Military spending bill would give LANL record budget

By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com
Dec 16, 2022 Updated Dec 17, 2022

Correction appended.

The U.S. Senate has approved an $858 billion military spending bill that will funnel a record $1.6 billion to Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium operations to aid in the lab’s effort to ramp up production of nuclear bomb cores.

Plans call for the lab to produce 30 nuclear warhead triggers, known as pits, by 2026, and for Savannah River Site in South Carolina to make an additional 50 pits by the mid-2030s.

Funding for that work has escalated steadily in recent years. The 2023 request for Los Alamos is almost 60 percent higher than this year’s $1 billion and about five times the $308 million budgeted three years ago. To aid Savannah River, lawmakers added $500 million more than the Biden administration initially asked for, pushing its funding for plutonium operations to $2.9 billion.

The National Defense Authorization Act, the yearly defense budget request, has passed both chambers and will head to President Joe Biden, who is expected to sign it. The bill includes $4.6 billion overall to fund the lab, a sizable increase from its current $4 billion budget. Funding included in the National Defense Authorization Act will be part of an omnibus appropriations package expected to be voted on in the next week. An appropriations bill is required to ratify the funding, but it generally passes without any substantial changes to the proposed spending.

“With four military installations and two national laboratories, New Mexico plays a vital role in maintaining our national security, and this legislation will further our state’s impact,” U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján said in a statement.

Luján, D-N.M., said the bill also includes his amendment to develop the lab’s workforce, which is needed to support its mission.

The bill also authorizes a 4.6 percent pay raise for service members, improves their access to housing and child care services and builds on the military justice reforms enacted last year, including independent oversight of sexual assault cases, Luján said.

In an email, an anti-nuclear activist expressed skepticism that the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees nuclear weapons program, can get the Los Alamos lab to meet its pit production goal.

“NNSA cannot at present say when it [the lab] will produce pits, or how many pits it can produce, or what the effort will end up costing,” wrote Greg Mello, executive director of Los Alamos Study Group.

Pentagon leaders, nuclear security officials and some politicians say the pits are needed to modernize the arsenal so it will act as a stronger deterrent against Russia, China and rogue states that otherwise might act rashly with their weapons.

But Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, contends that making new pits is as much about arming new warheads being developed, such as the W93, which will be launched by submarines.

The Biden administration didn’t ask for any money for the W93, but lawmakers budgeted $45 million for the missile and warhead, Coghlan said. The W93 is important to the lab, which designed it and will produce the pits for it, he said.

“That is an item that’s going to have a lot of influence on LANL’s future,” Coghlan said.

The bill will provide $22.3 billion for the nuclear security agency’s activities. And it will allocate $286 million for the lab’s cleanup program.

The bill also authorizes spending in New Mexico that includes:

• $15 million for the high speed test track at Holloman Air Force Base
• $3.6 million for a missile assembly building at White Sands Missile Range
• $8 million for a munitions storage area at Cannon Air Force Base
• $2 million for the ADAL Systems and Digital Engineering Lab at Kirtland Air Force Base
• $540,000 for the explosives operations building at Kirtland
• $4.7 million for Kirtland’s Joint Navigational Warfare Center
• $4.4 million for the Space Rapid Capabilities Office’s facility at Kirtland
• $600,000 for the New Mexico Army National Guard’s vehicle maintenance shop in Rio Rancho.

The bill will also fund some infrastructure improvements.

“It includes provisions that I secured to bolster our water infrastructure to ensure our communities have water that is safe to drink and use,” Luján said.

Correction: This story has been amended to reflect the following correction. A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that the 2023 budget request for Los Alamos National Laboratory is nine times higher than what was budgeted three years ago. It is five times higher.

Greg Mello published comment:

We haven't seen any opposition to turning LANL's pit factory from groups like Nuclear Watch, and once again we don't see it here. They align themselves with those who think it is better to produce pits at LANL right away, which is 'early to need" (as the nuclear managers would say if they weren't so crazed on growth and the new arms race), than to do so elsewhere a decade and more from now. Now Coghlan is worried about new pits for the W93. That would not be a concern,either at LANL or for the nation as a whole if LANL wasn't rebuilding itself into a nuclear weapons production agency. The earliest LANL could produce pits for the W93 is at least a decade from now, assuming everything goes smoothly for the new pit mission. (It isn't and won't). Why skip over this crucial decade, which will set the character of northern New Mexico as permanently as can be in this world and, if pit production becomes established, quite negatively? LANL's plans involve sucking all the talent it can get from the region, and suborning local investment patterns to serve its needs as well, all to the detriment of local government finance -- and the death of local autonomy and creative green alternatives. LANL needs plenty of ugly, cheap apartments and suburban sprawl for the two thousand or so more workers it wants to hire. The new defense authorization bill allows NNSA to spend unstated and therefore apparently unlimited funds on creating educational programs to serve its needs. The atmosphere of dependency and economic apartheid will increase, unless and until there is an awakening to a genuine environmental and social contract, which will never be based on war and weapons of mass destruction.