Collective Statement to the UC Regents from DOELOC

This statement was delivered in full to the University of California Regents during the public comment period on July 17, 2008

As the UC Student Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee, an Associated Student Government Committee present on multiple UC campuses, we are charged with educating the students, faculty, and staff at this University as well as media and the general public about the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories managed by the UC and its partners, Bechtel, B&W, and the Washington Division of the URS Corporation.  Last month, members of the Student Department of Energy Laboratory Oversight Committee here at UCSB held a potentially productive meeting with Regent Pattiz.  Mr. Pattiz assured us that he would encourage the other Regents on this board to meet with our committee. We believe that it is our responsibility to provide the Regents of the University with accurate, factual information about the work of the laboratories which we do not believe is adequately provided either by the laboratories themselves, or by the Regents Committee on Oversight of the Laboratories.  This inadequacy was apparent in Mr. Foley’s testimony at the Regent’s meeting occurring in May of this year, at the UCLA campus, when he was unable to immediately and adequately answer Lieutenant Governor Garamendi’s queries regarding pit production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. We will provide a comprehensive and factually accurate report to any individual Regent or group of Regents on this board.  You can contact us at doeloc@gmail.com.  We have the facts on pit production, and we will not skirt the issue.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory is the only facility in the United States with the mission and necessary capacity to produce plutonium pits.  For the first time since the early 1950s, 11 plutonium pits, the fissionable cores of thermonuclear weapons, were produced last year at the laboratory, of which 8 were “war reserve” pits, meaning these pits have entered the U.S. nuclear arsenal and are currently deployed on nuclear submarines.  The plutonium pits at LANL are being manufactured for installation into W-88 warheads.  Each W-88 warhead carries a yield of 475 Kilotons.  The bomb built by UC scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, which was subsequently dropped on the city of Hiroshima, Japan by the U.S. government, carried a 15 Kiloton yield.  One W-88 warhead has the destructive capacity of 32 Hiroshima bombs, enough firepower to instantly vaporize all of New York City.  In 2007, under the management of UC and its partner, Bechtel, the largest nuclear-industrial corporation in the world, LANL’s pit production facility built 11 nuclear weapon cores, enough fire power to obliterate multiple countries. 

Last year, LANL’s pit production facility manufactured 348 Hiroshima bombs-worth of potential destructive capacity. But incredibly, these weapons represent only 0.1% of the overall nuclear weapons inventory possessed by the United States, all of which were unfortunately developed under the management of the UC by UC employees.  The University of California should have absolutely no part in such an enterprise and as students and alumni, we are shocked and disgusted that our University has chosen to directly involve itself in the development of weapons of mass destruction for over six decades.  And we are outraged that this Board of Regents is not, itself outraged, that the UC is overseeing a nuclear weapons production mission at the national laboratories.  To that effect, we applaud Lieutenant Governor Garamendi’s efforts to insert a critical discourse regarding the laboratories within the Board of Regents.

Several Regents have identified themselves to us as nuclear abolitionists and have referenced the Wall Street Journal article published by fellows at the Hoover Institute which calls for a world free of nuclear weapons.  While we applaud any acknowledgement of the necessity of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, we must point out the inherent hypocrisy of presiding over the central institutions of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and simultaneously claiming to be pursuing a path toward nuclear abolition.  This argument is not to say that we favor unilateral disarmament by the U.S. government.  We only wish to point out the seemingly obvious fact that building new nuclear weapons, such as the RRW, designed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or new nuclear weapons facilities, such as the CMRR, currently being built at LANL, are not paths toward disarmament.  The University of California is presiding over the very programs which are promoting a new global arms race and which directly violate international treaty commitments embodied in Article 6 of the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which stipulates that the U.S. government make good faith steps toward disarmament.  The UC should have no part in the violation of international law, yet it has irresponsibly committed itself to laboratories that violate that law as they fulfill their central missions.

In 2006 the laboratories were tasked by the NNSA to conduct a study on plutonium pit aging.  I’ll read a quote from that report: “The assessment demonstrates that there is no degradation in performance of primaries of stockpile systems due to plutonium aging that would be cause for near-term concern regarding their safety and reliability. Most primary types have credible minimum lifetimes in excess of 100 years as regards aging of plutonium.”  The U.S. government already has 10, 000 plutonium pits stockpiled.  None of these pits are over 50 years old.  Therefore, as a means of ensuring national security, there is no rational justification for the creation of new plutonium pits.  Add to this the fact that the U.S. government has no coherent nuclear weapons policy almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War.  The United States must be a global leader for multilateral nuclear disarmament.  But as long as the United States continues to lead the world toward a new arms race, the UC’s reputation will be forever tarnished as it continues to lend its academic legitimacy and scientific resources to the development of weapons of mass destruction.

Again, we encourage you all to contact us at doeloc@gmail.com.