Plutonium pits and moral principles

I commend David Kramer for his Issues & Events piece “Despite unknowns, NNSA plunges ahead on plutonium pits ” (Physics Today, April 2023, page 22). But it is missing a discussion of the morality of possessing nuclear weapons in the first place.

Both rightness and truth are important. Many US citizens, including those with and without physics backgrounds, do not want their federal taxes to pay for nuclear weapons—and therefore National Nuclear Security Administration facilities that aim to make, certify, or store them. And voters’ decisions in national elections can be flawed if based on misinformation.

The public also needs information from the National Nuclear Security Administration regarding the stability of plutonium pits, especially given the conundrum of the element’s instability from the mutually interacting effects of self-irradiation and its multiple phases—to say nothing about the other properties of plutonium (for example, that it is pyrophoric when in contact with air).

Everyone needs to be included in devising solutions to the problem of nuclear weapons. If those with moral reservations are excluded from that work, the results will be flawed.