FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, August 7, 2026
Contact: Jay Coghlan, 505.989.7342, cell 505.470.3154, jay[at]nukewatch.org

Sophia Stroud, 505.231.9736, sophia[at]nukewatch.org

Santa Fe, NM – The Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has released an unredacted report entitled Plutonium Aging: Executive Summary (Unclassified), copied in its entirety below. Its key “High-Level Finding” is:

“The Pu [plutonium] in the stockpile appears to be aging slowly. The degradation issues that have been observed do not call into question present weapons performance.”

Plutonium “pits” are the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. The NNSA has repeatedly claimed that potential aging effects drive the need for the aggressive expansion of plutonium pit production, which is its most expensive and complex program to date.

However, the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) has repeatedly stated that the NNSA has no credible costs estimates and no “Integrated Master Schedule” for simultaneous production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. In fact, DOE and NNSA have been on the GAO’s “High Risk List” for project mismanagement and waste of taxpayers’ dollars since 1991. At more than $30 billion, the plutonium pit plant at SRS is on track to become the most expensive building in U.S. history. A comparable amount will be spent at LANL on facility upgrades and related projects, for which the NNSA fails to keep total aggregated costs.

Expanded plutonium pit production has been the choke point of resumed industrial-scale nuclear weapons production by the U.S. Crucially, no future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons for the new arms race. These new weapons can’t be tested because of the existing global testing moratorium, thereby perhaps degrading confidence in the stockpile. Or new-design nuclear weapons testing could prompt the U.S. to resume testing, which would have severe international proliferation consequences.

Nuclear Watch New Mexico filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Plutonium Aging: Executive Summary (Unclassified) in June. On July 15 we received an unclassified executive summary, but its two narrative pages were completely redacted. The date is significant because on July 16 the public comment period expired for the draft Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS), which was meant to examine the need and rationale for pit production to begin with. The nonprofit organizations Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch and Tri-Valley CAREs had to sue NNSA under the National Environmental Policy Act to compel NNSA to complete the Pit Production PEIS to begin with. The agency has now apparently bowed to public and congressional pressure to release an unredacted version. Nevertheless, concerned citizens were deprived of this crucial document while attempting to submit truly informed comment.

NNSA’s draft Pit Production PEIS claimed:

“NNSA’s existing pit manufacturing capability is insufficient to meet current production requirements, necessitating the establishment of additional pit production capability and capacity both to satisfy the congressional mandate and to mitigate risks associated with plutonium aging.” Draft Pit Production PEIS, NNSA, January 2026, P. S-2

[While rejecting the reuse of more than 15,000 existing pits] “Only Reuse Existing Pits. Not feasible as sole solution. Stockpiled pits age and do not mitigate aging risks or enable enhanced safety features…” Ibid., p. S-14

“Many of the aging pits will have to be replaced with new ones in the coming years to maintain a safe and reliable nuclear stockpile and deterrence.” Ibid., p. 1-3

NNSA Administrator Brandon Williams recently said that the Los Alamos Lab will begin to produce 100 pits per year by 2028. In 2021, LANL Director Thom Mason declared:

“… the pits we have today were largely manufactured in the 1980s, and we don’t have the predictive ability to say with certainty that our current, 40-year-old pits will be good until any particular date. It’s sort of glass half full, glass half empty; we can’t prove that they will fail, but we also can’t prove that they will work.” The best way to deal with this dilemma is to “take it off the table,” Mason explains. “We do that by making new pits, immediately.” [1]

Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented,

“The Lab Director certainly must be pleased that LANL is going to spend 2 billion taxpayer dollars on new plutonium pit production for each of the next six years. But it looks like his plutonium aging excuse doesn’t really hold water. LANL’s nuclear weapons programs are getting a huge $1 billion raise on October 1 for a total of $6 billion in FY 2027, while virtually everything else is being cut. We need real national security against wildfires, pandemics and adverse climate change, not empty excuses for new-design nuclear weapons for the new arms race that threatens us all.”

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As of May 2026, the United States is replacing or “modernizing” nearly every component of its strategic nuclear arsenal as well as expanding tactical capacity that was abandoned at the end of the cold war.

A war involving nukes would bring on blast and fire damage, along with radiological and chemical poisoning. It would likely bring on a “nuclear winter” that might last 5 years. A Nuclear Winter event would dramatically disrupt the world’s food supply.

In a rational world, we’d only have to worry about enemies starting war or accidents but now we face added problems of unstable, self-serving or even crazy leaders (e.g. Trump, Netanyahu and perhaps Putin) with fingers on the triggers. Underlings, civilian and military could trigger wars that go nuclear. False flag operations could go sour.

Please push for a serious American effort to live peaceably with other nations and halt the nuclear “modernization.”

bennet.senate.gov. hickenlooper.senate. gov. neguse.house.gov.

any member of Congress. 202-224-3121

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She adds: “If the president decided to launch a counterattack, even if the initial attack was launched by accident, certainly the adversary is going to retaliate. That’s a civilisation-ending day – or an afternoon.” I’m so taken aback I laugh out loud. “I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I’ve had many years to acclimate to this. But most people haven’t. Most people don’t know we’ve set up a system that is essentially a doomsday system. And we can dismantle it. We just have not.

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(Washington, D.C.) — The Arms Control Association (ACA) calls on Congress to reject and cut down the president’s request for a defense budget of $1.5 trillion dollars. Coming after several years of large increases to defense spending and in the absence of demonstrable progress in diplomatic steps to avoid arms racing and unnecessary military expenditure, the request is an unjustified and indefensible imposition on the American people.

“Both this administration and its predecessor have failed to convincingly justify several years of explosive growth in spending on nuclear weapons modernization and upgrades, an ambitious and destabilizing scheme for strategic missile interceptors, and other major weapons systems. The new budget request far exceeds any justifiable requirements, will line the pockets of military contractors, and steal taxpayer funds away from programs that address the real needs of Americans,” said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director.

“As the Trump administration seeks the largest military spending increase in U.S. history and massive increases in Defense and Energy Department spending on nuclear weapons, it has failed to seriously pursue lower-cost strategies to mitigate national security dangers, including effective nonproliferation diplomacy with Iran and bilateral nuclear arms reduction negotiations with Russia,” Kimball noted.

The budget calls for massive increases in military spending, including $71.4 billion for Pentagon nuclear weapons programs, $85.8 billion for missile defense and the president’s Golden Dome project, and $27.4 billion for nuclear weapons activities at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

“The United States is already set to spend more than $946 billion on its nuclear weapons systems in the decade between 2025 and 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That estimate does not include recent hikes in cost estimates for several major nuclear modernization programs,” noted ACA senior analyst Xiaodon Liang.

One example of an unjustified nuclear program is the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that is on track to cost upward of $200 billion and breached Pentagon cost-control measures.

“Because these ground-based missiles are vulnerable to attack by nuclear-armed adversaries, they pose a use-it-or-lose it dilemma for the president, creating an unnecessary escalation risk in the U.S. nuclear posture. ICBMs are an extravagance in an era when an enemy surprise attack is a lesser risk than escalation—particularly accidental escalation—in a crisis. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has ignored calls to forego Sentinel and instead life-extend the existing Minuteman III missile until all land-based ICBMs can be phased out through mutual, verifiable arms reduction agreements,” Liang added.

Despite Trump’s expressions of interest in “denuclearization talks” with Russia and China, the administration failed to pursue a new nuclear arms control framework with Russia to succeed the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in the year before the agreement’s expiration on Feb. 5, 2026, while also failing to engage China on a bilateral basis.

“While it is tragic that U.S. and Russian leaders failed to engage in meaningful negotiations on a successor agreement to New START, it is also notable that following the expiration of New START, the United States proposed multilateral strategic stability talks as a means to achieving a ‘new era’ of nuclear arms control,” Kimball noted.

“A ‘multilateral’ approach to nuclear arms control may sound appealing. Indeed, all five nuclear-armed states have treaty obligations to engage in good faith negotiations to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. But without a serious strategy for success, Trump’s approach could be a formula for further inaction, especially given the complexities of a five-sided negotiation involving states with different force sizes, force structures, nuclear postures, and strategic cultures,” Kimball warned.

“Such an initiative should not be allowed to substitute for the immediate commencement of serious bilateral talks between the United States and Russia and the United States and China on nuclear risk reduction, strategic stability, and nuclear arms reductions that could also yield concrete arms control and risk reduction outcomes, and perhaps more quickly,” he suggested.

“The Trump administration has also advocated for an expansion of the U.S. strategic missile defense system that could cost $185 billion by the end of this presidency according to the Pentagon’s own admission, would not establish an effective workable defense for the U.S. homeland, and would likely encourage Russia and China to improve their offensive capabilities so as to be able to overwhelm any new U.S. missile defense architecture,” Liang said.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that a missile defense shield that satisfies the president’s stated goals would cost $1.2 trillion – far more than the $185 billion the Pentagon plans to request.

Other excessive nuclear programs include third and fourth warheads for the sea-based leg of the strategic triad (the W93 and the future sea-based warhead), a nuclear bunker buster (the Nuclear Delivery System Air-Delivered), the sea-launched cruise missile, and large-scale plutonium pit production in two states.

“We also oppose the president’s proposed budget hikes because it is designed, in part, to pay for his costly, reckless, and illegal war of choice against Iran. American consumers are already paying for the president’s mistake at the gas pump and their tax dollars should not be used to support an expansion of a war that should never have been launched,” Kimball said.

For these reasons, ACA joined other organizations to encourage Congress to reject the president’s budget request. ACA is one of a diverse array of organizations, led by the Coalition on Human Needs and Public Citizen, which jointly issued an open letter on April 3 to Congress calling on members to oppose the $1.5 trillion budget request.

Instead of further wasteful and excessive spending on the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, ACA calls on Congress to question the military effectiveness and strategic wisdom of the expensive nuclear build-up underway. Legislators should press the administration for evidence of tangible progress toward reducing military and nuclear competition with Russia and China through hard-headed and sensible risk reduction and arms control diplomacy.

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Today there is a public hearing in Santa Fe for the draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement, made possible by Nuclear Watch New Mexico’s successful lawsuit.

Plutonium “pits” are the fissile cores of nuclear weapons. Their production has been the choke point of U.S. industrial-scale nuclear weapons production ever since a 1989 FBI raid investigating environmental crimes shut down the notorious Rocky Flats Plant near Denver.

As the archbishop of the diocese where nuclear weapons were invented, I follow in the footsteps of our late Pope Francis who declared that their mere possession is immoral. Today I am guided by Pope Leo XIV, who has declared: “The idea of the deterrent power of military might, especially nuclear deterrence, is based on the irrationality of relations between nations, built not on law, justice and trust, but on fear and domination by force.”

Here I believe that our Holy Father gets to the heart of the matter. The Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement claims that the National Nuclear Security Administration’s programs are consistent with the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty. That deserves serious examination.

For 56 years, the Nonproliferation Treaty has acted as the cornerstone of nuclear weapons nonproliferation. However, the treaty is now badly frayed, perhaps even in danger of collapsing. Its 11th review conference, being held now at the United Nations in New York City, is widely expected to fail for the third time over 15 years to make any progress whatsoever toward nuclear disarmament. This is primarily due to the never-ending refusal of the nuclear weapons states to enter into serious negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament, which they pledged to long ago in the treaty. The one-word excuse is always “deterrence”; that is, to deter others from using nuclear weapons. But this deflects the blame from our own possession of immoral, genocidal weapons.

“Deterrence” is at best only a half-truth. In reality, our government’s policy has always been a hybrid of deterrence and maintaining nuclear warfighting capabilities that can end civilization overnight. That is why the U.S. and Russia each have thousands of nuclear weapons instead of only a few hundred for minimal deterrence. That is why the U.S. has a $2 trillion so-called modernization program to keep nuclear weapons forever, in which expanded plutonium pit production is the critical issue.

Pope Leo XIV calls for a world built on law, justice and peace, which is our God-given duty to pursue. The U.S. Constitution enshrines international treaties as the “supreme Law of the Land.” The essential bargain of the Nonproliferation Treaty was that the nuclear weapons powers promised to negotiate nuclear disarmament, in exchange for which all other nations promised to never acquire them. The nuclear weapons powers have not upheld their end of this legal bargain.

No future pit production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, it is all for new-design nuclear weapons which can’t be tested because of the international testing moratorium, thereby perhaps eroding stockpile confidence. Or new-design nuclear weapons could prompt the U.S. to return to testing, which would shred the global nonproliferation regime.

The enormous sums for unneeded new nuclear weapons rob from the poor and needy. Military spending is reaching record heights while programs for the common man and woman are being slashed. We urgently need comprehensive cleanup at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to protect our irreplaceable groundwater. Instead, $6 billion will be put into LANL’s nuclear weapons programs next year, of which $2.4 billion is for plutonium pit production. But cleanup gets less than $300 million.

These are the clearly the wrong priorities. I urge concerned citizens to speak their minds at this evening’s public hearing. In addition, please be sure to submit written comments on the need for cleanup and nuclear disarmament by the deadline of July 16 (which happens to be the 81st anniversary of the Trinity Test that harmed New Mexicans).

The Most Rev. John C. Wester is archbishop of Santa Fe.

[The Pit Production PEIS public hearing Thursday, May 14, 2026: 5:00-5:30 pm Open House Poster Session, 5:30-8:00 pm Formal Public Hearing, at the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute, 1607 Paseo de Peralta. It is also virtual at https://bit.ly/PitPEIS14May, Meeting ID: 278 752 885 654 34, Passcode: W9Bt96vN Written comments should be submitted by July 16 to PitPEIS@nnsa.doe.gov]

—

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The stakes could hardly be higher.

Russia, Israel and the United States, all nuclear-armed, are conducting illegal wars of aggression against countries without nuclear weapons. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaged in conflict last year across their disputed border, raising the spectre of nuclear escalation.

In February, the last remaining agreement constraining Russian and US nuclear weapons lapsed, with nothing to replace it. The two countries account for nearly 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

And all nine nuclear-armed states are investing vast sums in modernising their arsenals with more capable and dangerous weapons. Deployed nuclear weapons and those on high alert, ready to be launched within minutes, are also rising.

All these developments have brought the Doomsday Clock, which assesses how close the world is to existential catastrophe, closer to midnight than it has ever been since 1947.

What is the NPT?
The NPT is considered a cornerstone of international law in relation to nuclear weapons and disarmament. It has the widest membership of any arms control agreement, with 190 states. These include five countries that manufactured and exploded nuclear weapons before 1967 – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. All other members do not have nuclear weapons.

North Korea is the only state to have joined the NPT and then renounced it. India, Israel and Pakistan, all nuclear-armed, along with South Sudan, are the only countries that have never joined.

The NPT is essentially a bargain struck in the late 1960s between the states that had nuclear weapons and those that did not. The first five nuclear-armed states – also permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto rights – committed to end the nuclear arms race and eliminate their arsenals.

In exchange, states without nuclear weapons agreed to forego acquiring them, with the sweetener of assistance in developing peaceful uses of nuclear technology.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was established to ensure non-nuclear states did not acquire weapons. However, the treaty did not establish any timeframes, defined processes, or verification or enforcement mechanisms for nuclear-armed nations to disarm.

The NPT entered into legal force in 1970, initially for 25 years. It was hoped the task of nuclear disarmament would be accomplished by then.

When this was clearly not the case in 1995, the treaty was indefinitely extended, thereby removing an important source of pressure on nuclear-armed states to fulfil their side of the bargain. Since then, there have been reviews every five years to debate implementation of the treaty.

Rarely consensus
These conferences, however, have been fraught.

In 2015, for example, Canada, the UK and US blocked adoption of a painstakingly negotiated text at the behest of Israel, a non-member of the treaty. And in 2022, Russia blocked adoption of the final text, mainly due to references to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, which it attacked and occupied.

Since 1995, only two review conferences have produced an agreed outcome document.

In 2000, the members agreed to 13 practical steps to progress nuclear disarmament, but these remain almost completely unimplemented. And in 2010, the members agreed to a 64-point action plan, but implementation has been variable and weak, particularly for the 22 actions relating to disarmament.

The NPT has been moderately effective, though, in discouraging additional states from acquiring nuclear weapons. A number of countries, such as Canada, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea and Australia, gave up nuclear weapons programs or ambitions after joining.

But when it comes to disarmament, the treaty has failed dismally.

The head of this year’s conference, Do Hung Viet, has stressed the risk of failing to find consensus again at this year’s review.

It may not put an end to the NPT itself but […] it may hollow out the NPT. We may lose the credibility of the NPT itself.

Two main challenges ahead
In the current dysfunctional international environment, expectations for this year’s conference are low.

Nuclear-armed states have not only failed to disarm, they are growing, modernising and threatening to use their arsenals in an accelerating arms race. And two recent developments are likely to cast further shadows over the debate.

The first is Russia’s unprecedented weaponisation of nuclear facilities in Ukraine, including operating nuclear power plants with huge quantities of radioactive materials in the reactor cores and in spent fuel ponds. Russian forces have engaged in a number of reckless actions, including:

attacking and damaging the facilities
interfering with their operation and terrorising staff
using some as military bases
and jeopardising the power and water supplies critical to the essential cooling of reactors and spent fuel.
These actions risk a radiological disaster extending far beyond Ukraine’s borders.

A major failing of the last review conference in 2022 was that no measures were passed to protect nuclear facilities from attack.

A Russian serviceman guards the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station in Russian-occupied Ukraine in 2022. AP
The second major issue confronting this year’s review: the US–Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Both countries have cited Iran’s imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons as a pretext for their attacks, despite the fact US intelligence officials and the head of the IAEA said this wasn’t the case.

The might-is-right attacks by the US and Israel raise profound questions for the world’s non-nuclear nations in the value of adhering to the NPT. Why should they comply with the treaty’s stringent requirements when nuclear-armed states can use illegal force against them, at their will?

Non-proliferation cannot be secured by war. In fact, for the surviving members of Iran’s regime (and leaders of other nations), the war likely reinforces the opposite lesson: preventing military aggression is best assured by having nuclear weapons.

The risk of other states now following the North Korean model – leaving the NPT and developing an initially clandestine nuclear weapons program – is much higher.

In the nuclear age, security is either shared or non-existent. The only safe and sustainable future is predicated on eliminating nuclear weapons. This can only be achieved through cooperation, negotiation and international law, backed up by equitable verification.

—
Jay Coghlan, Executive Director
Nuclear Watch New Mexico
903 W. Alameda #325, Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.989.7342 c. 505.470.3154
jay@nukewatch.org

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AnnualReport-Arsenals-by-Country.png
Which countries have nuclear weapons?
icanw.org

There is no evidence that Iran has even one nuclear weapon although the situation became much more clouded after Trump erased Nuclear Deal. The Council on Foreign Relations: “first-order concern is that Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons would pose a major threat to Israel.” America and Israel leap into a major war because the countries with most powerful militaries in the world are nervous that Iran just might get a nuke.

Trump jumped out of Nuclear Deal saying, “The fact is this was a horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made. It didn’t bring calm, it didn’t bring peace, and it never will.” It certainly was one sided and collapsed under the egos of Trump and Netanyahu. Those firebrands dragged us into attacking Iran twice since Trump reneged on the Nuclear Deal. Which mad-man leads this Parade?

This could easily blow up into WWlll and go nuclear. There is good reason to believe that nuclear winter could result. The sky would darken, temperatures would drop, agriculture would be greatly limited for as much as 4 or 5 years. Billions would die. .Who has fingers on the release of Nukes? Trump, Hegseth or other lunatics in the Trump’s menagerie or maybe yahu, Ben-Gvir or Smotrich? Where are Hickenlooper, Bennet?? bennet.senate.gov. Hickenlooper.senate.gov.  capitol switchboard. 202-224-3121

Our Congress has been on holiday for the last two weeks as Trump and Netanyahu rain bombs on the people of Iran. Israel murdered 350 people in Lebanon on Wednesday with no letup of their US funded abuse of Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza.

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