nuke triggers in production - Mother's Day demo NV

Los Alamos produces triggers for nuclear weapons

LESLIE HOFFMAN, Associated Press Writer Tuesday, April 22, 2003
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(04-22) 16:13 PDT LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) --

Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, has restored the nation's ability to make triggers for nuclear weapons for the first time in nearly 14 years.

"Six decades ago, Los Alamos produced the first trigger, or pit, as it's called. And today, on our 60th anniversary, we delivered to the Department of Energy a pit made with fully certified processes and made to all of the specifications required for the nuclear stockpile," the lab's interim director, Pete Nanos, said Tuesday.

The U.S. capability to produce plutonium pits -- the heart of a nuclear weapon -- ended when the Rocky Flats plant near Denver shut down in June 1989.

In 1992, when the Cold War ended, the United States decided not to resume production of nuclear weapons parts at Rocky Flats.

That left the United States as the only nuclear power in the world that couldn't make pits, said Linton Brooks, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration.

"All these acknowledged nuclear powers could make pits. It seems clear many of the unacknowledged nuclear powers could make pits, but we couldn't until today," Brooks said.

Now the United States has the capability to replace pits in its current stockpile. Officials said, however, that does not mean the lab will turn into a nuclear weapons manufacturer.

"What it means is that we now how the capability if something goes wrong with the stockpile to fix it," Brooks said.

Nanos said a decision on a permanent manufacturing facility will be up to the Department of Energy, and that the lab's capability is an interim function.

Brooks said, however, that for at least the next decade "the capability we have at Los Alamos is all the capability we'll need."

Five facilities, including Los Alamos and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, are under consideration to become home to the DOE's proposed permanent Modern Pit Facility. The facility would process, manufacture and assemble plutonium pits for the Pantex weapons plant in Amarillo, Texas.

Pantex also is on the finalists' list. That facility, the nation's primary assembly and disassembly plant for nuclear warheads, currently repackages old plutonium pits to meet new safety standards.

Other possible sites are the Nevada Test Site and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The facility is expected to be operating by 2020.