Ambient office = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Asparagus from Central Market = 151 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 83 nanosieverts per hour

     South Carolina’s Savannah River and New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory are manufacturing plutonium pits for use in nuclear weapons. Hollow, globe-shaped plutonium pits are placed at the core of nuclear warheads. Plutonium is one of the two key ingredients used to manufacture nuclear weapons, along with highly enriched uranium.
     Plaintiffs in South Carolina’s federal court challenged a plan consummated in 2018 for the two pit production sites that they say relied on an outdated environmental impact study. They also say that the plan didn’t truly analyze simultaneous production, and undermined safety and accountability safeguards for a multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons program and related waste disposal.
     Judge Mary Geiger Lewis said in her ruling that “Defendants neglected to properly consider the combined effects of their two-site strategy and have failed to convince the court they gave thought to how those effects would affect the environment.”
     The decision was handed down as U.S. authorities this week certified with a “diamond stamp” the first new plutonium pit from Los Alamos for deployment as a key component to nuclear warheads under efforts to modernize the nation’s weapons.
     This new ruling from South Carolina’s federal court says nuclear weapons regulators violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to properly analyze possible alternatives to production of the nuclear warhead component at Savannah River and Los Alamos.
     Jay Coghlan is the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico which is a co-plaintiff to the lawsuit. He said, “These agencies think they can proceed with their most expensive and complex project ever without required public analyses and credible cost estimates.” The court order provides litigants with two weeks to “reach some sort of proposed compromise” in writing.
     A spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration said that the agency is reviewing the court’s ruling and consulting with the Department of Justice. Spokesperson Milli Mike said in an email that “We will confer with the plaintiffs, as ordered. At this point in the judicial process, work on the program continues.”
     The ruling also rejected several additional claims in the lawsuit, including concerns about the analysis of the disposal of radioactive materials from the pit-making process.
     At the same time, the judge said that nuclear weapons regulators at the Department of Energy “failed to conduct a proper study on the combined effects of their two-site strategy” and that “they have neglected to present a good reason.”
     Plutonium pits were previously manufactured at Los Alamos until 2012. The lab was dogged by a string of safety lapses and concerns about a lack of accountability.
     Proposals to move production to South Carolina triggered a political battle in Washington, D.C., as New Mexico senators fought to retain a foothold for Los Alamos in the multibillion-dollar program. The Energy Department is currently working to ramp up production at both Savannah River and Los Alamos to an eventual 80 pits per year, amid timeline extensions and rising cost estimates.
     Plaintiffs in the plutonium pit lawsuit include environmental and nuclear-safety advocacy groups as well as a coalition of Gullah-Geechee communities of the descendants of Black slave along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina.
     Outside Denver, the closed Rocky Flats Plant was capable of producing more than 1,000 war reserve pits annually before work stopped in 1989 due to environmental and regulatory concerns. In 1996, the Department of Energy allowed for limited production capacity at Los Alamos, which produced its first war reserve pit in 2007. The lab ceased operations in 2012 after producing what was needed at the time.

Ambient office = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 104 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     Despite the impossibility of even Russia’s and China’s combined nuclear forces launching a successful first strike which would knock out the United States’ ability to cause catastrophic damage in response, the U.S. might be headed for increases in its nuclear forces.
     The Strategic Posture Commission’s report on preparing for threats from 2027 through 2035 states that the U.S. nuclear force must be “either larger in size, different in composition, or both” if it is to be able to address both a revisionist Russia and a China that the report claims is “pursuing a nuclear force buildup on a scale and pace unseen since the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s.”
     The commission’s report goes on to recommend that the U.S. urgently send more nuclear warheads to its deployed carriers, deploy, or base nuclear forces to the Asia-Pacific theater, increase planned numbers of nuclear-capable bombers, investigate fielding road-mobile nuclear missile carriers and prepare to deploy the future Sentinel ICBM in a configuration that carries multiple independent re-entry vehicles. Currently, each Minuteman III ICBM only carries one warhead, because of limits imposed by New START.
     Russia is also pouring resources into upgrading its nuclear arsenal, with a recent test of a new type of heavy ICBM, the RS-28 Sarmat, apparently having failed.
     The Sarmat is one of six weapons that Putin revealed at his 2018 annual address. A video animation showed Russian missiles flying toward a target resembling Florida. Two U.S. analysts recently claimed to have found a likely deployment site for another one of Russia’s nuclear-capable weapons heralded by Putin in 2018, the Burevestnik. Russia has also suggested that it may resume nuclear testing, preparing facilities on the island of Novaya Zemlya, where the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb ever detonated.
     Putin on September 25 proposed broadening the scope of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, suggesting that attacks by “nonnuclear countries with the participation or support of a nuclear country” could trigger a nuclear response, in a clear reference to Ukraine and its Western backers. The same day, China launched a nuclear-capable ICBM into the Pacific Ocean, its first ICBM test outside of its territory in over 40 years.
     Besides potentially sending nuclear warheads to existing carriers and developing new weapons systems, the U.S. recently announced it would deploy nonnuclear cruise missiles that would previously have been banned under the INF treaty to Germany, with Putin promising to respond in kind and lift a self-imposed moratorium on deploying intermediate-range missiles if the deployments go ahead.
     It has been reported that Russia has deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus, which had not hosted them since the early 1990s.
     With many changes to nuclear and conventional missile force postures taking place, relations between the West and Russia and China have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War. With more countries building up significant stockpiles of nuclear warheads, the world could already be living through the beginning of the next nuclear arms race. If the nuclear powers don’t agree on new limits, it could be just as dangerous as the last one.

Ambient office = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Granny Smith apple from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 3 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    The next major bilateral treaty to collapse was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which banned ground-launched missiles with ranges between three hundred and ten miles and three thousand and four hundred miles. The U.S. had long accused Russia of failure to comply with the treaty, with the Obama administration finding that a cruise missile tested by Russia in 2014 violated the treaty’s range limits. The Trump administration announced that it would withdraw from the treaty in October 2018, with Russia responding that is would also do so.
     These bilateral arms control treaties reduced the number of warheads from a peak of over sixty thousand when the INF treaty was signed in 1987 to less than ten thousand when New START was signed in 2011.
     In addition to Russia’s alleged violations of the INF treaty, the Trump administration mentioned China’s failure to participate and the need to prepare for a possible conflict in the Southern Pacific.
     China’s planned expansion of its nuclear arsenal poses an obstacle to nuclear negotiations that did not exist during the Cold War, when non-American and Soviet arsenals were small enough to safely ignore. Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. connected the prospects of a new nuclear agreement with Russia to the idea that China should join New START or another trilateral nuclear treaty. In 2023, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the U.S. found that the United States “will no longer be able to treat the Chinese nuclear threat as a ‘lesser included case’ of the Russian nuclear threat.”
    According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), China is expanding its nuclear forces and may have deployed “a small number of its nuclear warheads” in 2023. It is expected to continue increasing its nuclear arsenal over the next decade and could match U.S. or Russian numbers of deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles by 2034, although its overall number of warheads would remain lower.
     Whether the world will experience a massive increase in the number of warheads stockpiled and deployed if New START is allowed to expire without a replacement remains unclear. Daryl Kimball is the head of the Arms Control Association (ACA). He said that the U.S. and Russia have more efficient ways to increase the size of their deployed arsenals. Following the expiration of the treaty, “they will both have the capacity to double the number of deployed warheads by ‘uploading’.” This means increasing the number of nuclear warheads present on delivery systems that are already deployed.
     Pranay Vaddi is the U.S. National Security Council’s senior director for arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. He says that while the United States must be prepared for the constraints set out in New START to “disappear without replacement,” the U.S. does not “need to increase [its] nuclear forces to match or outnumber the combined total of [its] competitors.”
     Considering the U.S.’s existing second-strike capability, it would seem that more is not necessarily better. Just one submarine out of between eight and ten at sea at any time carries some 100 warheads. This is enough to “obliterate a large country and kill many tens of millions of people,” according to Kimball.
Please read Part 3 next