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Nuclear Weapons: Now and Forever? The Role of Laboratory-Based Testing in Maintaining Nuclear Weapons

Department of Energy plans to spend ever more billions of dollars to construct and operate a system of new high-tech laboratory facilities to preserve its capacity to maintain test modify design and produce new nuclear weapons with or without underground tests are analyzed by Jacqueline Cabasso and Patrice Sutton. Having squandered more than four trillion dollars on nuclear weapons over the last 50 years and with continuing expenditures of some $25 billion a year on nuclear forces the U.S. commitment to these weapons is unceasing. The ongoing production and strategic deployment of nuclear weapons by the U.S. and other nuclear powers conflict with their obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to work toward disarmament. Mexican Ambassador Miguel Marin-Bosch has noted that this apparent unwillingness of the nuclear powers to give up nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future does not bode well for efforts to halt the global spread of nuclear weapons.

nuclear weapons; nuclear testing; disarmament; nuclear proliferation; nuclear non-proliferation treaty; U.S. military policy

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 22, No. 4 (1995): 140-153