COLUMN: Nuclear weapons overfunded

Published: Thursday, February 6, 2003


President Bush's remarks during the State of the Union Address, combined with his enthusiastic mispronunciation of the word nuclear, (it's "nuclear," George, not "noo-cyoo-ler!") made the threat of war with Iraq more imminent than ever.

Using skewed and clichéd rhetoric like "justice," "suffering" and "torture," Bush aimed to incite a spirit of patriotism in the American public, a spirit that seems to be predominantly absent. The cries of peace advocates demanding the immediate cessation of crusades for oil continue to be casually disregarded.

But if Bush's speech and the government's deaf ears aren't enough to scare you into furnishing the bomb shelter with another case of Spaghetti-O's, prepare to be alarmed. The 2004 national budget proposal is currently being reviewed by Congress.

Along with proposals to cut taxes, Curious George and associates intend to boost the funding of American nuclear arms program by 25 percent over six years.

If, after heavy deliberation and gallons of instant coffee, Congress accepts the budget proposal, New Mexico's LANL and Sandia Laboratories -- two of the nation's leading manufacturers of nuclear weapons components and heavy metals -- will see an unseemly budget increase of nearly $250 million.

But while anti-war demonstrators cry, "No more noo-cyoo-ler bombs, George!" soothsayers predict the year 2004 will welcome LANL and Sandia with budgets of $1.7 billion and $1.5 billion, respectively. This means proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the kind we say others countries can't possess, will persist.

"More weapons?" the public will scream. "But why?"

Only four explanations for the budget increases can be proffered, all scary and all designed to amplify the potency of the American empire.

1) By boasting the largest number of nuclear weapons in the world, the United States can continue to subjugate, oppress, and bully countries that have what we want. These "weaker" nations, barred by U.N. legislation from pursuing the means to protect their valuables (rendering them eternally codependent), will have no choice but to buckle under American demands. Let international piracy reign, ya scurvy scalawags!

2) In the not-so-distant future, we'll need new bombs to replace the ones we anticipate dropping on the Middle East. If we use all of our bombs to level Iraq, we won't have any left for cremating North Korea.

Of course, being sensitive to the plight of innocent civilians, we don't want to have to use nuclear muscle (wink, wink) unless it's absolutely necessary. But let's be on the safe side and keep cranking those puppies out. Yee haa!

3) Bombs are radioactive, which means that when exposed, your skin starts to bubble and you're soon converted into ashtray artifacts.

But the plutonium and uranium cores of these devices have a half-life that decays at a predictable rate. So we need new bombs because the old ones aren't quite as powerful as they once were. The fallout radius of those old, antediluvian bombs is probably a couple feet shy of that of the sparkling new über-bomb. It's purely a matter of profit margins and getting the most bang for your buck. If we want to incinerate everything with utmost utilitarian success, we need to have weapons with the optimal efficacy. After all, we wouldn't want to be wasteful, we're talking millions of dollars here!

4) With a larger pecuniary pool to draw from, LANL and Sandia will be able to explore new alleyways of blowing people to smithereens, leaving behind only cockroaches and Twinkies.

New warfare technology is good for several reasons. First, new explosive technology will make Fat Man and Little Boy look like potato guns. With a variety of ballistics to choose from we'll be able to blow up twice as much!

Second, according to the recently appointed fashion designers, the mushroom cloud look is totally passé. If the atomic cloud looks hipper, more stylish and innocuous, people won't take death so seriously. Who could really be terrified of being vaporized with a teddy bear-shaped cloud looming overhead? Not me.

The ultimate irony of the situation surfaced when Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham opened his mouth and spat one of the most inconceivably asinine axioms imaginable. Addressing a group of reporters on Monday, Abraham maintained that preventing nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands would continue to be one of the United States' top priorities. What Spencer must have meant to say is that by making more nuclear weapons, we actually minimize the chances of lunatics obtaining nuclear devices; the more bombs, the slimmer the avenue of opportunity for terrorists to acquire one. Apparently, Abraham has a little problem with probability ratios.

With proposals such as the aforementioned, Bush sends the message that jeopardizing homeland security will be rewarded with increased budgets. Poorly managed institutions like LANL, where precautionary rigor is of the utmost importance and mistakes are tantamount to disaster, should not take part in leading national security. Nor should they be monetarily praised for ineptitude. During the past five years, LANL has been under fire for breaches in security and accusations of espionage (see Wen Ho Lee), "misplaced" laptops, hush-hush memos from higher-uppers and stolen equipment. And we're entrusting these people with our intellectual property and our lives?

Maybe if public schools and Medicare started "losing" computers and leaking "sensitive data" like LANL has been known to do, they would be receiving budget increases in 2004.

Methinks we're in big trouble.



Send explosive responses to erichow@unm.edu.