Nuclear Spending Comes Under Fire
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — The sprawling nuclear weapons laboratory here is just starting construction of a $1-billion plutonium research center, part of an ambitious plan to modernize its outdated facilities.
But congressional analysts and outside watchdogs are calling it a boondoggle -- a facility that will be obsolete less than eight years after it opens. A congressional report this spring called the plan "simply irrational," and House lawmakers are trying to kill the project.
"It is stupid to put money into a limited-life thing like this," said Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees energy. "We are resisting spending that money."
It was a tough -- but increasingly routine -- rebuke for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, a vast enterprise of labs and factories from South Carolina to California that has thrived in the post-Cold War era.
The federal government has spent more than $65 billion on the complex over the last decade, and experts agree the United States has nuclear weapons that are reliable for use in war, safe from accidental detonation and secure from terrorists.
But Democrats and Republicans in Congress, as well as outside analysts, have grown increasingly concerned about what they see as sloppy management by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Among other things, they cite scientific mistakes and cost overruns on projects at the nation's two nuclear weapons design centers -- an X-ray machine at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a laser at Lawrence Livermore in the Bay Area.
"It has been one problem after another," said Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "The current administrator should be fired."
Not surprisingly, that administrator, Linton F. Brooks, who was the chief U.S. arms control negotiator in the early 1990s, sharply disagrees. He calls the program to maintain the reliability of aging bombs "a rousing success."
Bomb scientists say the extra spending on nuclear weapons is necessary because the U.S. stopped underground nuclear testing in 1992. Maintaining the reliability of the weapons -- something the industry calls "stockpile stewardship" -- requires a massive, and expensive, scientific effort.
