I'd been intermittently searching the Web for the fate of the Reliable Replacement Nuclear Warhead when Stop the War Machine-Albuquerque, http://www.stopthewarmachine.org/, sent me an e-mail to say that the House had refused to approve another $10 million to fund it, in the Defense Appropriations Bill, by a vote of 271 to 144.

Then I learned, from the Frends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had exercised her "Speaker's Discretion" to abstain from voting, as she did in House votes to ban torture, and cutting funding for "missile defense."

(See http://capwiz.com/fconl/bio/keyvotes/?id=447&lvl=C.)

$10 million a small fraction of the real cost.

Who knows who or what anyone intended this paltry $10 million to buy, since more millions than I want to imagine have already been spent, designing this new nuke, during the past two years of fierce competition between Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Labs that George Bush jumpstarted on March 2nd, 2006, with the first $27 million to be shared by both labs, http://www.lasg.org/DemNow3-2-06.htm.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation estimated that just building the bomb factories to manufacture the Reliable Replacement Nuclear Warhead would cost the Department of Energy, a.k.a., the Department of Nuclear Weapons, tens of billions of dollars.

(See http://tinyurl.com/62bbn3.)

So, I think it's fair to say that this $10 million the House voted down on 05/22/2008 would have been no more than another green light for what would have been, and still could well be, the first new nuclear weapon produced in the U.S. since 1991.

Thanks to Stop the War Machine-Albuquerque

Stop the War Machine-Albuquerque, http://www.stopthewarmachine.org/, deserves thanks not for publicizing and rallying opposition to the new nuke weapon all over the country, though they battling uphill against the two of their three New Mexico Reps who supported it.

Steve Pearce, (R-NM-2), offered a floor amendment to restore the $10 million that the U.S. Armed Services Committee had already cut from the Defense Authorization Bill for the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

Heather Wilson (R-NM-1) voted for the amendment, but Tom Udall (D-NM-3) voted against.

Lawrence Livermore and LANL National Weapons Labs fierce competition all for naught?

The RRW Warhead design emerged from two years of fierce competition between Albuquerque's Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory and our own Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab, with Lawrence Livermore emerging as the lead design laboratory, because "it can be built with more certainty in the absence of underground testing," although the administration's Nuclear Weapons Council found several proposed features of the Los Alamos design "highly innovative" and said they could be integrated into the future warhead design."

(See "Relliable Replacement Nuclear Warhead; Another Unneeded Nuclear Weapon," analysis produced by FCNL, for more details on the new nuke weapon defeated in the federal House on 05/22/2008, http://tinyurl.com/5jd7pj.

I think this is worth a quick study, because I really cannot magine that the Reliable Replacement Warhead proposal will not be back, because:

• As a Bush-Clinton Defense official stated, The weapons labs are more interested in job security than in national security,”
• The Reliable Replacement Nuclear Warhead is a smaller nuclear weapon than those the U.S.A. has built in the past, in keeping with the "first nuclear strike to protect our regional interests" policies now embraced by the U.S.A.-— and by France and Britain, two of the other five official nuclear weapons states.
• This is a Congressional election year, so every Congressperson in Washington is highly conscious of how their voting records may be scrutinized this year., and the Reliable Replacement Nuclear Warhead seems to be as unpopular as the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan and their skyrocketing costs.

Best response when the RR Nuke Weapon proposal returns?

Sixty years ago, scientists proposed what still seems like the most effective opposition not only to our new nuke but also to the resurgence of all things nuclear, including the new global nuclear weapons race:

"In 1945, the year of the tragic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nobel-laureate physicist James Franck headed a committee of scientists at the University of Chicago that desperately tried to prevent the use of the bomb and also earnestly proposed ways to prevent nuclear weapons from endangering human civilization. The committee stated in its report, that the best way to stop the spread of nuclear weapons would be to prohibit the mining of uranium." (http://tinyurl.com/3nndyp)

The Navajo Nation, The Australian State of Queensland, the State of Virginia, and, most recently, the Canadian Province of British Columbia, have all banned uranium mining, Defenders of all three previous bans have dug in their heels, and thus far managed to defend them amidst the current uranium mining boom, and all that's inspired it.

Might anti-nuclear activists all over the world now imagine a global movement to ban uranium mining, as Nobel physicist Joseph Franck and his committee of scientists did sixty-three years ago?

Of course, if a global movement to ban uranium mining were to emerge, it would probably have to be paired with a global movement to ban the reprocessing of nuclear waste now favored by John McCain, who also suggests that we should emulate France, making 80% nuclear power a national goal, for the sake of "energy security."

(See John McCain on Nuclear, on the You Tube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkFH_KEY29U)

--Ann Garrison, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it