Talk is cheap for R&D (albeit clearly W is better than Kerry/Gore et al...but he is no Reagan), which minimal funding gets gutted without any real resolve to oppose by the Administration (from mininukes to Bunker busters). Meanwhile, even the funds to keep weapons operable get gutted, and the President marches ahead unilaterally on dismantling the U.S. arsenal, such as the MX, while Russia keeps its SS-18 first-strike arsenal until 2017...here is one tidbit from just a month and a half ago...
Cold War Relic in Pieces, but Next Generation LoomsI.e., in other words, W has ordered the DOD to discontinue yet another planned maintenance program, putting it still deeper onto the unilateral disarmament track...there will be no replacement for the aging W-80...one of the residual backbones of our deterrent arsenal.
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; Page A15The Bush administration is expected to announce today that it has dismantled the last of the most powerful nuclear missile warheads left over from the Cold War.
At the same time, however, a Senate subcommittee has added $10 million to next year's budget to fund a design competition for the second warhead in a new generation of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has increased by 50 percent the rate at which it is dismantling older weapons in the nuclear stockpile, which has about 5,000 weapons.
..... according to NNSA Deputy Administrator Thomas P. D'Agostino.... said NNSA is planning to put more emphasis on dismantling retired nuclear weapons, a process that in the past decade has provided a steady amount of work for the Pantex facility outside Amarillo, Tex., where weapons are assembled and disassembled. Up to now, the programs to refurbish operational warheads have used up almost all the operating space at the facility. But with that program declining, dismantling of retired weapons can increase.
In another step related to reduction of operational weapons, the subcommittee cut $82 million from the budget because the Defense Department has decided that it will not continue a program that would have extended the life of W-80 nuclear warheads carried by several hundred submarine- and air-launched cruise missiles.