Bush's nuclear plan bombs Republican-led committee cuts off funds for
new H-bomb, construction of giant laser



By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER 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.

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