Republicans never met a nuclear weapon they didn’t like, right? Generally, that’s true, but neither are they immune to infatuation with another program that happens to be at odds with nuclear weapons as the national-security policy of last defense. All of a sudden Republicans’ mania for cost-cutting might override the special place they hold in their hearts for “our nuclear deterrent,” as they euphemize nuclear weapons.

On June 15, at the Washington Post, Walter Pincus provided as good an introduction as any to what transpired.

. . . lawmakers are cutting into the funds that the Obama administration had pledged for [nuclear] upgrades and modernization. The House Appropriations subcommittee that approves funding of the weapons complex, run by the National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA), just whacked almost $500 million from the weapons program. A slice of $100 million came out of a $200 million pot that is supposed to finance early steps in the coming year to build a new facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

What’s strange about the $100 million is that

continue reading after the jump

"The vastly ambitious CMRR project has greatly detracted from the attention needed to solve existing nuclear safety problems at LANL," writes Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) in its latest newsletter. LANL, of course, is the Los Alamos National Laoratory, one of the United States' two nuclear weapons-design laboratories. The CMRR, about which I've often written about in conjunction with LASG's attempts to retard its progress, is the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility, intended to expand production of plutonium pits (where the chain reaction occurs in a nuclear weapons).

The light shining on the safety of nuclear energy as a result of the Japanese nuclear crisis has been of such powerful wattage that it's even flushing safety issues with nuclear weapons labs and manufacturing facilities out of hiding. Roger Snodgrass reports for the Santa Fe New Mexican.

On Friday, President Barack Obama asked the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission to review the safety of American nuclear power plants. . . . At Los Alamos National Laboratory, nuclear safety issues have been complicated with seismic concerns, as geological studies have uncovered an increasingly precarious underground structure.

Los Alamos, of course, is the national lab in New Mexico created for the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Still a work in progress after all these years, the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) facility is being built to the tune of a cool $4.3 billion. That's six times the cost (adjusted for inflation) of the division of the Manhattan Project that was based in Los Alamos.

At Pro Publica, in an article titled Even In Worst Case, Japan's Nuclear Disaster Will Have Limited Reach Abrahm Lustgarten

. . . spoke with seven top nuclear engineers and scientists to at least establish some boundaries for the disaster’s potential health and environmental impacts. The rough consensus: The long-term and most severe effects from radiation at the plant, where four of six reactors are in crisis and hundreds of tons of spent fuel is a risk, will be largely contained to the area around the plant, affect a relatively limited population and will likely not spread outside Japan.

So what, as Reuters reports, if the

. . . unprecedented multiple crisis will cost the world's third largest economy nearly $200 billion and require Japan's biggest reconstruction push since post-World War II.

Uncovered by insurance because it was an act of God (however Old Testament)? No problem.

The highly specialized German Nuclear Reactor Insurance Association (DKVG) partially insured Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant to the tune of tens of millions of euros. But the Cologne-based insurer won't be paying anything. "We do have a stake in the risks in Japan, generally speaking. But the property insurance and liability insurance policies exclude damages from earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions," DKVG chief executive Dirk Harbrücker told Deutsche Welle.

Never mind that when it comes to building new reactors, the Independent reports that "some estimates suggest extra safety will add at least another 10 per cent."

On January 26, influential country musician Charlie Louvin died at age 83. He and his brother Ira performed and recorded as the Louvin Brothers, until they split up in the early sixties, when Charlie began a solo career. Perhaps because of the spare instrumentation of Charlie's guitar and Ira's mandolin, as well as their heart-felt harmonies, they influenced the Everly Brothers, the Byrds, and country rock legend Gram Parsons.

Another fan, Emmylou Harris, was quoted by the New York Times:

". . . there was something scary and washed in the blood about the sound of the Louvin Brothers." In fact, simply "washed in blood" might better characterize one of their songs.

Blink and you might have missed it. Or, more to the point, fallen asleep before you got to item number 42 under "Other Matters" of the International Atomic Energy Agency's latest report on Iran's nuclear program. (Link courtesy of Arms Control Wonk.) It reads:

On 15–16 February 2011, the Agency conducted an inspection at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant . . . and has verified the nuclear material present in the facility. On 23 February 2011, Iran informed the Agency that it would have to unload fuel assemblies from the core.

In the New York Times William Broad and David Sanger

explain the significance of that item.

Iran told atomic inspectors this week that it had run into a serious problem at a newly completed nuclear reactor that was supposed to start feeding electricity into the national grid this month, raising questions about whether the trouble was sabotage, a startup problem, or possibly the beginning of the project's end.

It doesn't appear to be connected with the Stuxnet computer virus that ravaged Bushehr's reactors, though. Instead, Reuters reports:

Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Bushehr may have a problem with equipment in its primary cooling circuit. "At Bushehr there is a critical interface in this area between equipment supplied by German industry and equipment supplied by the Russians," Hibbs said. "If there is a problem in that equipment . . . that could delay the start-up of the unit for a few months."

Reuters also quotes Olli Heinonen, former head of IAEA inspections, who said that "the issue could be embarrassing for the Russian operator of Bushehr, Rosatom. Full responsibility for the plant is only 'supposed to be turned over to the Iranians after the first refuelling which is estimated to take place perhaps two years from now,' he said." In other words, it's happening under Rosatom's more than Iran's watch.

One of the of the Burma ruling junta's more despised adversaries is David Tharckabaw. He serves as the vice president of the Karen National Union, which is dedicated to fighting for the rights of, and providing services for, one of Burma's oppressed minorities, the Karen people, who live near the border with Thailand. In his most recent statement/press release, Tharckabaw asks, "Why Are There No Protests in Burma?"

Thus far Burma's military dictatorship been immune to the uprisings to which the world has been witness to -- or engaged in -- elsewhere. Perhaps that's because Burma comes in a close second to North Korea as the most merciless administration in the world. You think Bahrain and Libya have been barbaric in their responses to protests? One shudders to think how North Korea (where, actually, an opposition movement is unimaginable) and Burma's ruling junta would react. Tharckabaw, though, sees a ray of hope.

It's only natural that highly charged words find themselves coupled with the word "nuclear." It's almost as if they're attracted by a magnetic force. Three examples spring to mind.

Holocaust: Most frequently, of course, it's used in reference to the slaughter of Jews in World War II. When appended to "nuclear," it describes an earth ravaged to within an inch of its life by nuclear war.

Apartheid: Originally, as we all know, it was the word for segregation in South Africa from 1948 to 1993. When preceded by "nuclear," it describes the perception of some states without nuclear weapons that those in possession of same are keeping them (as well as nuclear energy) for themselves. And yes, it is singularly sleazy, to link the word "apartheid" with nuclear weapons.

As recently as last month, the term "nuclear apartheid," in all its unsavoriness, reared its ugly head again. Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency denounced the IAEA's approval of a plan for a nuclear fuel bank as "nuclear apartheid" (because of the implied infringement on a state's own nuclear fuel production). For his part, back in 2005 President Ahmadinejad said of nuclear technology, "We're against 'nuclear apartheid,' which means some have the right to possess it, use the fuel, and then sell it to another country for 10 times its value."

At first glance, Social Security seems innocuous enough. What's not to like? It's as American as, well, the Great American Century. Also, until recent years, it's managed to straddle the political divide from Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt, under whose administration it was instituted, to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

But today many Americans view it, ironically, as un-American and would like to see Social Security (along with most federal functions) reduced with an eye to abolishing it. Besides opposing large government in principle, they believe that the money withheld from their paychecks for Social Security is just another form of taxation, to which, in itself, they're constitutionally incapable of reconciling themselves. Furthermore, it's money that they feel they could invest more profitably in stocks and bonds, mutual funds, IRAs, 401(k)s, or . . . lifetime savings accounts.

When you think of a nuclear treaty such as New START, a decrease in the number of nuclear weapons naturally comes to mind. While that's been true in the past, New START leaves the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia more or less intact. In March 2010 Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists explained at it Strategic Security Blog that:

. . . the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks to, in part, a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [In fact, this] "fake" counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case. . . . Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty.

(As well as -- anyone familiar with my writing knows -- a mechanism by which Republicans squeezed an $85 billion commitment from the Obama administration to shore up the nuclear-industrial complex over the next decade.)

The incarnation of "sexy," that is, that cropped up a few years ago: exciting or trendy in a general, not erotic, way. That settled, let's move on to a paper that Christopher Ford wrote for the Hudson Institute in which he weighs, in classic nuclear-strategist mode (bearing in mind that Hudson was founded by its most notorious example, Herman Kahn), the merits of launch on warning (LOW).

To refresh your memory, LOW refers to a nuclear state launching a retaliatory strike when it believes that it has detected nuclear weapons headed towards it soil. In another words, the attacked state isn't waiting around for the decisive confirmation that detonation constitutes. Needless to say, accidents happen. (The most famous was in 1983 when Soviet ballistics officer Stanislav Petrov was brave enough to act on his judgment that an alarm supposedly informing him that the United States had launched a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union was false.) Ford speculates on:

. . . the counter-intuitive possibility that progress since the end of the Cold War in reducing the perceived importance and strategic centrality of nuclear weapons and delivery systems [aka missiles -- RW], and the attention given them within the military hierarchy, may itself be increasing accident risks.

Say what? Ford explains.

Already, for instance, it would appear that the gradual [reduction] of the perceived importance of nuclear missions within the U.S. military – and the degree to which nuclear specialties have gone from being considered a badge of elite distinction to a career backwater relative to "real" warfighting or exotic emerging arenas such as outer space and cyberspace – has helped produce a more accident-prone culture in the nuclear components of the U.S. military. [Such as] the incident in 2007 in which nuclear-armed cruise missiles were mistakenly loaded aboard a B-52 bomber and flown for several hours across the United States.

As hawks and Republican congresspersons are fond of reminding us, this phenomenon seems to apply to the fields of nuclear design and engineering as well. Much of the current workforce is approaching retirement and few young people seem interested in joining a field that seems like it's trending down. If, that is, you believe that New START is a disarmament treaty rather than a vehicle for ensuring the nuclear-weapons industry is funded to the tune of $180 billion over the next decade. In other words, pro-nuclear-weapons advocates have managed to secure the money; they just need bodies.

"There's just been no talk about that right now, none whatsoever."

Thus spake John Kerry, who led the Senate campaign for New START ratification as reported by David Sanger of the New York Times when asked about the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. At his famous Prague speech in April 2009 that buoyed the hopes of many in the disarmament community, President Obama said, among other things that he would seek U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (on nuclear-weapons testing).

Like many on the left we're usually less than sanguine about Sanger, with his tendency to bend to the prevailing winds, but this article is straightforward.

[New START] was initially envisioned as a speed bump on President Obama's nuclear agenda, a modest reduction in nuclear forces that would enable him to tackle much harder issues on the way to his dream of eventually eliminating nuclear weapons altogether.

When the subject of torture in the abstract is broached, the conversation tends to wend its way toward the terrorist and the ticking time-bomb scenario. You know how it goes: a terrorist group announces that a nuclear bomb it's planted in a major American city will be detonated unless its demands are met. One of its members is captured. Time to take off the shackles on torture and let 'er rip, right?

However, when a scenario hinges on not only the ultimate weapon, but one set to go off at a time that's both predetermined and rapidly approaching, it's no longer a test case for torture. Instead the debate slips down a peg in hierarchy to one about torture under highly specific circumstances. The option often poised in counterpoint to torture -- becoming intimate with the subject and winning his or her trust over repeated interrogation sessions -- is removed because of the time constraints. The scenario, in other words, becomes tantamount to the plot device of a movie.

It's not just the Obama administration against which Republican senators under the guidance of Jon Kyl pit themselves when they oppose New START. In fact, perhaps bewitched by Tea Party-style incoherence, they've also placed themselves in the unlikely position of bucking the national defense establishment, to which traditionally they've been joined at the hip. New START, of course, enjoys the support of Secretary of Defense Gates and the Pentagon.

There's no love lost on New START by this author, in part because its cuts are token, but, more to the point, because it's come at too high a cost -- a commitment to spend $86.2 billion on maintaining current operations of the nuclear weapons complex along with modernization of the stockpile and infrastructure. The Republicans and the Obama administration, in fact, are making it more and more difficult to pin the label "paranoid" on left-wing disarmament advocates who suspect New START is just a smokescreen that they're both using to ensure that the nuclear weapons industry continues in perpetuity.

That is, six times the cost of the division of the Manhattan Project (to develop nuclear weapons during World War II) that was based in New Mexico. The heart of it -- what later became known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Odds are, with the Cold War consigned to history, you couldn't have imagined that a nuclear weapons facility of such immensity was still on the table.

Greg Mello is the executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG), which, since 1989, has been spearheading nuclear disarmament in New Mexico, and, consequently, the nation. Since 1999, it has concentrated on halting or, failing that, downsizing a building project at Los Alamos called the Chemical and Metallurgical Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR). The intended function of this facility is to increase the capacity to produce new plutonium pits. The actual site of the nuclear fission, they're the beating heart of the warhead.

Along with Richard Lugar (R-IN), Jon Kyl, the Republican Senate whip from Arizona, is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (KY) go-to guy on nuclear issues. We wrote yesterday at Focal Points:

After Republicans picked up six seats in the Senate earlier this month, prospects for the passage of the new START began to diminish (not that this author minds). Barron YoungSmith at the New Republic writes that last week "chief of staff to Senator Bob Corker -- a key vote on the treaty -- said that it should not be considered during the lame-duck Congress, and the Republican Policy Committee released a memo urging a similar delay."

Kyl is known as a staunch supporter of nuclear weapons who made his mark as a freshman senator in 1999 when he blew up passage of the Comprehensive (nuclear) Test Ban Treaty. But, writes YoungSmith in the article I cited yesterday, "bizarrely enough, he seems to want [new START] to go through." I continued:

Turns out, not so bizarrely. Desmond Butler for the Associated Press writes: In a bid to win approval of [new START] before newly energized Republicans increase their clout in the Senate, the Obama administration is offering to add billions of dollars in funding for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. [To wit] a boost of $4.1 billion . . . between 2012-2016 . . . that will go to maintaining and modernizing the arsenal and the laboratories that oversee that effort. The additional money comes on top of an additional $10 billion the administration had already agreed to over 10 years. And that additional $10 billion, YoungSmith explains, is "on top of" . . . an initial massive $80 billion appropriation in Obama's 2011 budget proposal [that Kyl demanded be] guaranteed over ten years. [In the end] Kyl's proposal would pair New START with a huge cash bonanza for programs that would make it easier to maintain and upgrade our nuclear weapons in the future. In other words, according to YoungSmith, Kyl "seems to think that securing long-term funding for nuclear modernization outweighs whatever qualms he might have about reducing our present arsenal."

Writing for Time, Massimo Calabresi is wary of Kyl, though. Of his perceived openness to New START, Calabresi writes:

Maybe. But if Kyl's primary characteristic as a Senator is subterfuge, his secondary characteristic is a tough devotion to his ideological positions. . . . And convincing Kyl to accept a large cut to the cap on U.S. strategic warheads runs counter to positions he has taken over 16 years in the Senate. That said, the administration has accurately identified something Kyl wants in exchange for accepting a "relatively benign treaty."

Nuclear modernization and missile defense, that is. Those issues aside, writes Kelsey Hartigan at Democracy Arsenal, New START will be "the first test of whether the GOP can be trusted to lead. [Sen. Lugar] recently wrote that 'the Republicans can't just be the Party of No.' [And as] Robert Kagan recently explained to his fellow conservatives, ratifying New START is a 'good first step toward governing.'" Besides, writes Hartigan, "Screw up New START and you can kiss your nuclear pork goodbye."

The New York Times saw fit to provide valuable op-ed space to John Bolton and John Yoo on November 9. You'd think the latter, especially, best known for providing the Bush administration with legal justification for torture, would be reluctant to show his face -- or byline -- in public again. In this instance Bolton and Yoo are turning their collective wisdom to the new START treaty.

"The sweeping Democratic midterm losses last week raise serious questions for President Obama and a lame-duck Congress," they write. "Voters want government brought closer to the vision the framers outlined in the Constitution" -- laying it on a little thick, guys -- "and the first test could be the fate of the flawed New Start arms control treaty [which] awaits ratification. The Senate should heed the will of the voters and either reject the treaty or amend it so that it doesn't weaken our national defense."

Excuse the sensationalistic head: the subject lends itself to hyperbole both because of its urgency and the imperative to draw reluctant readers. Of course, the "What if" doesn't actually figure to materialize any time soon. Still, it hints at what a Pandora's box the development of nuclear weapons has been for over six decades. Actually, it's starting to look more like a clown car -- an evil-clown car.

At Politico, Laura Rozen monitored the engineering failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that knocked 50 nuclear ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) offline. She referred us to fellow Politico reporter Gordon Lubold, who wrote:

Tony Cordesman of CSIS told Morning Defense that, based on preliminary reports, there was not a crisis: "Unless something is released that somehow indicates that you broke through every known barrier to a system that is not connected to the Internet or outside command-and-control, it is a warning that you need to look at the particular system failure, but that is as far as it goes,"

Cordesman's words that we've highlighted are an allusion to hacking. Ms. Rozen also cites Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic (again, emphasis added).

It is next to impossible for these systems to be hacked, so the military does not believe the incident was caused by malicious actors.

However reassuring it is to hear that a nuclear-weapons launch system can't be hacked, it nevertheless plants the seed of a fear in us that most never knew existed. The worm Stuxnet that infiltrated Iran's nuclear program is considered a state-supported project. But what if a terrorist group were to take a shot at the impossible and attempt to hack into a nuclear-weapons launch system?

When it chose to post We Can't Stop Iran From Going Nuclear, So Stop Pretending That We Can, the New Republic no doubt thought it was a quintessentially moderate piece on U.S.-Iran relations. The author, Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review who sometimes writes about foreign affairs, writes:

Just about every major publication in America and England (and no doubt Israel as well) has contributed to the debate. All possible viewpoints and positions have been expressed. . . . Yet [as] someone who has reached the conclusion that military action against Iran would be a bad idea . . . I worry that the way the argument has been framed makes military action all but inevitable.

So far, it sounds like the article the New Republic had hoped for. After quoting writers and statesmen, Gewen writes, "Taken together, all these statements add up to a consensus that if sanctions don't work, the U.S. or Israel will move to the next step and bomb Iran."

What's it like to be one of the principal keepers of "The Worst-Kept Secret" (as Israel bomb historian Avner Cohen calls it in his new book)? David Danieli, the deputy director general and head of the policy division of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, was recently interviewed by Yossi Melman for Haaretz. Some background: at this year's General Conference of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the Arab states, along with Iran, sought to pass a resolution calling for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Yesterday at Newshoggers, Steve Hynd wrote: "Marc Ambinder and others are now confirming the Guardian story today that a U.S. SEAL killed kidnapped aid worker Linda Norgrove when he threw a fragmentation grenade instead of a smoke one, fatally wounding her."

The computer worm Stuxnet didn't exactly bore into the computers of workers in Iran's nuclear program. In fact, whoever unleashed it -- Israel or another state -- sprayed it indiscriminately like machine gun fire. John Markoff of the New York Times reports:

The most striking aspect of the fast-spreading malicious computer program — which has turned up in industrial programs around the world and which Iran said had appeared in the computers of workers in its nuclear project — may not have been how sophisticated it was, but rather how sloppy its creators were in letting a specifically aimed attack scatter randomly around the globe.

Thus, perhaps because of a perceived time crunch on the part of the creators, it created what Markoff called "collateral damage" as if it were a military attack. Now for a riddle: name the weapon which never causes collateral damage? Nuclear weapons. Civilians, of course, form the better part of their intended targeted and are in no sense of the word collateral.

It's bad enough that Israel, along with North Korea, Pakistan, and India, maintains an unacknowledged nuclear arsenal outside the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). But, unlike the other three, which are all too happy to trumpet their possession of nukes to their neighbors and world, Israel continues to keep up the farcical, not to mention insulting, pretense that it's nuke-free. Worse, the United States enables it in the ultimate game of don't ask, don't tell.

Obviously that doesn't sit well with Arab states, not to mention Iran. At the 2010 General Conference of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) two weeks ago, they once again called for Israel to join the NPT. But their resolution, even though it was nonbinding, was rejected by the other members states of the IAE. Reuters reported:

Washington had urged countries to vote down the symbolically important although non-binding resolution, saying it could derail broader efforts to ban nuclear warheads in the Middle East and also damage fresh Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

At his website, New Paradigms Forum, Christopher Ford recently hosted an email colloquy on the subject of nuclear deterrence between staunch disarmament advocate Steven Leeper, chair of the Hiroshima Peace Culture Foundation, and himself. The position of Ford, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and chief negotiator of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons for the Bush administration, can perhaps best be described as counseling extreme caution in disarming while other states still seek to develop nuclear weapons programs.