New nuke design down, but not out

Los Alamos voters may have heavily favored Republican U.S. Senate candidate Heather Wilson in Tuesday’s primary, but the statewide winner, Steve Pearce, is a key congressional ally to a controversial nuclear weapons program that "would mean plenty of high-end jobs at Los Alamos National Laboratory," Politico.com is reporting.

Jen Dimascio’s piece focuses on the battle over the Bush administration’s plan for a new nuclear weapons design, known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead. The program, as we noted earlier this week, hasn’t had much luck in Congress recently, to the delight of opponents. According to Politico:

Nuns, Quakers, arms-control wonks and liberal scientists may not appear to have a chance of killing the savior of the administration’s nuclear weapons stockpile, the next-generation Reliable Replacement Warhead program.

But for the second year in a row, the anti-nuclear-weapons coalition has more than a prayer in its fight against the administration, the national laboratories and the New Mexico congressional delegation.

How long the prayer will be answered, however, is far from certain.

But killing government programs of this kind is about as difficult as getting rid of nuclear waste. Even though leading appropriators oppose the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, it retains widespread support among lawmakers for strategic and parochial reasons.

The program is projected to cost up to $100 billion. And as much as the administration lays out arguments about updating the nation’s nuclear arsenal, the program would certainly provide future work for scientists at national laboratories in California and New Mexico that have already seen budget cuts.

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