Bunker buster defunded

You know the Republicans are feeling budget trouble when Congress won't rubber stamp Bush's nukes



The Robust Earth Penetrator (illustration) and related programs were deleted in the massive budget bill passed by Congress over the weekend.

Our Congressional representatives have acted in accordance with our pleas of August 6 for them to stop the Administration's determined pursuit of new "usable" nuclear weapons. Walter Pincus reported Tuesday in the Washington Post that

...it was a Republican, Rep. David L. Hobson of Ohio, who lead the successful effort to keep the programs out of the omnibus appropriations bill adopted Saturday. Hobson, chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, oversaw dropping the money from an appropriations bill in June, and House-Senate conferees accepted that action in Saturday's bill.

It should be noted that during our August 6 action, we thanked members of Congress who courageously supported deleting the bunker buster funds. Please see a pdf-format copy of the handout we distributed that day. At that time we wrote the we applauded "action in June where the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee courageously removed all the funds for new nuclear weapons in the House version of the energy and water appropriations bill (HR 4614)".

We again give the same thanks to Representative Hobson and those members who now have made the deletion stick.

Pincus does go on to quote the positive reaction of arms control advocates, and gives the rationale for opposing these dangerous and unnecessary weapons, writing, "the existence of lower-yield weapons -- sometimes called "mini-nukes" -- would ultimately increase the likelihood of war".

A victory perhaps even bigger than the elimination of the bunker busters in this budget action is the cold stop of the effort to build a new facility for production of plutonium pits for bombmaking. Although this deletion was small ($7 million), it stops dead in its tracks the proposed $4 billion Cold-War-throw-back construction program.

This remark of Hobson's was also in the Pincus story:

[Hobson] said that the $9 million Bush request to study ideas for new low-yield weapons had been redirected into studies of "current technologies to make existing warheads more robust and easier to maintain without more testing." Hobson added he had been against developing smaller-yield weapons "that someone might use," and instead wants the nuclear labs to employ modern technology to make "more reliable replacements" for the current warheads.

While we clearly agree with the remark that nukes that someone might use should not be built, it seems some equivalent money will be spent in other sanctums of nuclear horror. Our work to prevent nuclear war can hardly be considered over.