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With little debate recently, the House of Representatives endorsed a spending plan prepared by its Appropriations Committee which would cut U.S. nuclear warhead programs overall by 6 percent.

It would also halt a major Bush Administration initiative to build new warheads; stop the construction of a new plutonium warhead core, or "pit," factory at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and cut funding for pit making by half.

Los Alamos, and to a lesser extent Sandia National Laboratories, would bear the brunt of these cuts, should they become law.

The detailed House plan redirects funds cut from Department of Energy weapons programs toward preventing nuclear proliferation and promoting renewable energy.

Each member of the New Mexico congressional delegation opposed these shifts. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat, was relatively mute. Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, both of Albuquerque, said the sky would fall if the cuts were adopted, but took no action. "St. Pete" Domenici, will do his best to restore funding in the Senate.

Rep. Tom Udall, a Santa Fe Democrat, opposed the proposed spending plan in committee, but was the sole voice on the 56-person Appropriations Committee to do so. Later, he offered an amendment on the House floor to restore $192 million in nuclear weapons spending, specifically for Los Alamos, but it lost by a wide margin.

For the Senate, it will be the first nuclear spending plan since 1994 that will not be under Domenici's direct influence.

A third powerful actor this year is the White House, which has said it will veto the current bill, primarily because it would spend too much money.

Whither nuclear weapons policy, then? As three congressional committees have noticed, the United States has no coherent nuclear policy even now. This lack of clarity led the House to put the reins on the most expensive and controversial parts of the Bush nuclear agenda.

It's dangerous to make predictions, especially about the future (as Yogi Berra said), but here's one: five years from now there will still be no coherent U.S. nuclear policy. This is because the underlying contradictions in U.S. nuclear weapons policies run very deep.

The only policy compatible with nonproliferation treaty commitments is a commitment to complete nuclear disarmament. While the American people support our disarmament obligation and choose disarmament above other policies in the polls, Congress does not.

There is a consensus on the direction on nuclear forces, spending and infrastructure that is downward. A wide range of relevant actors, from the left to the right, favor a smaller nuclear arsenal, lower annual expenditures and smaller warhead storage centers.

Nuclear weapons are not popular in the military. An administration official said if the military had to pay for nuclear warheads, there wouldn't be any.

Who promotes nuclear weapons? It has been three nuclear weapons labs that promote them most - they and members of Congress associated with their locations, with Domenici in the lead.

As one Republican appointee said to us, "Why have you come to see me? The problem with nuclear weapons policy is in your state and his name is Pete Domenici."

In New Mexico there are serious political, economic and social consequences from these loyalties. Domenici's role in obtaining nuclear pork-barrel spending for New Mexico is now considered so inviolate by New Mexico Democratic Party leaders that they consistently fail to seriously challenge him either rhetorically or electorally. After all, they too depend on lab employees for political contributions.

Behind the mask of party pluralism, the loyalty of New Mexico political elites to the nuclear labs gives an uncontested seat to the deeply conservative Domenici for as long as he wants it. The labs' influence extends elsewhere. Through our bipartisan devotion to federal nuclear pork, the labs create a strong right-of-center tug on New Mexico politics.

This strong pull to the political right has implications across a wide range of New Mexico issues, especially on our state's economic and social performance. It goes a long way toward explaining why our relative economic performance as a state has fallen in a direct proportion to rising laboratory spending. Both trends coincide, more or less, with Domenici's Senate tenure.