The Coming Chokepoint in US Nuclear Warhead Production in South Carolina

Hi,

There’s a deluge of news going down on the endless war beat right now. Signals of an impending US attack on Iran, Israel’s near-daily bombardment of Gaza despite the US-brokered ceasefire, ICE and Border Patrol agents shooting and killing people across US cities, Trump’s announcement that he wants to increase the $1 trillion military budget by another $500 billion next year. We’re only a few weeks into the new year, which kicked off with a US raid on Venezuela that killed dozens of people while special forces abducted its president and first lady. At Inkstick, we believe endless war is a defining feature of modern life in the US. Sometimes it feels like it’s playing out quietly in the background. Nowadays it feels like it’s shrieking in our faces and feeds every day.

My latest story is about the new nuclear arms race, which the US has been chugging along with — designing and manufacturing new bombers, missiles, submarines, and warheads — for about a decade now. And it may not feel like the most urgent or timely matter at this moment. But I think all of what was just described above was also many years in the making, enabled by weapons in the pipeline long before they were put to use.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, New Mexico – the United States’ only repository for transuranic radioactive waste.

So, I hope in that context you’ll find our latest report relevant, since we highlight a key chokepoint in the nuclear arms race that will play out over this year. It’s about the production of plutonium pits, the bowling ball-size core of nuclear warheads, and a hazardous waste dispute playing out between rural South Carolina and a desert waste plant in New Mexico that could throw a major wrench into the United States’ plans to produce hundreds of those pits. And frankly, I think if no one took notice of the dispute we lay out in the piece, authorities in South Carolina may have just been able to paper over it. But grassroot watchdogs and national arms control organizations are tuned in, and we’ll keep reporting on it.

A Grave Problem with South Carolina’s New Nuclear Warhead

The coming showdown over the radioactive waste underscores what has long been a truism of the US nuclear weapons complex: that the government’s urgency to produce new weapons outstrips its commitment to plan and fund the cleanup of the sites across the American landscape that are contaminated while doing so. And a bureaucratic permitting process will provide citizens an opportunity to say whether or not they want to repeat the haste of the past during this second go-around of the nuclear arms race.

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