DOSSIER

The New Anti-Nuclear War Movement in New Mexico

Nuclear Testing, Plutonium Pit Production at Los Alamos,

the Risks, and the Movement Fighting Back

Compiled July 19, 2026 • 81 years and 3 days after the Trinity Test

Sources: contemporary press, government documents, peer-reviewed research,

advocacy-organization records, and primary correspondence. Full bibliography at end.

Contents

Executive Summary……………………… 3

Part I — The Testing Question………. 5

Part II — Los Alamos and the Plutonium Pit Mission………………….. 7

Part III — The PF-4 Plutonium Release Study……………………………… 9

Part IV — The Opposition: Who Is Fighting…………………………………….. 11

Part V — The Legal Front……………. 13

Part VI — The Community Front….. 15

Part VII — The Workforce Bottleneck………………………………………………… 16

Part VIII — The Money Argument… 17

Part IX — Sole Presidential Launch Authority…………………………………… 18

Part X — The Political and Electoral Front……………………………………….. 20

Part XI — Timeline and Watch Points………………………………………………… 22

Part XII — Key People………………… 24

Sources…………………………………….. 25

Executive Summary

Three stories converge in New Mexico in the summer of 2026, and this dossier treats them as one story. First, the United States government has announced an intention to resume nuclear weapons testing for the first time since 1992, while conceding under oath that no technical need for explosive testing exists. Second, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is industrializing the production of plutonium “pits” — the fissile cores of nuclear warheads — in a facility that independent, peer-reviewed research now says carries a radically underestimated accident risk: a severe release could cause roughly 3,200 cancer cases, about 1,000 of them fatal, in surrounding communities. Third, a layered opposition movement — watchdog nonprofits, litigators, downwinders, scientists, faith leaders, and national campaigns — is fighting the expansion through courts, comment periods, budgets, pews, and (slowly) the ballot box.

The essential facts, distilled: no explosive nuclear test is currently scheduled, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright testified on May 13, 2026 that “to assure the reliability of our weapons, there is not a need for explosive testing.” What the administration calls “testing” remains undefined; the U.S. already conducts legal, non-explosive subcritical experiments underground in Nevada. Meanwhile the pit-production program — NNSA’s most expensive ever, at roughly $60 billion over twenty years — aims for 30 pits per year at LANL by 2028, with new targets of 60 and a “capability” of 100. None of these new pits maintain the existing stockpile; all are for new-design weapons. Some 15,000 existing pits sit in storage at Pantex, and the last independent JASON study found most pit types reliable for a century or more.

The opposition’s sharpest current lever is legal: a coalition (Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley CAREs, represented by the South Carolina Environmental Law Project) already won a federal ruling that NNSA violated the National Environmental Policy Act, forcing the first programmatic environmental review of the entire pit enterprise. The draft appeared in April 2026; comments closed July 16. The coalition’s July 6 demand letter accuses NNSA of suppressing three documents — a new JASON pit-lifetime study, a critical DOE management review, and a decade-overdue seismic hazard analysis for Los Alamos — any of which could undercut the program’s stated rationale. A second round of litigation over the final decision is likely.

Two structural pressure points stand out. The workforce bottleneck: LANL’s hiring blitzes (~1,000 per year) are colliding with a regional housing crisis, and reporting in Science confirms that inability to staff safety-critical roles is already delaying pit production. And the democratic deficit: one person — any president — retains sole, unchecked legal authority to launch nuclear weapons in minutes. Bills to require congressional authorization for first use (S.192/H.R.669) have never received a vote; they accumulate cosponsors and wait for a political moment.

The movement’s unfilled gap is electoral. The Council for a Livable World endorses and funds arms-control candidates; Back from the Brink supplies a ready five-plank platform; over 250 state and local officials have signed on. But no major-party presidential contender has yet run on nuclear disarmament — and New Mexico’s own congressional delegation, anchored by LANL jobs, supports the spending. History suggests the missing ingredient is not policy detail but public imagination — a gap that culture and art, more than white papers, have actually moved before.

Part I — The Testing Question

1.1 The October 2025 announcement

On October 30, 2025, President Trump announced that the United States would resume nuclear weapons testing “on an equal basis” with other nuclear powers: “We’ve halted many years ago, but with others doing testing I think it’s appropriate to do so.” The statement, made amid reports of Russian tests of nuclear-powered delivery systems (not nuclear detonations), ended a de facto public settlement that had held since the U.S. stopped explosive testing in September 1992.

What the order actually requires remains undefined nine months later. A February 11, 2026 internal memo from NNSA’s deputy administrator directed staff to “execute the President’s directive with respect to the testing of the U.S. nuclear deterrent” — with implementation details listed, literally, as “TBD.” The ambiguity is the story: “testing” could mean anything from continuing existing non-explosive experiments (rebranded), to flight tests, to an actual underground detonation.

1.2 Two very different kinds of “nuclear test”

Subcritical experiments — already happening, legal, non-explosive. Roughly 1,000 feet beneath the Nevada National Security Site (NNSS, 1,300 square miles, ~65 miles northwest of Las Vegas), the PULSE facility (formerly “U1a”) hosts experiments in which chemical explosives shock plutonium so scientists can study its behavior under extreme conditions. The plutonium never reaches a self-sustaining chain reaction — no nuclear yield, hence “subcritical.” These experiments, many designed and fielded by Los Alamos teams, are a pillar of the Stockpile Stewardship Program that has certified the arsenal without explosive testing every year since 1992, alongside supercomputer simulation. The most recent publicly reported subcritical experiment was in May 2024.

Underground explosive testing — the thing actually in dispute. An actual detonation, sealed in a deep shaft at the Nevada site, the way the U.S. conducted over 800 underground tests between 1962 and 1992. Resuming would break a 34-year moratorium observed by every nuclear power except North Korea. Experts estimate a crude “demonstration” shot could be staged in roughly 18 months from a go order; a scientifically useful, fully instrumented test would take several years to prepare. Nevada officials note an added modern complication: Las Vegas’s high-rises were not built with test-era seismic codes in mind.

1.3 The Wright concession

The most important data point in the entire testing debate came at a Senate hearing on May 13, 2026, when Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) pressed Energy Secretary Chris Wright:

“To assure the reliability of our weapons, there is not a need for explosive testing.”

— Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Senate testimony, May 13, 2026

Wright acknowledged that the weapons laboratory directors and the STRATCOM commander had again certified the stockpile’s reliability using non-explosive methods — while noting the President retains authority to order explosive tests “for other reasons.” Translation: if a test happens, it will be geopolitical signaling, not science. That admission is now a fixed point that opponents cite in every forum.

1.4 Where things stand

• No explosive test is scheduled or publicly confirmed. A March 2026 Washington Times report claimed the U.S. was “set to resume” underground tests; DOE/NNSA has not confirmed.
• Subcritical experiments continue at PULSE and are being expanded with new diagnostic capability.
• Nevada’s congressional delegation is actively fighting resumption; Sen. Rosen’s hearing exchange was part of a sustained pressure campaign.
• Arms-control experts (CSIS, Stanford CISAC, Arms Control Association) broadly assess resumption as strategically self-defeating: the U.S. has more test data than any rival, so a testing race benefits adversaries with thinner datasets.

1.5 Los Alamos’s role in testing

LANL designs and fields subcritical experiments in Nevada, would design any device used in a resumed explosive test, and supplies the test-hardware pipeline — a pipeline that has been repeatedly delayed by the laboratory’s own safety and staffing problems (see Part II). But LANL’s central role in the buildup is not testing at all: it is manufacturing.

Part II — Los Alamos and the Plutonium Pit Mission

2.1 What a pit is, and why new ones

A plutonium pit is the grapefruit-sized fissile core — the “trigger” — of a modern thermonuclear weapon. The U.S. mass-produced pits at the Rocky Flats plant in Colorado until 1989, when the FBI raided it over environmental crimes and production stopped. Since then the U.S. has made only small numbers of pits; roughly 15,000 existing pits are stored at the Pantex Plant in Texas.

The official rationale for new production is pit aging. The counter-evidence is substantial: the 2006 JASON independent scientific review concluded most pit types have reliable lifetimes of 100 years or more (the average pit is now about 43 years old), and those that do not have known fixes. Critically — as the watchdog coalition emphasizes and NNSA does not dispute — none of the planned production maintains the existing, extensively tested stockpile. The new pits are for new-design weapons, principally the W87-1 warhead for the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile.

2.2 Targets, money, and the two-site plan

The pit program is NNSA’s most expensive undertaking ever: roughly $5 billion per year over the next six years and at least $60 billion over twenty. The plan splits production between two sites:

• Los Alamos (PF-4): 30 pits/year by 2028 under the current plan — with a February 2026 NNSA memo setting new objectives of 60 pits/year by end of 2028 and “enabling production of 100.” NNSA approved an aggressive LANL expansion plan in March 2026.
• Savannah River Site (South Carolina): a converted facility intended to produce 50 pits/year — now delayed to roughly 2035 and estimated at $30 billion-plus, which would make it the most expensive building in United States history.

Nuclear weapons activities now consume roughly 84% of LANL’s budget, with nearly all other programs cut — a transformation of what was once a broader science institution into, functionally, a bomb plant with a physics department attached.

2.3 PF-4’s safety record

Plutonium Facility 4 (PF-4) is the only operating U.S. pit factory, and its record is the movement’s Exhibit A. In 2011, technicians photographed plutonium rods placed side-by-side in a configuration that risked accidental criticality — a lethal, uncontrolled chain reaction. The Center for Public Integrity’s “Nuclear Negligence” investigation documented how criticality-safety engineers resigned in frustration and the facility’s plutonium operations were paused for years (2013–2016). More recently, Science (AAAS) reported that safety lapses — worker contamination events, criticality-safety staffing shortfalls — have delayed both warhead work and shipments of test hardware to Nevada. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), the federal government’s own independent overseer, has flagged seismic and ventilation concerns at PF-4 for years.

2.4 Why this matters now

Every element of the risk picture in Part III scales with the expansion: more plutonium on site, more glove boxes, more workers, more handling operations, faster tempo — in a decades-old building, near an active fault system, whose safety basis rests on a 2008 analysis using mid-century data.

Part III — The PF-4 Plutonium Release Study

3.1 The study

In July 2026, Science and Global Security published a peer-reviewed consequence analysis of major accidents at plutonium pit production facilities. Lead author: Sébastien Philippe, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and visiting researcher at Princeton, funded by the Andrew Carnegie Foundation and the Ploughshares Fund. Its finding, in one sentence: the U.S. government underestimates the consequences of a plutonium release from PF-4 by one to two orders of magnitude.

3.2 The scenario

This is not a nuclear explosion — plutonium in a facility cannot detonate like a bomb. The scenario is a release of respirable plutonium particles: a major earthquake (LANL sits near the Pajarito fault system) topples some of the thousands of glove boxes in which plutonium is handled; fire follows; the building’s ventilation and filtration systems fail; micron-scale plutonium particles escape and drift over Los Alamos, White Rock, and the Española Valley toward Santa Fe. Inhaled plutonium lodges in lung tissue and causes cancer over years and decades.

3.3 The numbers

Scenario	Philippe study (2026)	Government estimate
1 kg of plutonium released	Hundreds of cancer deaths	~9 deaths (2008 DOE analysis)
5+ kg released (severe case)	~3,200 cancer cases; ~1,000 fatal	Not comparably assessed
Overall assessment	10–100× worse than official figures	—
Remediation cost, major release	~$150 billion	—

A note on the figure that circulates publicly: “1,000 people” refers to the study’s estimate of fatal cancers in a large release; total cancer cases would be roughly three times that.

3.4 Why the government’s number is so much lower

The official safety case rests on a 2008 assessment built on experimental data from the 1960s–80s. The new study finds released particles could be about one-fifth the size previously assumed — and smaller particles stay airborne longer, travel farther, and penetrate deeper into lungs. NNSA’s own October 2022 internal modeling of one scenario showed a potential 210 cancer deaths — already far above the 2008 basis — and in 2022 the agency declined a PF-4 ventilation upgrade as too expensive.

3.5 NNSA’s response, and the seismic document fight

NNSA’s public response: PF-4 “has robust safety programs” and is “one of the safest places in the country” to be during a natural disaster. The agency has not rebutted the particle-size science. Meanwhile, a new Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis for LANL — nearly a decade overdue, completed around May 2026 per DNFSB reporting — has not been released to the public, even as the pit-expansion environmental review it directly bears upon moves toward a final decision. That withholding is now part of the legal fight (Part V).

Part IV — The Opposition: Who Is Fighting

4.1 The New Mexico core

• Nuclear Watch New Mexico (Santa Fe) — Jay Coghlan (executive director), Scott Kovac (research director), Sophie Stroud (communications/associate director). Technical research, FOIA work, litigation, and comment mobilization. Ploughshares-funded. The hub of the pit fight.
• Los Alamos Study Group (Albuquerque) — Greg Mello. The other long-running LANL watchdog; deep budget and technical analysis; tracks the lab’s hiring pipeline and expansion approvals in detail.
• Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium — Tina Cordova, co-founder. Represents families exposed to Trinity Test fallout in 1945; won the decades-long fight to extend Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) coverage to New Mexicans. The moral center of gravity.
• Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, Communities for Clean Water, Tewa Women United, Honor Our Pueblo Existence — cleanup, water protection, and Indigenous/Pueblo-community accountability around LANL, whose land and watersheds border multiple Pueblos.

4.2 National coalition partners

• Savannah River Site Watch (Columbia, SC) and Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA — Scott Yundt, executive director) — the sister watchdogs at the other two weapons-complex sites; co-plaintiffs in the pit litigation.
• South Carolina Environmental Law Project (SCELP) — the nonprofit public-interest law firm actually litigating on the coalition’s behalf.
• Union of Concerned Scientists, Arms Control Association, Federation of American Scientists — Washington-facing technical and policy analysis. UCS labeled the new environmental review a “legal fig leaf.”
• Ploughshares Fund — the philanthropic backbone funding much of the field, including the Philippe study.
• Back from the Brink — the national grassroots umbrella founded by Physicians for Social Responsibility and UCS; city/state resolutions, congressional legislation, and local hubs including an active New Mexico Hub.

4.3 The faith infrastructure

Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe has made his archdiocese the most prominent Catholic voice for nuclear disarmament in the country since his 2022 pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace.” He leads annual Trinity remembrances (the fourth was held July 19, 2026, at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe, with NM Environment Secretary James Kenney keynoting), gives the movement moral standing and media reach, and connects it to international faith networks — Interfaith Power and Light, Soka Gakkai International-USA, and the Vatican’s explicit condemnation of nuclear deterrence itself.

4.4 Official watchdogs (not activists, but ammunition)

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board publishes weekly inspector reports from LANL; GAO audits costs and schedules; the independent JASON scientists review pit aging; and the New Mexico Environment Department wields state regulatory power. None are opposition bodies — which is precisely why their findings carry weight when the movement cites them.

4.5 How the pieces work together

The coalition functions as a division of labor: litigation is the skeleton, technical research is the nervous system, community organizing is the muscle, and the faith and downwinder voices are the heart. Watchdogs generate FOIA discoveries and technical analysis; SCELP turns them into legal filings and the public-comment record; Back from the Brink hubs, parishes, and downwinders turn out bodies for hearings and vigils; Washington groups translate it all into congressional pressure and press; the state applies regulatory leverage on waste and cleanup. Each node is small — NukeWatch is a three-person shop — but the network behaves like a much larger organization.

Part V — The Legal Front

5.1 The lawsuit that already won

In 2021, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, and Tri-Valley CAREs — represented by SCELP — sued NNSA for launching the two-site pit expansion without a programmatic environmental review of the whole enterprise, as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires for connected federal actions. A federal judge ruled that NNSA had violated NEPA, and the agency ultimately agreed to prepare a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) covering the entire pit-production program.

This matters beyond the paperwork: the PEIS is the only legally required process in which the public can formally comment on — and build a court-ready record against — the entire nuclear “modernization” complex. The coalition believes it may also be the last such process, given the administration’s active dismantling of NEPA itself.

5.2 The PEIS, by the numbers

• Draft PEIS (DOE/EIS-0573) released April 2026.
• Public comment period closed July 16, 2026 — pointedly, the 81st anniversary of the Trinity Test.
• Coalition comment infrastructure: pitpeis.com, sample comments, help-desk “office hours” run by NukeWatch staff in the final days.

5.3 The three withheld documents

On July 6, 2026, SCELP formally demanded that NNSA release three documents and extend the comment period 30 days after their release:

• The new JASON pit-lifetime study. An unclassified summary has existed since late 2025 but is withheld despite congressional requests and FOIA filings. The 2006 JASON study found most pits reliable beyond 100 years; if the new one concurs, NNSA’s “aging pits” rationale — the program’s stated purpose and need — collapses. As Tri-Valley CAREs’ Scott Yundt put it: if the study supported NNSA’s position, NNSA would be eager to release it.
• A DOE “Special Study” of NNSA’s management of the pit mission. Ordered August 2025, due December 2025, expected to be critical of the $30B+ Savannah River plant. Also withheld despite congressional and FOIA requests.
• The new seismic hazard analysis (PSHA) for LANL. Nearly a decade overdue; the draft PEIS itself said it would be done in early 2026; DNFSB confirmed its completion in May 2026. It bears directly on the earthquake-driven release scenario in the Philippe study — and it is not public.

The legal theory: NEPA’s “hard look” doctrine holds that an agency may neither research “in a cursory manner” nor sweep “negative evidence under the rug” (Nat’l Audubon Society v. Dep’t of Navy, 4th Cir. 2005). Finalizing the PEIS while suppressing directly relevant studies would hand the coalition its next lawsuit — a challenge to the Record of Decision.

5.4 The state-law front

Parallel to the federal fight, the New Mexico Environment Department wields hazardous-waste permits (LANL legacy waste; the WIPP underground repository permit) and the cleanup Consent Order. Watchdogs file comments and interventions in these proceedings, and Secretary Kenney’s keynote at the July 19 Trinity remembrance — on holding the federal government accountable for cleanup and water protection — made the state-federal tension publicly visible. The state cannot veto pit production; it can make the waste stream and cleanup obligations expensive and slow.

5.5 What to watch next

• Whether NNSA extends the comment period or releases any of the three documents.
• The final PEIS and Record of Decision — the trigger for probable second-round litigation.
• FY2027 appropriations: pit funding lines in the NNSA budget.
• DNFSB weekly reports from LANL — the early-warning channel for safety problems.

Part VI — The Community Front

6.1 Mass participation as strategy

The community strategy converts diffuse public unease into countable, legally significant acts: comments filed, resolutions passed, claims submitted, bodies in rooms. PEIS comment campaigns came with sample text and staffed office hours; the goal is both volume and a record — every substantive comment is something the agency must respond to and a potential hook for litigation.

6.2 The remembrance calendar

The movement runs on an annual liturgy of dates: July 16 (Trinity, 1945), August 6 and 9 (Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The fourth annual interfaith Trinity remembrance — July 19, 2026, St. Michael’s High School, Santa Fe — assembled the whole coalition in one room: Archbishop Wester leading; Secretary Kenney keynoting; Jay Coghlan on pit production; Tina Cordova on downwinder harms; plutonium chemist Michael Ketterer on the science; organized jointly by the Archdiocese, Back from the Brink’s NM Hub, Interfaith Power and Light NM, Nuclear Watch NM, Soka Gakkai, and the Downwinders Consortium. These events are simultaneously mourning, recruitment, education, and press generation.

6.3 Downwinder justice and RECA

For 79 years, the families downwind of Trinity — heavily Hispanic and Native American communities who received no warning and no evacuation in 1945 — were excluded from federal compensation. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expansion changed that: qualifying New Mexicans can now file claims of $100,000, including on behalf of deceased relatives. Claim clinics double as organizing infrastructure: they document harm at scale, build the movement’s base, and anchor its most unanswerable argument. Tina Cordova’s formulation has become the movement’s signature line:

“We don’t ask IF we’ll get cancer; we ask WHEN it will be our turn.”

— Tina Cordova, co-founder, Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium

RECA’s bipartisan passage is also the movement’s proof of concept that nuclear-harm politics can win across party lines — the on-ramp issue for everything else in this dossier.

Part VII — The Workforce Bottleneck

7.1 The hiring machine and its limits

LANL now employs roughly 18,000 people and has run annual hiring blitzes of about a thousand or more, with another planned for FY2026. The constraint is not applicants — LANL pays extremely well in one of the poorest states — but absorption: northern New Mexico’s housing market cannot house the workforce. Santa Fe New Mexican and Boomtown reporting documents the “LANL effect”: bidding wars, displaced locals from Española to Santa Fe, and a commute funnel up “the Hill” that has become its own limiting factor. The Los Alamos Study Group tracks the hiring pipeline as a core structural vulnerability of the entire pit program.

7.2 Safety staffing as the binding constraint

Science (AAAS) reporting establishes the sharper point: pit-production delays are already driven in part by the inability to hire and retain qualified criticality-safety engineers and technicians — the specialists who keep plutonium operations from going critical. This is a decades-old institutional weakness (the 2011 near-miss and subsequent resignations hollowed out the discipline), and it cannot be fixed quickly: these are years-long training pipelines requiring clearances, and every national lab is competing for the same people.

7.3 The strategic implication

A recruitment shortfall functions as passive brake on the pit mission — no lawsuit required. Every unfilled safety-critical seat slows the tempo; every safety incident triggered by inexperienced staff invites DNFSB scrutiny and further delay. Observers of the program should treat LANL’s hiring and attrition numbers, and the housing market that governs them, as leading indicators of whether the 2028 pit targets are achievable. (NNSA’s own schedule history — 30 pits by 2026, then 2028, then 2030 in some documents — suggests they are not.)

7.4 The political flip side

The same jobs machine is the movement’s central political obstacle. LANL is northern New Mexico’s largest employer, and the state’s congressional delegation — Senators Heinrich and Luján, Representatives Leger Fernández and Stansbury — supports LANL funding even while criticizing safety lapses and championing downwinders. Any strategy premised on New Mexico’s own federal politicians turning against the lab is, for now, unrealistic; the movement works around them, not through them.

Part VIII — The Money Argument

8.1 The numbers

Program element	Cost	Note
Full nuclear modernization program	~$2 trillion	30-year, all-legs rebuild of the arsenal
Pit production program	~$5B/year; $60B+/20 years	NNSA’s most expensive program ever
Savannah River pit plant	$30B+ (est.), 2035	Most expensive building in U.S. history
Sentinel ICBM (uses the new pits)	81% over budget	Triggered statutory Nunn-McCurdy review
PF-4 accident remediation (if major release)	~$150B	Philippe study estimate
Declined PF-4 ventilation upgrade	“Too expensive” (2022)	Against $150B downside risk

8.2 The opportunity-cost frame

The movement’s budget argument is the oldest one in American politics — guns versus butter — sharpened by two facts specific to this case: the product (new-design pits) is arguably unnecessary by the government’s own commissioned science (JASON), and the spending is concentrated in programs (Sentinel) already in formal statutory breach for cost overruns. The legislative vehicle for the frame is the People Over Pentagon Act (H.R. 1134, a $100 billion Pentagon cut), and Back from the Brink’s messaging — “two trillion taxpayer dollars” against education, healthcare, and Social Security — is built for a general audience. Polling on nuclear-weapons spending consistently shows it among the least protected categories of federal spending across party lines, which is why the movement believes the money argument, not the moral one, is its likeliest majority-maker.

Part IX — Sole Presidential Launch Authority

9.1 The mechanics, plainly stated

The President of the United States can order the launch of nuclear weapons alone. No second official must concur — not the Secretary of Defense, not the Joint Chiefs, not Congress. A military aide with the “football” (strike options and communications gear) is always within reach; the president authenticates with a personal code card (the “biscuit”), selects an option, and the order flows through the Pentagon’s War Room to launch crews. From decision to ICBMs leaving silos: under five minutes. Submarine launches: about fifteen. The Secretary of Defense’s formal role is to confirm the order is authentic — that it really is the president — not to approve it.

The only theoretical brake is that the military may refuse a manifestly illegal order (disproportionate, without military necessity). The system’s appetite for that question is illustrated by Major Harold Hering, discharged in 1973 for asking, during missile-crew training: “How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?” The question was treated as disqualifying. It has never received an official answer.

9.2 Why the system is built this way — and why that’s the problem

Speed was the Cold War design requirement: Soviet missiles meant a president might have under 30 minutes to order retaliation before decapitation. But the machinery that enables a legitimate 3 a.m. retaliatory decision is identical to the machinery that would execute an illegitimate 3 a.m. first strike — there is no technical or legal difference between the two orders. The documented false alarms make this concrete: NORAD computer failures in 1979–80 displayed inbound Soviet missiles that did not exist; Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov faced the mirror-image false alarm in 1983 and simply disbelieved his screens. Every such event ran downhill toward a human with minutes and absolute authority.

Officials themselves have blinked: after January 6, 2021, House Speaker Pelosi phoned the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs about “an unstable president” and the codes, and General Milley reviewed launch procedures. In November 2017, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held the first hearing on presidential launch authority in 41 years.

9.3 What reformers propose

• Restricting First Use of Nuclear Weapons Act (S.192 / H.R.669, Markey–Lieu, reintroduced 2025). Surgical: retaliation after a nuclear attack on the U.S. remains instant and unrestricted, but a first strike would require a congressional declaration of war expressly authorizing it. Constitutional logic: Congress holds the war power; a nuclear first strike is the largest act of war conceivable.
• No-first-use declarations — companion bills declaring the U.S. will never strike first.
• Procedural checks — scholars’ proposals to require the Defense Secretary’s confirmation plus the Attorney General’s certification of legality before a launch order executes.
• Structural fixes — William Perry and Tom Collina (The Button) argue for retiring the ICBM leg entirely, since silo-based missiles create the “use them in minutes or lose them” pressure that makes sole authority so dangerous.
• Executive action — a president could renounce sole authority or first use unilaterally; 31 House Democrats formally asked Biden to do so in 2021. No Congress required — only a willing president.

9.4 Status

None of these bills has ever received a floor vote. They accumulate cosponsors and hearings, building the public record and the whip count for a future political moment. Ending sole authority is plank two of Back from the Brink’s five-plank platform, and the Council for a Livable World puts the question directly to candidates it screens for endorsement — which is how the issue is being wired into electoral politics despite legislative stasis.

Part X — The Political and Electoral Front

10.1 Back from the Brink: the platform

Founded in 2017 by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Union of Concerned Scientists, Back from the Brink is not a membership group or PAC but a shared platform that organizations, city councils, and officials endorse. Its five planks: (1) renounce first use; (2) end the president’s sole authority to launch; (3) take weapons off hair-trigger alert; (4) cancel the ~$2 trillion program to replace the arsenal with new, enhanced weapons — the plank aimed squarely at pit production; (5) actively pursue a verifiable agreement among nuclear-armed states to eliminate arsenals. The structure’s genius: a school-board member and a senator can endorse the identical text.

In Congress, the platform is embodied in H.Res. 317, introduced by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) on April 10, 2025 — a non-binding resolution whose value is the public cosponsor whip-count, the winnable local ask (“call your rep”), and the ready coalition if politics shift. The previous Congress’s version drew 44 cosponsors. In April 2026, more than 250 state and local elected officials signed the campaign’s open letter urging Congress to act — the 1980s nuclear-freeze playbook, rebuilt: stack up cities, counties, and statehouses until national politicians see a constituency.

10.2 The electoral machinery

The Council for a Livable World is the direct answer to “who is working on an anti-nuclear-war candidate.” Founded in 1962 by physicist Leo Szilard expressly to elect arms-control candidates, it is a PAC that screens, endorses, and funds House and Senate candidates each cycle — including on the sole-authority question — with its 2026 endorsements published on its “Meet the Candidates” pages. Physicians for Social Responsibility, ICAN (the Nobel-winning international campaign behind the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons), Soka Gakkai, and the Ploughshares Fund build the public-opinion and funding substrate beneath it.

10.3 Congressional champions and the New Mexico problem

The bench: Rep. McGovern (H.Res. 317), Sen. Markey (Restricting First Use; the perennial SANE Act to cut nuclear-weapons spending), Rep. Lieu, Sen. Rosen (testing), plus the members pressing NNSA to release the JASON study. The hole in the bench: New Mexico. The state hosting the pit factory has a delegation structurally committed to it by jobs — the movement’s hardest political fact.

10.4 The gap, and the cultural lever

No major-party presidential contender currently runs on nuclear disarmament. The platform exists (five planks), the funding channel exists (Council for a Livable World), the local officials exist (250+ signatures) — the candidate does not. Historically, the missing ingredient at such moments has been public imagination, and it has been supplied by art more often than by policy papers: Reagan recorded in his diary that the 1983 television film The Day After left him “greatly depressed,” and his advisers traced a line from it to his arms-control turn; Oppenheimer and Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario (in adaptation by Denis Villeneuve) are performing the same function now. For artists and writers, this is the operative fact: the public does not know the mechanics documented in this dossier, and the movement’s own diagnosis is that closing that imagination gap is the precondition for everything else.

Part XI — Timeline and Watch Points

Recent (2025–2026)

Date	Event
Oct 30, 2025	Trump announces resumption of nuclear testing “on an equal basis” with rivals
Late 2025	New JASON pit-lifetime study completed; unclassified summary withheld
Dec 2025	DOE “Special Study” of pit-mission management due; withheld
Jan 2025 (reintro)	Markey–Lieu Restricting First Use Act (S.192/H.R.669), 119th Congress
Feb 11, 2026	NNSA memo: 60 pits/yr by 2028, capability for 100; testing directive “TBD”
Mar 2026	NNSA approves aggressive LANL expansion plan
Apr 10, 2025	H.Res. 317 (McGovern) — Back from the Brink resolution introduced
Apr 2026	Draft Pit Production PEIS (DOE/EIS-0573) released; 250+ officials’ open letter
May 13, 2026	Energy Sec. Wright: “not a need for explosive testing”
May 2026	New LANL seismic hazard analysis completed (per DNFSB); not released
Jul 6, 2026	SCELP demand letter: release 3 documents, extend comment period
Jul 2026	Philippe PF-4 release study published in Science and Global Security
Jul 16, 2026	PEIS comment period closes — 81st anniversary of Trinity
Jul 19, 2026	4th annual interfaith Trinity remembrance, Santa Fe

Watch points ahead

• NNSA’s response to the document demand; any comment-period extension.
• Final PEIS and Record of Decision — the likely trigger for round-two litigation.
• Release (or continued suppression) of the JASON study — the single document with the most destructive potential to the program’s rationale.
• Any announcement defining what “resumed testing” means; NNSS activity indicators.
• LANL hiring/attrition numbers and DNFSB weekly reports — leading indicators on the 2028 pit targets.
• FY2027 appropriations for pit production and Sentinel.
• 2026 midterms: Council for a Livable World endorsee performance; H.Res. 317 cosponsor count.

Part XII — Key People

Name	Role	Relevance
Jay Coghlan	Exec. Director, Nuclear Watch NM	Lead NM watchdog; plaintiff; decades on pit issues
Scott Kovac	Research Director, Nuclear Watch NM	Research/FOIA; event and comment-campaign organizer
Tina Cordova	Co-founder, Tularosa Basin Downwinders	Downwinder justice; RECA; the movement’s moral voice
Archbishop John Wester	Archdiocese of Santa Fe	National Catholic disarmament leader; annual remembrances
Greg Mello	Los Alamos Study Group	Budget/technical analysis; hiring-pipeline tracking
Scott Yundt	Exec. Director, Tri-Valley CAREs	Co-plaintiff (Livermore watchdog)
Sébastien Philippe	UW–Madison / Princeton	Lead author, PF-4 consequence study
James Kenney	Secretary, NM Environment Dept.	State regulatory pressure; cleanup accountability
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA)	U.S. House	H.Res. 317 sponsor
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA)	U.S. Senate	Restricting First Use Act; SANE Act
Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)	U.S. House	Restricting First Use Act (House)
Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV)	U.S. Senate	Extracted the Wright “no need” testimony
Chris Wright	Secretary of Energy	Conceded no technical need for explosive testing
Tom Collina & William Perry	Authors, The Button	Definitive case against sole launch authority

Sources

Primary correspondence: Nuclear Watch New Mexico emails of July 7, 2026 (press release: “Plaintiffs Demand Release of Critical Documents”) and July 17, 2026 (Trinity remembrance announcement), received by the compiler.

Testing

• NPR, “Trump says he wants to resume nuclear testing” (Oct 30, 2025) — npr.org/2025/10/30/nx-s1-5590818/trump-nuclear-testing
• Arms Control Association, “NNSA Charts Buildup as Delays Mount” (April 2026) — armscontrol.org/act/2026-04/news/nnsa-charts-buildup-delays-mount
• Sen. Rosen press office, Wright hearing video/release (May 13, 2026) — rosen.senate.gov
• Washington Times, “U.S. set to resume underground nuclear tests” (Mar 25, 2026)
• NNSS, PULSE/U1a complex — nnss.gov/mission/stockpile-stewardship-program/u1a-complex
• CSIS, “Can the United States Immediately Return to Nuclear Testing?”; CRS IF11662, “U.S. Nuclear Weapons Tests”

Pit production & LANL

• NNSA, Draft Pit Production PEIS, DOE/EIS-0573 (April 2026) — energy.gov
• Science (AAAS), “Safety problems at a Los Alamos laboratory delay U.S. nuclear warhead testing and production”
• Center for Public Integrity, “Nuclear Negligence” series — apps.publicintegrity.org/nuclear-negligence
• NukeWatch NM, pit production fact sheets and budget analyses — nukewatch.org
• Time, “Inside the Los Alamos Lab Making Nuclear Bomb Parts Again”; High Country News on the lab’s transformation

PF-4 risk study

• Philippe et al., “Consequence Analysis of Major Fires at Plutonium Pit Production Facilities,” Science and Global Security (2026) — tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08929882.2026.2690796
• Searchlight New Mexico, “U.S. Underestimates Peril if Los Alamos Were to Leak Plutonium”; Santa Fe New Mexican coverage

Legal front

• NukeWatch NM, PEIS lawsuit page and July 6, 2026 press release — nukewatch.org/plutonium-pit-production-peis-lawsuit
• pitPEIS.com — coalition PEIS hub; SCELP demand letter
• Union of Concerned Scientists, “legal fig leaf” statement — ucs.org
• JASON, Pit Lifetime study (2006); DNFSB LANL weekly reports — dnfsb.gov

Workforce & economy

• Santa Fe New Mexican, FY2026 hiring blitz and “LANL effect” housing coverage
• Boomtown (Los Alamos), “It’s Housing Driven” series; Los Alamos Study Group pipeline tracking — lasg.org

Sole authority

• S.192 / H.R.669 texts — congress.gov; Markey and Lieu press releases
• Union of Concerned Scientists, “Whose Finger Is on the Button?”
• Perry & Collina, The Button (2020); Perry–Collina Senate Armed Services testimony

Political & electoral

• Back from the Brink — preventnuclearwar.org (platform, H.Res. 317 pages, April 2026 open letter)
• H.Res. 317, 119th Congress — congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-resolution/317
• Council for a Livable World — livableworld.org (Meet the Candidates; sole-authority questionnaires)
• Physicians for Social Responsibility — psr.org