[Anyone] They're dropping like dead flies:

[Erich]

Thos Myers <totem at laplaza.org> said:

> 
> 
> Thanks, Eric.  I am not so naive as to think that the dumbocrats are any
> better that the republicrats.  They do get elected with the same money
> from the same corporations and they all know who their masters are.
> 
> 
> The US: Number 1 in murder, death, kill.
> Number 37 in health care.
> 
> LANL gets to make more nuklar warheads again.

Thos:

I know you're not. I apologize if the way in which i posted a link implied
that. You clearly see that voting in the US is mostly a placebo, to obfuscate
the fact that major decisions are made elsewhere, independent of this "voting
process".  Chavez is really a spark of hope here, for us in the western
hemisphere. 

In regards to nukes at LANL, this may be of interest:

This morning's editorial in the very conservative (and slavishly Domenici- and
lab-friendly) Albuquerque Journal is revealing. 

    * The current level of support for the labs is described more as the
product of legislative legerdemain on the part of Domenici and Bingaman in
protecting proprietary interests than as normative national policy.  Dorgan is
described as a person to be "swayed," not an independent thinker.
    * No support is offered for the administration's nuclear policies,
including pit production. In fact, no real support is offered for nuclear
weapons at all.
    * The tone is cautious, unsure, and fully compatible with another possible
editorial in two or three months accepting significant cuts to the labs'
budgets as a product of necessary changes in national priorities. 
    * Nothing is said about how "important" the labs are for NM's economy.

Given the source, these seem noteworthy. 
http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/editorials/576830opinion07-08-07.htm
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Policy Vacuum Sucks Oxygen Out of Labs

    A hot product for which New Mexico is the source— it's not green chile— is
susceptible to the wilt.
    Los Alamos National Laboratory has crafted two plutonium "pits," which are
to hydrogen bombs as blasting caps are to dynamite.
    Certification of the second pit on July 2 was occasion enough for Sen.
Pete Domenici to visit the lab and mark the milestone: The pits are the first
produced since an environmental mess shut down the Department of Energy's
Rocky Flats, Colo., plant in 1989. They are the first produced since Los
Alamos got the "interim" job of making pits 11 years and a couple of billion
dollars ago.
    One interpretation of "interim" is that pit manufacture will wilt away,
limiting the U.S. arsenal to aging, Cold War-era weapons. Increasing tension
on the budgetary purse strings held by Congress lends some credence— and much
anxiety— to that interpretation.
    Domenici said he was stunned in early June when the House Appropriations
Committee slashed hundreds of millions from the nuclear weapons complex
budget, including a 50 percent whack out of funding for pit manufacture.
    Stunned maybe, but congressional critics of the labs have been
telegraphing the punch. Domenici couldn't have been surprised.
    The Washington that Domenici came up in was pretty clear about the value
of the weapons labs, the purpose of nuclear arms, the threat of another
superpower, the need for a credible deterrent and steady funding for the labs.
    It's a different world today, a more complicated landscape of
unpredictable threat. Washington is far from sure about the role of the big
stick and the labs in that world.
    Momentum and the skill of New Mexico's senators have carried the labs and
the nuclear weapon mission through the post-Cold War policy vacuum. Instead of
the makers of military and foreign policy and budgets working out goals and
the labs creating specific tools to meet them, the labs pop out tools that may
not be particularly useful— beyond perpetuating programs' existence, payroll
and growth.
    The momentum is spent. The skill of Domenici and Democratic Sen. Jeff
Bingaman can probably buy time. In a GOP-Dem variation on the good cop, bad
cop routine, the two swayed a key appropriator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.,
against the deep nuclear weapons cuts. For now.
    "We have questions facing this country about what we wish to do with
respect to the future of nuclear weapons," Dorgan told his colleagues. "These
are very, very important questions," he said, and future rounds of
appropriations must hinge on policy consensus.
    Before spending money on replacement warheads and plutonium pits to
replace those removed from bombs for reliability testing, Washington has to
determine how many nuclear weapons will be needed in the future and for how
long. That number is almost certain to be fewer than the number that exist
today. Policymakers also need a better understanding of the shelf-life of
nukes before investing money for potentially premature replacements.
    But as Washington goes about filling the vacuum with policy that addresses
an uncertain future and directs the efforts of the labs, Congress must
acknowledge what Dorgan has come to understand since taking over the
chairmanship this year.
    The labs are not an interchangeable cog in the machinery of national
defense that can be discarded at the drop of a Berlin Wall and quickly
replaced if a new threat appears. The labs "are a national treasure," Dorgan
said, "and we will have adequate funding for the laboratories."
    And the labs must understand that means funding adequate for work critical
to meeting the new policy goals, not an entitlement.



-- 
Greg Mello * Los Alamos Study Group * www.lasg.org
2901 Summit Place NE * Albuquerque, NM 87106
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