Regardless of President Barack Obama’s declarations in favor of reducing, or even eliminating, the United States’ stockpile of nuclear weapons, the federal government is still moving forward with a modernization plan to make sure its warheads are as destructive as ever.

Since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, officials in the Department of Energy (DOE) have discussed how the U.S. can maintain a viable nuclear deterrent while no longer developing new nuclear weapons, given that the radioactive core of existing warheads eventually breaks down over time, making them unreliable. The answer from officials in the Bush and now Obama administrations has been to replace the cores, or plutonium pits, with new ones.

But to do this the federal government will have to spend billions of dollars to build new facilities at nuclear weapons complexes and laboratories. DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration is in charge of the Complex Modernization program that will create new infrastructure for the production of plutonium pits—as many as 80 a year—at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The program also will expand the enriched uranium processing operation at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
                                                                                                                                                       -Noel Brinkerhoff

US: Nukes Agency Pushes New Bomb Production (by Matthew Cardinale, Inter Press Service)