Shortly after 1:00 a.m. on Saturday morning (September 22), Congress effectively terminated a new nuclear bomb plant at the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.

Buried in the 30-page long “Continuing Resolution” passed by the Senate Saturday morning was language that provides no additional funding the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) facility. The bill extended funding for the first six month of the budget year for the federal government, through March 2013. The House of Representatives had earlier passed an identical bill, and the measure now goes to the president, who will sign the bill.

The defeat of the $4 to $6 billion bomb plant was due to the hard work of many local and national organizations in New Mexico and Washington, DC.

More information about the CMRR is on the FCNL website.

A CRITICAL NOTICE OF GREG MELLO

Dear all,

This isn’t really right, in two main ways.

First, Congress did not terminate funding for CMRR-NF on Saturday or any other day. The Continuing Resolution (CR) allows NNSA to spend as it pleases at an annual rate of $7,577,341,000 within Weapons Activities, without formal reference to line item limits or commitments. (We call it "OGPOM" — One Giant Pot Of Money.)

The situation hasn’t changed in recent weeks or months. There was no termination.

The CR reads, in relevant part:

Sec. 125. (a) Notwithstanding section 101, amounts are provided for ‘‘Department of Energy—National Nuclear Security Administration—Weapons Activities’’ at a rate for operations of $7,577,341,000.

(b) Section 301(c) of title III of division B of Public Law 112–74 shall not apply to amounts made available by this section.

That Section 301(c) of title III of division B of Public Law 112–74 reads:

(c) Except as provided in this section, the amounts made available by this title shall be expended as authorized by law for the projects and activities specified in the ‘‘Conference’’ column in the ‘‘Department of Energy’’ table included under the heading ‘‘Title III—Department of Energy’’ in the joint explanatory statement accompanying this Act.

The referenced table is at pp. 869-883 in that Report, here, and it specifies the line-item amounts that can be spent on various projects. It is no longer legally binding, the CR says. And that’s all it says.

Thus NNSA could spend any amount of new money on CMRR-NF if the agency chose to do so. NNSA also has about $120 million in unspent CMRR-NF appropriations from past years, in addition to the (no longer relevant) amounts in the referenced table.

The fact is that DoD, STRATCOM, NNSA, Office of the Vice President, OMB, National Security Council, DOE, and even LANL all oppose CMRR-NF construction at this time, as do the appropriations committees (although these made no appropriations act this year).

When did this decision happen? Executive branch agencies were on board in their decision to defer CMRR-NF in late 2011, by the time the budget was prepared, as we knew then. CMRR-NF was essentially defeated, to the extent it IS defeated, from within the Executive Branch, about a year before this past Saturday.

In addition to law and administrative decisions, there are many practical barriers to re-starting the CMRR-NF project. Senator Levin, writing to the Department of Energy on last week, enumerated some of these:

This budget proposal [of February 2012] to essentially cancel the CMRR-NF led to a detrimental self-executing effect the day it was released. Key engineering staff that were leading the project, who are highly sought after on other nuclear and high hazard projects have since left for other job opportunities. The large engineering firms that were in charge of designing this project have moved their technical staffs to other jobs. The result is that not only has the human knowledge base been lost, a costly endeavor to re-constitute contractual activities associated with the design of the CMRR-NF will also have to be re-negotiated causing at least two year delay regardless of whether the project is started now or three years from now. The Committee is deeply concerned and troubled that the NNSA undermined the Congress and set into motion its cancelation [sic] plans without full Congressional consent. This delay also assumes that the same safety design basis can be used from the $350 million spent designing the facility for the past three years.

Senator Levin does not mention that the future appropriations stream that would have built CMRR-NF is now all spoken for and then some, by cost overruns in other projects. Nor does he mention that the Nuclear Weapons Council formally voted to defer the project and realign the plutonium program in March.

The upshot is that NNSA, despite having legal authority and even outstanding unspent appropriations to build CMRR-NF in FY2013, will not do so. They can’t. But the CR changed none of this.

To remedy the legal ambiguity, and get at the unspent balances in a formal way, NNSA has submitted a reprogramming request to suck all the money from the CMRR-NF project. It won’t be signed into law just now by the requisite 8 congresspersons, and Senator Levin indicated as much. It might be later, or maybe not. In either case, congressional action has been, for now, overtaken by events. This was an extremely partisan and unproductive Congress and this is one of the consequences.

Not all of CMRR-NF has been halted. The tunnel (current estimated cost, $140 M) is supported by most parties. (It’s unnecessary.)

Second, I want to challenge the claim that "The defeat of the $4 to $6 billion bomb plant was due to the hard work of many local and national organizations in New Mexico and Washington, DC."

For some years we met with you from time to time to ask for some solidarity from FCNL on this matter, and none was ever forthcoming.

A promise to build CMRR-NF was essential to New START ratification, and to any potential CTBT ratification until New START took center stage, so all the arms control NGOs were silently permissive or worse, regarding not just CMRR but also UPF and everything else the Obama Administration offered up in sacrifice (pdf), which was nothing less than modernization or replacement of the entire stockpile and all its delivery systems, and all the supporting NNSA infrastructure. FCNL did not oppose CMRR until long past its apparent demise.

The overriding goal of ratifying New START silenced all opposition to CMRR-NF from the U.S. arms control community. It put that community in support of CMRR.

Of all the organizations in Washington, DC and New Mexico, only one — the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) — joined us, after the decision had been made but before it was public, in opposition to CMRR-NF. Although their report came very late in the day, it was very good and they deserve credit for that. They bucked the DC community. We helped them, and we put essentially all the information we had out there for anybody else who wanted to join with us.

We are very happy to have you join us now, but for goodness sake let us be clear: the arms control "community" was on the other side of this issue until long after it was resolved in what Senator Levin called a "self-executing" manner by the Administration and the military.

The various New Mexico groups (which were and possibly still are, as we recently learned, supported financially by DOE) are another story. They never opposed CMRR-NF either, and one (Nuclear Watch) continues to argue for building a major part of CMRR-NF (the big vault, which implies the big tunnel and the big security perimeter, and other support systems). New Mexico groups tacitly agreed to build the first CMRR building, and bargained away the opportunity for public hearings on the air quality permit in favor of dog-and-pony shows in which NNSA could report on its progress in building CMRR — every six months!

This is not a matter of personal pique or a matter of who deserves the credit for what. The issues are much deeper than that.

So did we do this? We didn’t put the faults in the Pajarito Plateau, or make gallium-stabilized delta-phase plutonium in sealed pits stable, or create the salary structure, overhead, culture of lies, and the other forms of inefficiency that are strangling projects across the nuclear weapons complex. We did stop construction, which was imminent, and we did quite a few other things.

As far as I know, the U.S. disarmament and arms control "community" remains without any clear direction. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars have been dispensed by the Peace and Security Funders Group during the Obama Administration to NGOs and academics, and the result is — what? Anything? New START, which is basically a force ratification treaty? Ah, defeat of CMRR! But there was essentially no funding from those many foundations that contributed to the CMRR outcome. That funding was on the other side of the issue. Whatever else it was, ours was almost entirely a grassroots-funded effort, and the people on this listserve need to understand that something is terribly amiss in the U.S. arms control community and its funders.

After receiving your email, I see that the Ploughshares Fund is now claiming victory in this matter. They were on the opposite side altogether! Who else who supported CMRR all through the years will now step forward to claim credit for stopping it?

But CMRR and its progeny are not quite yet stopped. To do that and more, the arms control community has got to unify around the goal of decreasing funding for the weapons complex in a practical, serious manner, working across the aisles. I don’t see that happening yet. Far from it.

Best wishes,

Greg Mello

Greg Mello
 Los Alamos Study Group
 2901 Summit Place NE
 Albuquerque, NM 87106
 505-265-1200 office
 505-577-8563 cell