Skip to content or view mobile version

Home | Mobile | Editorial | Mission | Privacy | About | Contact | Help | Security | Support

A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.

U.S. Navy Conceals Nuclear Weapons Production in California

Mil Watch | 03.03.2010 14:56 | Anti-militarism | World

A U.S. nuclear weapons assembly plant in California is off limits to any kind of photography, information gathering, or reporting. Local residents are unaware of the plant's existence and its potential radiological hazards.

Satellite photograph of Building 181
Satellite photograph of Building 181

Below-ground ramp (indicated by shadow) to loading dock
Below-ground ramp (indicated by shadow) to loading dock

Building 181 surrounded by warning signs
Building 181 surrounded by warning signs

Signs prohibit photography, sketching, and gathering of information
Signs prohibit photography, sketching, and gathering of information

Signs indicate that Lockheed Martin Building 181 is U.S. Navy property
Signs indicate that Lockheed Martin Building 181 is U.S. Navy property

High-resolution video cameras on Building 181
High-resolution video cameras on Building 181


The United States Navy and Lockheed Martin have been concealing the assembly and movement of nuclear warheads in the densely populated San Francisco Bay Area for decades. The nuclear weapons facility is so secret that not only is photography strictly prohibited, but even making drawings or taking notes about the buildings from a public street is considered illegal. It is internally identified as a Naval Industrial Reserve Ordnance Plant (NIROP), one of several across the country.

Inside a single sprawling industrial building of approximately 100,000 square feet at the corner of 5th Avenue and Mathilda Avenue in Sunnyvale, California individual W88 nuclear warheads are assembled for the Trident II (D5) submarine-launched missile. Labeled externally by Lockheed Martin's designation simply as Building 181, the facility contains loading docks shielded from view from streets for trucks to load and unload their sensitive cargoes away from the eyes of the public or even from aircraft and reconnaissance satellites. Once loaded onto unmarked trucks, often under cover of darkness, the warheads may be moved to or from any of a number of nuclear weapons laboratories around the country or to the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Support Base in Georgia, just north of Jacksonville, Florida. That is where they are loaded onto Trident II missiles at the submarines' home base.


The W88 nuclear warhead was designed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where supercomputer simulations were used to optimize the yield of the warhead through a critical combination of a plutonium 239 primary explosive boosted by a tritium-deuterium fusion reaction. That, in turn, detonates a uranium 235 secondary, enhanced by a lithium 6 deuteride fusion reaction. This complex combination gives the W88 an incredible explosive yield of 470 kilotons of TNT equivalent in a remarkably compact warhead. This is equivalent to approximately 30 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

Each Trident II missile payload is a multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicle (MIRV) containing eight W88 nuclear warheads, which gives a single missile the power to obliterate every major metropolis in countries like Japan, Iran, or Pakistan. One Trident nuclear submarine carries 24 Trident II ballistic missiles, giving it a combined weapons payload equivalent to 90 million tons of TNT, enough to flatten infrastructure and wipe out most of the populations of China, India, Russia, or Brazil several times over. The only other country believed to possess such advanced warheads is Israel, some of whose dual-nationality nuclear scientists were among the few to have been given security clearance to work on advanced numerical simulations of nuclear weapons at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Aerial photographs reveal the below-ground ramps along the western wall and near the south eastern corner of Building 181. From ground level, the declining ramps are concealed by privacy slats in the chain link security fence. Nowhere else does the chain link perimeter fence contain privacy slats, indicating that there was a deliberate decision to specifically conceal the below-ground ramps and the loading docks that they lead to.

Meanwhile, numerous high-resolution video cameras track anyone who attempts to look too closely at Building 181, at any activity inside the perimeter fence, or even anyone approaching the perimeter fence from the public streets.

Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which has operated the property continuously since acquiring it, apparently sold the property to the U.S. Navy at the latter's request on December 27, 1957. With the intent to use the building for the engineering and assembly of advanced nuclear warheads, the Navy deemed it necessary to buy the property in order to enforce provisions of U.S. Code Title 18 applicable only to U.S. government property to prevent photography and data collection about the facility. Confounding measures were also taken, such as deliberately mislabeling the street address as "1233 North Mathilda" when the actual recorded street address is 1235 North Mathilda Avenue. Nevertheless, the change in ownership did not alter Lockheed Martin's exclusive custody of the property and use of its facilities.

While the U.S. government hammers relentlessly at Iran for allegedly failing divulge the full details about its uranium enrichment efforts and its nuclear program, the Pentagon is not only actively concealing nuclear warhead production from the American public and the IAEA (UN International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna), but concealing the movement of dangerous fissile materials through densely-populated urban areas like Sunnyvale and Mountain View.

It is time for the United Nations and the American people to demand full disclosure of the Pentagon's intentions for further development of nuclear weapons. With the United States and Israel being the only countries in the world to openly declare the option of using nuclear weapons in a first strike, these are the most dangerous sources of pre-emptive nuclear war. Iran, by contrast, has not launched any sort of pre-emptive attack on another country in more than a century, let alone an attack with any type of weapon of mass destruction.

Mil Watch

Comments

Display the following 2 comments

  1. US Naval Base has security - shock — Gog bites man watch
  2. i cant help but agree — pointless
Upcoming Coverage
View and post events
Upcoming Events UK
24th October, London: 2015 London Anarchist Bookfair
2nd - 8th November: Wrexham, Wales, UK & Everywhere: Week of Action Against the North Wales Prison & the Prison Industrial Complex. Cymraeg: Wythnos o Weithredu yn Erbyn Carchar Gogledd Cymru

Ongoing UK
Every Tuesday 6pm-8pm, Yorkshire: Demo/vigil at NSA/NRO Menwith Hill US Spy Base More info: CAAB.

Every Tuesday, UK & worldwide: Counter Terror Tuesdays. Call the US Embassy nearest to you to protest Obama's Terror Tuesdays. More info here

Every day, London: Vigil for Julian Assange outside Ecuadorian Embassy

Parliament Sq Protest: see topic page
Ongoing Global
Rossport, Ireland: see topic page
Israel-Palestine: Israel Indymedia | Palestine Indymedia
Oaxaca: Chiapas Indymedia
Regions
All Regions
Birmingham
Cambridge
Liverpool
London
Oxford
Sheffield
South Coast
Wales
World
Other Local IMCs
Bristol/South West
Nottingham
Scotland
Social Media
You can follow @ukindymedia on indy.im and Twitter. We are working on a Twitter policy. We do not use Facebook, and advise you not to either.
Support Us
We need help paying the bills for hosting this site, please consider supporting us financially.
Other Media Projects
Schnews
Dissident Island Radio
Corporate Watch
Media Lens
VisionOnTV
Earth First! Action Update
Earth First! Action Reports
Topics
All Topics
Afghanistan
Analysis
Animal Liberation
Anti-Nuclear
Anti-militarism
Anti-racism
Bio-technology
Climate Chaos
Culture
Ecology
Education
Energy Crisis
Fracking
Free Spaces
Gender
Globalisation
Health
History
Indymedia
Iraq
Migration
Ocean Defence
Other Press
Palestine
Policing
Public sector cuts
Repression
Social Struggles
Technology
Terror War
Workers' Movements
Zapatista
Major Reports
NATO 2014
G8 2013
Workfare
2011 Census Resistance
Occupy Everywhere
August Riots
Dale Farm
J30 Strike
Flotilla to Gaza
Mayday 2010
Tar Sands
G20 London Summit
University Occupations for Gaza
Guantanamo
Indymedia Server Seizure
COP15 Climate Summit 2009
Carmel Agrexco
G8 Japan 2008
SHAC
Stop Sequani
Stop RWB
Climate Camp 2008
Oaxaca Uprising
Rossport Solidarity
Smash EDO
SOCPA
Past Major Reports
Encrypted Page
You are viewing this page using an encrypted connection. If you bookmark this page or send its address in an email you might want to use the un-encrypted address of this page.
If you recieved a warning about an untrusted root certificate please install the CAcert root certificate, for more information see the security page.

Global IMC Network


www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa

Europe
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
brussels
bulgaria
calabria
croatia
cyprus
emilia-romagna
estrecho / madiaq
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
liguria
lille
linksunten
lombardia
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
napoli
netherlands
northern england
nottingham imc
paris/île-de-france
patras
piemonte
poland
portugal
roma
romania
russia
sardegna
scotland
sverige
switzerland
torun
toscana
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
chiapas
chile
chile sur
cmi brasil
cmi sucre
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso
venezuela

Oceania
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india


United States
arizona
arkansas
asheville
atlanta
Austin
binghamton
boston
buffalo
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
dc
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
sarasota
seattle
tampa bay
united states
urbana-champaign
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
Armenia
Beirut
Israel
Palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
fbi/legal updates
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech