By Mary Hladky, PeaceWorks Kansas City.
Kansas City Missouri is literally at the center of the 2lst century new nuclear arms race.
Kansas City MO is home to one of the 8 major sites that make U.S. nuclear weapons. It has an innocuous name, the Kansas City National Security Campus (NSC), located at 14520 Botts Road, where it produces or procures over 80% of the non-nuclear components of U.S. nuclear bombs and warheads. Honeywell runs the NSC facility. Very few people living in and around Kansas City know it exists let alone know what it produces. Activists against nuclear weapons more accurately refer to it as the Kansas City Nuclear Bomb Parts Plant. This plant is a vital link in the production of nuclear weapons. And for this reason, the plant could be a target in an enemy attack.
The National Nuclear Security Administration plans to spend close to $2 trillion dollars over the next 30 years to maintain and modernize its nuclear weapons and their delivery systems – aircraft, ICBMs and submarines.
Spending trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons, weapons that destroy all life, is a choice. The U.S. government and its elected officials have chosen to enrich wildly profitable military contractors by spending outrageous sums of money on weapons that can never be used if we expect to continue to live on this planet. The military bonanza hurts all U.S. citizens. Americans deserve better. Americans deserve affordable housing, affordable medical care, a livable wage, good schools, roads, bridges, allowing no one to go hungry in the richest country in the world.
The KC nuclear bomb parts plant will double in size over the next few years to handle this increased production. Adding insult to injury, state legislators, with bipartisan support, are set to pass legislation that will provide a state sales tax exemption on the cost of all materials needed to double the size of the current nuclear bomb plant. This huge windfall to Honeywell/NSC is a cost all Missourians will absorb!
Instead of wasting the intelligence, skills and talents of those employed by Honeywell at the NSC, those employees’ talents could be used to address the climate crisis, the other existential threat facing the world.
We all live on this planet together. We are not each other’s enemies. It is in deciding to come together that we can address the nuclear and climate threats so life continues on this planet.
With all that said, the Kansas City National Security Campus is one crazy notion of national security.
