Pulling the curtain back on our nuclear weapons program

Feb. 9—Growing up in the post-Cold War era, nuclear warfare wasn't really on Sarah Scoles' radar. That continued as she pursued a career as a science journalist, writing about everything from NASA to AI.

Scoles, a Denver-based author who has written two previous books about UFOs and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, says she first became familiar with the United States' collection of national laboratories — which includes our own Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory — while reporting science news focused on physics and astronomy. When visiting the labs, she gradually became interested in finding out about the work the labs were less eager to publicize: namely, their work on nuclear weapons.

"When I visited, you just kind of know that there's this whole other thing going on besides studying supernovas or Mars or things like that," Scoles says. "And so I got interested in what is all of this contributing to and what actually is going on at these labs that they spend most of their time and money on. And so my initial interest was just kind of first finding that out, and then I saw all these parallels between the science I had been writing about and the weapons work."

That journey of discovery turned into Scoles' just-released book Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, which she will be visiting Collected Works Bookstore to discuss next week.

In the minds of much of the public, nuclear weapons have become more of a historical set piece than a living threat. That's changed somewhat following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which sparked new fears of a nuclear conflict in Europe. However, more people are likely to think about Oppenheimer or the Soviet Union when the topic arises than the fact the U.S. government is currently in the process of overhauling its nuclear weapons program.

That reality is likely convenient for the U.S. government, Scoles acknowledges, as when people learn more about nuclear weapons policy they don't always like what they see.

AUTHOR TALK

Collected Works Bookstore & Coffeehouse

6 p.m. Thursday, February 15

Scoles will discuss her book with Jim Falk, Global Santa Fe program chair. The talk will also be livestreamed on Zoom.

For more information or to purchase Scoles' book from Collected Works, go to tinyurl.com/2jcp6r4x.

To learn more about the U.S. nuclear program, and particularly the operations of Los Alamos National Laboratory, follow reporter Scott Wyland's coverage for The Santa Fe New Mexican.

"People in government don't say this but it's probably to their benefit to have people not thinking, 'Wow, a trillion dollars is going to that?'" she says.

Scoles' book is a much-needed attempt to push the national conversation on this subject into the 21st century and couldn't come at a better time for Northern New Mexico, which is both riding the wave of Oppenheimer-mania sparked by Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film and grappling with the implications of LANL ramping up to produce 30 plutonium pits, or nuclear bomb cores, per year as part of the Department of Energy's goal of modernizing its nuclear weapons stockpile.

That goal has become a political lightning rod, with advocates saying keeping up to date with technology is a crucial part of safeguarding the country's national security in an era of rising nuclear threats, while critics say it's a dangerous escalation on the way to a new nuclear arms race.

When speaking to scientists outside the labs, "the consensus among all of them was that it is the case that you can't just keep a plutonium pit around and expect it to behave itself indefinitely," Scoles says. "And so at some point, you will have to replace them. That's not a liberal issue, that's not a conservative issue. That's just science."

Where it gets more contentious, she says, is when discussing whether the labs are equipped for this kind of work, which can be incredibly dangerous to workers, the general public, and the environment if done incorrectly. (See: the infamous history of Rocky Flats, which produced more than 1,000 pits a year during the Cold War and was shut down after being raided by the EPA and FBI.)

"A lot of people think LANL doesn't have exactly the right workforce or the right infrastructure or the right mindset to be a producer of things, rather than a researcher and designer of things," Scoles says. "And so I think within the lab, that is the primary debate."

Countdown isn't a polemic on how the U.S. should approach nuclear weapons policy. The book provides a platform for a number of people to share their views, including Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan, University of New Mexico anthropology professor Martin "Doomsday" Pfeiffer, and a handful of LANL employees working on different aspects of the lab's nuclear mission.

Scoles says she was struck by how varied the viewpoints of lab employees are about their work, many of whom said they would prefer for nuclear weapons not to exist but, since they do, believe they need to be carefully monitored and maintained.

"That's a little bit contradictory, but it's kind of an interesting motivation for someone to work on something they don't fundamentally like or believe in because they have to live in a world with them," she says. "I think that was surprising to me."

The labs are, in some ways, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

"What is philosophically interesting is the labs initially existed to create new revolutionary, catastrophic weapons," Scoles says. "And they did that. Since then, it's been mostly about managing the impact of what they have created. 'We made these bombs, how do we keep them up? We made this environmental contamination, how do we fix it?' And so they've kind of kept themselves in business by dealing with the things that they created decades ago."

That's beginning to change as work gets underway on the stockpile upgrades, and some of the most interesting parts of the book deal with the tension between the labs' work as scientific research hubs and their more prosaic purpose as, well, bomb factories. That's become particularly salient at LANL, as Scoles notes, which has always had a reputation for being more academic than some of the other sites.

Pull Quote

She also delves into the contradictions between the labs being federal facilities run by private contractors (Sandia is currently managed by a subsidiary of Honeywell) and the strange fact that supercomputer capabilities are in some ways outstripping what could be learned about nuclear weapons from actual testing, which hasn't taken place in the U.S. for more than 30 years.

The national labs aren't generally enthusiastic about reporters "slinking around asking about their secret weapons," Scoles jokes, but she says she actually had less difficulty in getting access for her reporting than expected. She credits that partly to the trust she had established with her non-weapons-related reporting of lab programs over previous years as well as the DOE's incentive to promote its work in a positive light.

"It was fortunate timing, I think, because they're getting more money than they have in the past," she says. "They have a little more of a vested interest in being more public about what they're doing."

Part of that included a guided tour for reporters of LANL's pit production facility last summer, which included "lots of men with guns and lots of security" even though production was shut down for the day.

While few people will have the opportunity to tour a pit production factory, Countdown helps peel back the curtain on the nuclear weapons program in a way that is both accessible and engaging — and remarkably funny at times, for a book about weapons of mass destruction. For her part, Scoles says she wants to help people learn a little more about how some of their tax dollars are being spent.

"I think the biggest thing I hope people take away is acknowledging that this work is going on; it didn't stop after the Cold War," she says. "This is still a part of our world and will be for the foreseeable future."