Jay Coghlan, head of NukeWatch New Mexico, stays abreast of 8 major plants in the US nuclear weapons complex. Speaking to PeaceWorks-KC recently, he fired away about the KC, MO, National Security Campus (NSC):
–The NSC produces something on the order of 100,000 non-nuclear components for nuclear weapons each year, aimed toward rebuilding every US warhead.
–The NSC (opened in 2014) should never have been built. If its work had been moved to Los Alamos, NM, that would have been a good baby step toward shutting down the whole nuclear weapons complex.
–The City of Kansas City is in the odd position of being perhaps the only municipal government in the world to own a federal nuclear weapons production plant. KC sold municipal bonds to fund the NSC.
–“I urge you Kansas Citians to hold the government’s feet to the fire to make sure the old KC Plant (formerly at Bannister Federal Complex) is properly cleaned up.”
–The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) constantly has its hands out for more money for nuclear weapons production.
And this chart tracks the bucks for KC’s NSC.
| Budget Request for NNSA Per Year | Amount |
| FY 2021 budget request | $1.20 billion |
| FY 2020 budget request | $1.01 billion |
| FY 2019 budget request | $0.75 billion |
Coghlan closed his video during the Aug. 9 PeaceWorks-KC’s online Hiroshima/Nagasaki Remembrance with this challenge: “So, brothers and sisters, let us unite in a moral and political effort to rid this world of nuclear weapons and to use the sad occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing to begin just that very work.”
