OPINION — The Trump administration’s year-old plan to vastly increase future production of plutonium pits, the triggers of thermonuclear weapons, caught my attention just days ago when its high cost was mentioned in a section of the August 23, Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis of the Senate-passed version of the fiscal 2020 Defense Authorization Bill.
This questionable, but little discussed, multi-billion-dollar, Trump plan was generated by the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for “the enduring capability and capacity to produce plutonium pits at a rate of no fewer than 80 pits per year by 2030.”
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