Groundbreaking at Livermore Lab.

• Author: Thornburg, Gina K.
• Position: Protesters at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory against new National Ignition Facility which would create tiny nuclear explosions - Column

Livermore, California

Just when you thought the Cold War was over, the bomb-makers come up with "Science-based Stockpile Stewardship."

Over the next ten years, the Department of Energy plans to spend $40 billion to build new facilities to ensure the "continued safety and reliability" of the existing stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The program's crown jewel is the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $1.2 billion football-stadium-sized edifice to be constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The facility would create tiny nuclear explosions.

"Old Cold War programs are given a fresh coat of post-Cold War paint and a new name," says Marylia Kelley, president of Tri-Valley Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment.

The National Ignition Facility's real, albeit tiny, nuclear explosions would be created by a laser forty times more powerful than the Nova laser, currently the world's most potent (also located at Livermore). Critics say these explosions fly in the face of the Comprehensive Test Ban and Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaties.

Activists have already opposed Department of Energy tests on stockpiled nuclear weapons conducted early this summer at the Nevada Test Site, and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos national laboratories.

The Livermore lab invited Kelley and nine other activists to attend the groundbreaking ceremony for the National Ignition Facility on May 29.

While about 150 protesters demonstrated outside the laboratory's gates, the ten activists inside, all representing different organizations, made a bold statement in front of a crowd of 2,500. Wearing "Nuclear Insanity Forever" T-shirts, they planted sunflower seeds in the freshly turned earth and filled in holes dug by lab officials. (Sunflowers are becoming an international symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons.)

"It was disruptive in an extremely dignified way," says Jacqueline Cabasso, director of the Western States Legal Foundation, which, along with thirty-eight groups around the nation, has filed a suit against the Department of Energy for its failure to comply with the nation's environmental laws.

Officials from Lawrence Livermore and the departments of Defense and Energy defend the facility. They laud the pioneering astrophysics research and the potential energy applications of the National Ignition Facility's experiments.

"The National Ignition Facility could...