(Fine Art Print by Frank Tozier, depicting the conversion of implements of war into agricultural tool.)

Anyone with brains or heart has to be opposed to the very concept of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Those of us who happened to be in the deterrence business may have a better idea of all that was involved with the development, fielding and eventual destruction of Chem and Bio weapons- truly nasty things for which I am hard-pressed to find any justification, and the continued existence of which in backwaters like Syria and North Korea is appalling.

The undisputed king of WMD remains the atomic weapon. I had the opportunity to be in the Command-and-Control end of the nuclear business during the Cold War, as most of my comrades did, and even got to see a real one being moved one time- a scary thing of elegant shape and inimical purpose.

I mentioned yesterday a strange encounter with the remnants of the atomic program at the Nevada Test Site. There is much more left over from the Manhattan District Engineering Project- perhaps the single most expensive program ever undertaken by a government, at least until he got to the Affordable Care Act, and the Project still pops up periodically.

Recently, some dismay was expressed about the fact that all the locations where radioactive work was done in the War are not known and hence cannot be cleaned up. In fact, bureaucrats earnestly told us one time that the mission of the Department of Energy had shifted from the production of weapons to a 10,000-year job of remediation of nuclear contamination.

I recall another afternoon at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where plutonium waste still bubbles, and a vast structure looms out on the horizon, custom built for the storage of the “pits” (plutonium triggers) that made up the business component of decommissioned weapons.

We are very lucky that self-interest on the part of bureaucrats on both sides of the Cold War saw no need to actually employ the things, though goodness knows we were prepared to do so if necessary.

Not so much anymore. The Government of the United States, at least in part, is determined to do away with them, and in a unilateral fashion if necessary.
This is worth a book- or several- to examine the scope and the legacy of America’s Atomic Age. A nice way to approach how big it all was in contained in Denise Kiernan’s marvelous account of the lives of “The Girls of Atomic City.”

She took on the task of interviewing the now-old women who came to live in the secret complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which in the heyday of the Project, was home to 75,000 atomic workers and used more electricity than New York City. It is a fascinating presaging of many of the social issues that played out over the next fifty years and are not resolved yet, any more than the nuclear material Oak Ridge produced is.

The Project eventually produced more than 30,000 nuclear devices in the American stockpile with all sorts of amazing features: “Dial a Yield,” “Single Integrated Operational Plan,” “Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles,” “ICBM” “SLBM,” “GLCM.” that sort of surreal crap.

Anyway, we will not have to re-create a facility like Rocky Flats, where the hydrogen bombs were built, 1952-1992. Remediating the contamination at the facility is what has occupied the Department of Energy in the years after, since it is only 15 miles from downtown Denver.

There is plenty of enriched uranium around to build new weapons, were that to be required at some point, but in America, the nukes are so fifteen minutes ago.

You can see the demoralization in the ranks of those who are trusted with baby-sitting the Apocalypse. The list of offenses is quite remarkable. There is a current case of a two-star general in charge of 450 Minuteman ICBM’s who was, according to an Air Force IG report, “repeatedly drunk and exhibited boorish behavior during an official visit to Russia this past summer.”

The leadership scandal before that was the deputy commander of the US Strategic Command, a three-star Naval officer who allegedly used $1,500 in counterfeit chips at the while playing poker at the Horseshoe Casino in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

That is just the leadership. Surveys of the junior officers, the ones who sit behind the blast doors in the missile silos, shows that standard procedures are not being followed. Security is not what it could be. The career field is clearly no place to be, and the places where the weapons are located are in the vastness of the Upper Tier of square states. There is of course much more: real nuclear-tipped cruise missiles left on unattended bombers on flight lines, that sort of thing.

Anyway, that is the state of things in the force that is supposed to protect the nukes from mis-use. President Clinton once sent the cheat-sheet for the launch codes to the dry-cleaners in one of his suits. More recently, the officer who accompanies Mr. Obama discovered that the “football” he carried contained the wrong codes, and even if someone wanted to end the world, it would not have been possible.

I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. I am opposed to anyone using the nasty things. But there are certainly places where the nukes are not fifteen minutes ago: rather, they have a dread urgency more akin to Oak Ridge in 1945 than STRATCOM HQ in 2013.

So that is where brain and heart diverge. How many of these things do we have to have to deter the zanies from rashly threatening their neighbors? How many of these things do we need to deter some tramp steamer being loaded up with a crude weapon and sailing unannounced by rocket plumes or infrared launch signature into some densely populated harbor city?

We sweated that threat after 9/11 pretty hard, and that is one of the reasons we developed this fine national security state in which we now live.

How many of the pesky things do we need to deter a rising China, which has the most advanced nuclear weapons fabrication program in the world? Mr. Putin has just launched the newest ballistic missile submarine, which will carry an all new generation of nuclear SLBMs. We have a treaty about that, I hear.

Anyway, we have been so preoccupied with other events, domestic and overseas, that we really haven’t talked about what is happening to the American nuclear program. We no longer have the industrial infrastructure to build one, end to end, though I think we may have enough stuff in the attic to throw something together.

Anyway, if the subject comes up and manages to get anyone’s attention, here is what is going on. The Pentagon is facing strong opposition from Congress to a mandated EPA study of Minuteman III missile silos that must be accomplished before an additional fifty land-based ICBMs can be deactivated.

The resistance in the Senate comes from a bi-partisan group, mostly from the northern tier states, and in a letter to SECDEF Hagel last week, they said that the 2014 Defense Authorization will prohibit the environmental study, which theoretically would thus prohibit the destruction of the missile complex.

Columnist Bill Gertz of the conservative Washington Times claims his sources here in DC claim that the Pentagon plans to conduct the study anyway, since the appropriations process is not complete. The DoD timeline would have the missiles removed from the silos by October of 2014, and then the demolition of the launch complex commencing in May 2016.

I have no idea why they need to blow up the silos. If one of the other two legs of the strategic triad became vulnerable- the B-52 is over 50 years old, for example, or if our aging missile boats could not accomplish the mission, it would be nice to have something to fall back on to reconstitute.

Predictably, the plan to cut land-based ICBMs was not announced as part of the Pentagon’s April 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, issued by Bob Gates when he was secretary. I commend it to your attention:

http://www.defense.gov/npr/docs/2010%20nuclear%20posture%20review%20report.pdf

(Minuteman III silo with rocket. DoD plans to blow up 450 of them.)

There is some great stuff in it. All 450 Minuteman IIIs are being redesigned from three warheads to a single warhead. Way beyond the recommendations of DoD, Mr. Obama announced this year that he plans to make further cuts in U.S. nuclear warheads from the New START level of 1,550 to about 1,000 warheads. There is no treaty requirement to do so.

Russian Strategic Rocket Forces commander Col. Gen. Sergei Karakayev said just before Christmas that he intends to keep1,500 nuclear warheads atop his missiles. There is no testimony from the Chinese about their intentions, and the North Koreans bit the reporter who asked them about their plans.

How many is enough? If you are North Korean, the number seems to it be about five, though they started enrichment operations again. If you are Iran, it might just be one, though I am sure they are thinking a few spares might be nice.

One thing is for sure. I have no idea what the right number is that we ought to have. The Pentagon will obediently come up with whatever number they are told to. As a general matter, I think that beating your swords into plowshares is probably a good thing.

That is, unless there are people watching you do it with swords in their hands.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303