Listening to a young woman from the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) speak at a public hearing on expanded plutonium pit production at Los Alamos on May 14, the phrase “the banality of evil” kept coming to mind. The woman, perhaps in her early 20s, droned on, her speech peppered with acronyms. (The first public commenter referred to it as alphabet soup.) Her dull, technical presentation of the issue masked the insanity of what we were there to discuss: whether Los Alamos should host an increasing number of pits for new nuclear weapons. This despite the fact that unmarked drums of radioactive waste are currently being stored at Los Alamos National Labs, under what looks like a circus tent, in a fire zone.
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There were audible groans from the audience when the NNSA spokesperson talked about safety, as if the only potential risk was road crashes due to trucks moving—wait, moving radioactive waste?! 🤯
At the bottom of the screen during the hearing was a phrase along the lines of: “Nukes for peace”.
If any of you have been following the Fire on the Mountain issue—unmarked barrels of nuclear waste that have been sitting outside under a tent, in a fire zone, for decades, not far from Santa Fe—then the idea of creating yet more nuclear waste rather than dealing with the existing waste is horrifying. ☢️🔥
I had to leave the hearing early, but most of the comments were cogent and powerful. One young man asked how many people in the audience wanted to see an end to new nuclear weapons. Everyone (other than the NNSA officials) raised their hand. “This hearing is a farce,” he exclaimed, as the only “options” that were being considered were creating the pits in a different state. The idea that having enough nuclear weapons to be able to annihilate every person on the planet should mean that we don’t need more of them does not seem to have reached our government. And this isn’t just an issue of the current administration.
To put it succinctly: the problems we face, including the lack of proper social programs to help Americans thrive, is not unique to our current government. Those of us who care need to continue to make a lot of noise about a lot of issues, and hope that our combined voices and (dare I suggest) tireless activism will eventually bear fruit. Because nobody who can speak so casually about nuclear weapons should have any position of power.
To learn more, visit https://nukewatch.org/
