By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/6/26
This is not how it was supposed to go. During the Cold War the two sides of capitalism and communism were openly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation. Yet, diplomats worked hard to prevent that by building a comprehensive security infrastructure, starting with the 1972 ABM treaty (Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). And it worked very well.
Then post-Cold War, when the socialist experiment collapsed and the world was united under a single ideology for the first time ever, it was supposed to be the start of the golden age of international happiness and the “rules-based order” of peace and prosperity.
That didn’t happen, eh? After the chaos of the 1990s, following the collapse of the old system in the East, there was a brief decade in the noughties when the capitalists stampeded into the Emerging Markets – the peak of the “globalisation” – where it did appear that it was going to work.
But almost immediately it started to fall to pieces. While the noughties brought prosperity and growth to most EMs (which is still going on), as they added economic muscle, by the end of that decade they started to add political muscle too.
The rising Global South became increasingly dissatisfied with being the second cousin in a two-speed world, with no say, while the “Developed World” continued to dictate the terms – manifest in the Global North’s propensity to hit other countries with sanctions for their misdemeanours like anti-gay laws or weak democratic institutions, when the West was far from perfect.
Then there were the blatant self-serving biases baked into this “us and them” global order. The CIA interfered in over 70 elections during the 35 years of the Cold War, the Washington Post has reported, during the course of which it tried to topple between 15-20 democratically elected governments (historians debate the actual number) simply because they were not pro-American enough. The most famous example in my world is Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro probably counts as another. And now the US is backing Israel to the hilt despite the fact that the UN has officially condemned what it is doing in Gaza as “genocide.” That is not how the rules-based order is supposed to work. “For my friends everything. For my enemies the law.” That can now be updated to a “sniper’s bullet to the head of my baby” instead of sanctions laws. That is where we are now.
But the golden era actually began to unravel at the start of the noughties not at the end. George W Bush unilaterally withdrew from the granddaddy of security deals, the ABM treaty, in 2002. There was no need for this. The nukes were still there. The threat of Mutually Assured Destruction was still real. Yet, for no good reason, Bush nixed the treaty – largely because he could. I won’t go into an analysis of the whys, but the bottom line is this decision was massively destabilising. I remember at the time, the Russians were completely freaked out but as the country was flat on its back, there was little the Kremlin could do about it. It did, however, set the US and Russia on a collision course that ultimately culminated in the invasion of Ukraine – a Nato membership issue, is tied to the lack of the Cold War security infrastructure as Russia felt vulnerable to Nato missiles stationed in Ukraine in the same way as they had been placed in Poland and Romania thanks to the end of the ABM.
The rules-based order has broken down completely now, along with the death of that security infrastructure. Following the nixing of the ABM treaty, both sides pulled out of one after another treaty, culminating in the expiration of the START deal this year – briefly renewed by US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2021, after Biden took office. (Biden was a critic of the decision to pull out of the ABM when it came up in 2002. Putin is also keen on restarting all those Cold War-era missile agreements. And even Trump was a fan, at least during his first term in office.)
Now we live in a far more dangerous world than when I was a boy in the 1970s. Nuclear sabre rattling has become part of the muzak. Putin got a lot of flak for tinkering with Russia’s nuclear weapons concept, watering down the restrictions on a first strike to a mere “existential threat” to Russia’s sovereignty – without defining what that means. So it could mean anything. He also pulled out of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty in 2023, which clears the way for a European war.
It’s Hiroshima Day today; I used to live a couple of years in Japan, and this was always a very solemn occasion for good reason. Yet, the US has chosen this week to update its nuclear policy for potential regional conflicts with Russia or China that explicitly weighs the use of shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons. This is the new black for nuclear stand-offs: the potential use of a “tactical” nuke. That means a small one that has less blast power than the largest conventional bombs like the MOABs the US has, so that you can use it but avoid a nuclear exchange – or so runs the theory. Analysts have speculated that the Kremlin might drop a very small nuke and flatten half of Kyiv to bring the war to an end, banking on the fact that the US would not respond in kind.
But both sides are slowly drifting via a series of baby steps towards a new nuclear arms race. The new nuclear policy comes on top of Trump’s abandoning the rules-based order ideas and adoption of his mercantile transactional thinking that is a throwback to the nineteenth century. He then codified that in December with the new National Security Strategy (NSS) that is also a regression to the Monroe Doctrine, or as wags have dubbed the new version, the “Donnie Doctrine.”
And this escalation is not limited to just the classic Russia-America pair, which have about 3,000 war heads each. One of the really big lessons from the Ukrainian war is: “If you have nukes, then the Global North will never attack you.”
At the start of the Ukraine war Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in the first weeks that Nato would support Ukraine fully, but the “first priority is to avoid WWIII.” That led directly to the “some, but not enough” weapons supply policy that will probably end with Ukraine’s defeat at Russia’s hands this winter.
The same logic applies to the Iranian war, where the US openly flew F-16s alongside its Israeli colleagues to bring down the swarm of missiles and drones in the hot phase of the war. The US would never dare to fly one of its F-16 over Russian airspace in support of a Ukrainian military operation for fear of sparking WWIII. It’s no wonder that Iran wants to build a nuclear bomb and why Israel and the US are so fixated on stopping it.
It also explains the massive destruction from the invasion and war with North Korea.
Ah. There hasn’t been a North Korean war, has there? And if there was ever a country that deserved military action to impose the rules-based order, then North Korea is it. But Kim Jong Un reportedly has 50 nuclear warheads. You get the point.
Unnoticed, the new nuclear arms race has actually already begun. China got its first Bomb in 1964, almost two decades after the Manhattan Project, and is now up to 600, with planes to get to 1,000 by 2030. It is also rapidly developing a whole new class of hypersonic missiles and its navy is already bigger than America’s.
And you can be sure that there are plenty of countries in the Global South now who are at least actively studying the issue. Amazingly, Germany is also toying with the idea of moving in under the French nuclear umbrella.
Moreover, the proxy war being fought between the Global North and the Global South on the territory of Ukraine – because that is what it is – has already pushed the three non-aligned nuclear powers of Russia, China and North Korea into the rapidly militarizing CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea) as we have reported. That should be very worrying indeed – between them they have half of the world’s men under arms. Last week, China reportedly sent 16 giant cargo plans to Tehran packed with hypersonic missiles and other military goodies ahead of the mooted US invasion. This is no longer passive support.
On this day, of all days, we should be focused on the unbearable cost of nuclear war. The answer is not just to put all the Cold War security infrastructure back in place (although that would be a good start) but to erect a new post-Cold War global security deal. Nato is obsolete and falling apart anyway thanks to Trump. As we reported, the Russians already suggested a new pan-European security deal in 2008, but it was immediately binned by the EU.
The end of the Ukraine conflict would be a golden opportunity to do this. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy refused the Kremlin-backed 27-point peace plan (27PPP) deal last December because he cannot give up territory in Donbas without a real security deal for Ukraine. That deal will still be necessary in a post-war scenario; and I highlight that the Kremlin is asking for the same thing for the same reasons – Putin wants to avoid the possibility that a new Democrat administration simply starts funding a new Ukrainian effort to expel Russia from its occupied territories in a few years’ time. I’m pretty sure that most of the Global South would happily sign up too. It should be a no-brainer, but we will all have to persuade the Americans. And that remains the only country ever to have dropped a nuclear weapon on another country. Ask the Japanese.
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House passes requirement to build more than 200 plutonium nuclear warhead cores annually by 2050
By Los Alamos Study Group, 7/23/26
Contact: Greg Mello: 505-577-8563
Permalink * Prior press releases and backgrounders
Albuquerque, NM — Plutonium warhead cores (“pits”) are the primary fissile components of all U.S. nuclear weapons.
Since pit production ceased at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver in 1989, the U.S. has not had a factory to make these components. A $60 billion effort is underway to provide for not just one but two such factories, one at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and another to follow at the Savannah River Site (SRS) (“Plutonium “pit” production now a $60 billion program — $20 billion down, $40 billion to go,” Jun 8, 2026).
On June 15, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) reported out its proposed fiscal year (FY) 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA, H.R. 8800), which contained, at Section 3111 (p. 1478), this pit production requirement:
“Consistent with the requirements of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Energy shall ensure that, by not later than 2050, the nuclear security enterprise has the capability to reliably produce no fewer than 180 war reserve plutonium pits annually.’’
Yesterday, (Wednesday July 22), the House passed H.R. 8800 with amendments. While the final (“engrossed”) version of the bill as passed is not available at congress.gov as of this writing, there were no floor amendments offered to change the pit production capacity requirements that were written into the HASC version.
The corresponding Senate version of the FY27 NDAA (reported from Committee on 6/15, not yet debated or passed in the Senate) is silent on pit production requirements.
Current statutory pit production requirements top out at 80 pits per year (ppy) by 2030. There are no statutory production requirements beyond that year.
The statutory pit production requirement to make 10 pits was not met in FY24; one pit was made. The number of pits made in FY25 and so far in FY26 are classified.
The FY26 NDAA, at Section 3112, requires that LANL acquire the capability to produce at least 30 pits per year (ppy), and SRS acquire the capability to produce at least 50 ppy.
The word “capability,” as used in the FY26 NDAA and in the proposed FY27 NDAA, is not the same as actual production, and is open to some interpretation. For its part, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the semi-autonomous subset of the Department of Energy (DOE) that designs and builds nuclear warheads, recently wrote that the requirement to have the “capability” to produce 30 ppy at LANL could be satisfied by the actual production of as few as 10 ppy (see p. S-12, Draft Plutonium Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement).
In addition to statutory requirements, there are also executive branch requirements. The latter have recently more than doubled for near-term production (that is, production at LANL) (“Responsive Today, Dominant Tomorrow: Enhancing American Nuclear Dominance:” Nuclear agency outlines ambitious near-term goals for nuclear warheads, labs, factories, and operations; Pit production at Los Alamos to be at least doubled if not tripled; other NNSA sites to help Los Alamos do so, details TBD, Feb 23, 2026). At SRS, production is slated to occur no earlier than 2035.
In the HASC, the new pit production requirement first appeared in the “Chairman’s Mark,” which anonymizes behind-the-scenes authorship. No amendments were offered in committee to change it. Representative Garamendi offered an amendment to compare the estimated cost of the new requirement with the cost of current requirements, but this was voted down 25-31, possibly because it is impractical to estimate the cost of anything so vague and distant in time.
Conversations we held on Capitol Hill in late June did not shed light on the origins or rationale for this proposed requirement.
Last year, the Senate attempted to write expanded pit production requirements into law while also loosening near-term requirements (that LANL was unlikely to meet in any case) (“Senate bill would relax near-term production deadlines for nuclear warhead cores at Los Alamos, double outyear production requirements for Los Alamos, and cement Savannah River’s production role,” Aug 15, 2025).
The House did not concur and pit production requirements remained the same, apart from the new requirement previously mentioned in Section 3112, which in effect created for the first time a statutory requirement to complete the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility (SRPPF), the facility at SRS where pits are to be made.
In order to “reliably produce no fewer than 180 war reserve plutonium pits annually,” the average production level will need to be significantly higher than 180 ppy. NNSA has quantified this average on more than one occasion, as explained here. A minimum production rate of 180 ppy would certainly lead to an average production rate in excess of 200 ppy, mostly likely well in excess of that figure if two sites are producing, as Dr. Verdon of NNSA once explained.
Study Group director Greg Mello:
“We do not yet know the views of key senators regarding this dramatic proposed increase in nuclear weapons manufacturing capacity — including the senators from New Mexico and South Carolina. The geopolitical, fiscal, and environmental implications of this proposal are very great. Not just the senators but the representatives from the sites involved should be questioned and their views be made known.
“In New Mexico, journalists tend to treat our senators like kings. Nobody puts them on the spot about so-called national security proposals such as this. This topic is apparently too “hot” to handle. We aren’t sure if the news media fears some kind of retribution beyond social shunning, which is to be expected and comes with journalism territory.
“The ‘2050’ date is as curious as the enormous proposed production capacity. That is a long time from now. It would allow time for a brand-new pit factory to be built at LANL, should it be decided to do so and assuming such a thing were even possible, which, after our own extensive analysis, we doubt. There is also considerable grassroots opposition to pit production in New Mexico.
“Even to propose such a production ramp-up damages U.S. security and its international reputation. Nuclear peers will wonder what in the world the U.S. is up to, and countries without nuclear weapons will wonder whether the U.S. is even remotely interested in keeping its nonproliferation pledge.
“Thirty years ago this month, the International Court of Justice concluded that ‘[t]here exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.’ That legal obligation derives from Article VI of the NPT, a U.S. law since 1970. The House is proposing a lawless law.
“This particular section of the proposed NDAA is hardly the worst part. But it is important. It is an attempt to frame and constrain U.S. nuclear weapons policy for the next quarter-century, while literally concretizing today’s nuclear militarism for our children’s children to deal with.
“In the final analysis, this section proposes a nuclear arms race — as do other sections of both the House and the Senate versions of the FY27 NDAA. It’s all about the contractors, all about pork-barrel spending, and all about trying to “dominate” Russia and China. The overall nuclear weapons policies proposed in these bills, and this section in the House bill in particular, are expressions of a Congress that is in the process of losing its mind. Who or what will rein in this madness?”