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Editorial: Weapons labs need to embrace change

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Push is coming to shove for the nation's nuclear weapons laboratories, including Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico.

It may be that Congress, once again, will back away from proposed drastic cuts in the labs' billion-dollar-plus budgets, as New Mexico's Republican Sen. Pete Domenici and Democratic Rep. Tom Udall try to persuade the Senate and the House that "drastic" is not in the nation's best interests.

It will, however, be a higher mountain to climb this year, which probably will be the last year in which the labs can expect anything approaching full budget funding.

On the table is a House bipartisan plan to slash the nuclear weapons budget by $600 million and eliminate 37 programs, including the main one aimed at redesigning the basic U.S. nuclear warhead.

For more than a decade, the labs and the Department of Energy — the monstrous, cost-ineffective bureaucracy which oversees them — have been skating on increasingly thin ice. With the demise of the former Soviet Union, the nation's nuclear arsenal has been searching for an enemy.

Few, except perhaps dedicated, die-hard antinuclear advocates such as today's Insight & Opinion writer Greg Mello, see a day in the near future when the United States could securely do without nuclear weapons — even if the states of the former Soviet Union were to completely disarm.

But while the world has changed, the labs have not. They remain largely focused on banned weapons, while the world worries about economic equity, future energy sources, rising oil prices, the threat of emerging diseases and pandemics, terrorism and global warming.

The labs and their budgets do need a reality check. They need to reflect a global reality in which nuclear weaponry — particularly in its Cold War form — is an increasingly costly and irrelevant burden. Meanwhile, nuclear proliferation, nuclear material safeguards and nuclear disarmament are rising to the top of the global, if not the American, agenda.

While the world has pressed over the last seven years for a nuclear remedy that approaches total disarmament, the Bush administration has pushed in the opposite direction at home, for increased nuclear weapons funding, new nuclear programs weapons, the reliable replacement warhead program and reconfiguration and restoration of the aging nuclear arsenal and weapons complex, including a pit production facility at Los Alamos.

In a Senate deal being brokered by Domenici and North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, the labs' current programs and work levels would remain largely stable for the next year but would have to develop a new plan for the future of the nation's nuclear labs and arsenal.

The Tribune has long advocated a bottom-up, comprehensive review of U.S. nuclear weapons policy, its nuclear weapons complex and the nation's three nuclear research labs, on the premise the United States still needs a safe, secure and reliable nuclear arsenal. But it can and should be substantially reduced.

The review should start with a fundamental appraisal of the real value of nuclear warheads, the requirements of the military and broad public outreach, education and comment on the future it sees and wants for its nuclear weapon arsenal.

The last has been grievously missing over the last half century of nuclear weapons design, development and testing. The nation's future nuclear policy needs to be determined not just by the DOE, its nuclear labs, the Pentagon, the White House and the Congress, but by the American people.

No state's congressional delegation is better informed or equipped to lead this debate than New Mexico's. Led by Domenici and Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat, the delegation has managed to protect the labs from repeated efforts to trim their nuclear sails.

It is time to educate the nation on its past and current nuclear weapons policies and assets - including its research brain trust at places such as Sandia and Los Alamos - and to decide what shall become of them. The possibilities from refocusing much of their legendary capabilities on the energy and environmental crises are tantalizing.

But first, Los Alamos and Sandia must recognize the need for real change, embrace it and help New Mexico's congressional delegation lead the nation in adopting it. The future for Los Alamos and Sandia must be driven by realistic national security missions, not by protecting their budgets.