The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated in 1961 that the effects of our carrying out those plans, the annual operational plan for which the weapons existed and were on alert, they estimated it would kill 600 million people. A hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg says in An Ordinary Insanity. “When I saw that estimate in the White House, I thought that was the most evil planning that had ever existed in the history of humanity.”
As scientific research advanced and climate modeling discovered nuclear winter, estimates like 600 million became outdated.
Watch BOMBSHELL on PBS American Experience — streaming across all PBS-branded platforms, including YouTube, PBS.org and the PBS App!
The wait is over! BOMBSHELL is available NOW on PBS American Experience — and will be streaming simultaneously across all PBS-branded platforms, including YouTube, PBS.org and the PBS App.
BOMBSHELL examines how the U.S. government manipulated public opinion through propaganda and censorship to justify the use of nuclear weapons and to minimize the human toll. Against this powerful machinery, a small group of journalists—including a Black pool reporter, a Japanese American staffer, a Japanese photographer, and a freelance magazine writer—identified gaps in the official narrative and courageously reported on the human consequences of the atomic bombings.
The Wall Street Journal described BOMBSHELL as offering “lessons for our own age of ascendant AI,” while Foreign Policy called it “provocative history that brings to life the dangers that arise when government secrecy and control overwhelm press freedom.”