http://www.trivalleyherald.com...10669~2552825,00.html#
I liked that line about "white-collar welfare". ;-)
Good. What's the point of developing costly and unnecessary weapons programs?H-bomb designers and builders of the world's largest laser were awestruck Monday by a greater power -- the congressional appropriator.
In a fell swoop, a powerful Republican lawmaker led Senate and House Democrats in killing the Bush administration's requests for a nuclear bunker buster and new nuclear weapons, as well as cutting $25 million from the National Ignition Facility.
Under pressure from House and Senate leaders to deliver multiple appropriations bills before the weekend, Senate Energy and Water Appropriations chairman Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and other defenders of the administration's push for new and modified nuclear-weapons research yielded to a united front posed by House Energy and Water Appropriations chairman David Hobson, R-Ohio, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
Together, the trio cut $27.5 million for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a modification of a high-yield nuclear bomb at Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab and Sandia National Laboratories-California.
They also cut $9 million for an "advanced concepts" project to explore new weapons designs, replacing it with a project to make existing H-bombs more secure and more dependable in the face of aging, to be called the "reliable replacement warhead" program.
Arms-control advocates praised the move and Hobson for single-handedly blocking the administration's plans.
"I think it's fair to say he simply did not buy the administration's proposals for a new generation of weapons, did not see the need for such weapons and did not like their high costs," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association.
It was a bold play by Hobson, who calls himself a "country lawyer from Springfield" and does little to disguise his contempt for a nuclear-weapons establishment that he calls bloated and unaccountable.
The complex and its weapons labs -- Livermore, Sandia and Los Alamos -- in particular "could be viewed as a jobs program for Ph.D.s, the ultimate white-collar welfare," he said in a speech last August.
Executives at the weapons labs and the U.S. Energy Department's weapons arm, the National Nuclear Security Administration, caught wind of the threatened cuts late last week, as their traditional allies in Congress warned of being unable to preserve the money.
The joint House-Senate report on the National Ignition Facility was less scathing than some in the past but still highly critical of last year's decision by Lawrence Livermore and federal weapons officials to put off a telltale fusion experiment until 2014. In the new budget, the penalty for that decision -- or rather leading Congress to build the $4.5 billion laser for a more optimistic experiment date -- was $25 million, or about 7.4 percent of the money requested for it this year.
Wary of angering Congress further, lab officials said the cut would delay the giant, 192-beam laser's completion, set for 2008, but that they would keep the project on track as much as possible.
"We'll deal with it," said lab spokesman Bob Hirschfeld. "We'll do whatever it takes to make it work."
About a dozen weapons scientists at Livermore and Sandia-California were getting ready for the first major experiment with the new bunker buster. While not yet a full prototype, they had designed a rugged, heavy new case for the bomb and shored up its nuclear explosives to survive a plunge through several meters of concrete or rock.
With a few months and more money, they expected to have a mockup of the bomb ready for shipment to Sandia's New Mexico test facility, inside Kirtland Air Force Base. There, Sandians fill bombs and warheads with electronic sensors, load them on a rocket-powered sled and smash them into water, foam blocks and concrete to see how they stand up to the punishment.
The test bomb is the product of hundreds of hours of computer simulations and scientists' time figuring out how to make a complicated weapon still work after such a crushing plummet into rock.
But Hobson and Democrats had argued that the finished weapon, which would require $485 million to develop into a manufacturable design, would never be used and could hurt U.S. interests in discouraging weapons programs in other nations.
"We are disappointed that Congress did not follow the administration's request in several areas," said NNSA spokesman Bryan Wilkes. "But we are just going to have to take a look at the numbers and assess what we're going to do down the line."
In case the agency or the White House is tempted to find money elsewhere to research new bomb designs, lawmakers wrote a special restriction: Federal officials may not "reprogram" more than $1 million to these or any other projects without prior approval from the House and Senate appropriations committees.
I liked that line about "white-collar welfare". ;-)
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