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FatDomDaddy -> RE: Dr. Strangelove, meet President Obama (2/1/2010 8:58:15 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: AnimusRex
Speaking as a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club, MoveOn, and a genuine tree hugging peacenik (I even eat hemp granola- HAH!)
Are we reading the same article?
From the article:
"NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino defended putting more money into the programs, saying the U.S. needs the best nuclear weapons facilities, scientists, technicians and engineers as it moves toward eventual disarmament.
"This budget is implementing the president's nuclear vision," he said.
NNSA wants a 4.7 percent overall increase for infrastructure to more than $2.3 billion, including money for major long-term projects to replace aging buildings for plutonium work at Los Alamos and uranium work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
Los Alamos' budget includes about $225 million for design work for a chemical and metallurgy research replacement building, known as CMRR, to replace a 58-year-old lab where scientists analyze samples of plutonium and other radioactive materials.
Watchdog groups contend CMRR positions the U.S. to build more nuclear weapons by giving Los Alamos the capacity to make large numbers of new plutonium pit designs — the triggers of nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos lab officials have said the facility would replace existing capabilities and would be needed for other science, even if Los Alamos didn't do pit production"
So Obama went along with Republicans who demanded that if he wanted to curtail nuclear weapons, he could get their support if he also increased funds for these agencies; which he did, and the funds appear to mostly be used for:
...building new buildings. Oh, teh horror! Teh warmongering pigs!
If one really, really, wanted to gin up some partisan argument, one could (if one were a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club, MoveOn, and a granola eating hippie) say that this is really just porkbarrel stimulus make-work projects that happen to be in the states and districts of influential members of Congress.
But hey, I am groovy with that.
Funny Rex you left out this:
Greg Mello, director of the nuclear watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, said budgets for NNSA and DOE have increased in recent years, but the nation "hasn't seen any increase in weapons activities like this since the early years of Ronald Reagan."
He called the budget "a complete surrender to Senate Republicans," who have argued that stockpile reductions must be accompanied by a modernized nuclear weapons complex.
It was right in the middle of your above quote from the article but some how I guess it evaporated from your cut and paste.
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