http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity.
The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War.
Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe.
Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack.
But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production would encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons.
While I realize it's sexy (and yes, important) to talk about Pelosi or the 06 elections, let's have a discussion about the next 50 years, shall we? We are going to be creating more bombs. What does this mean? Everyone who doesn't trust us will be creating more bombs. I could say that a lot fancier, but that's the simple truth it boils down to.
125 new nukes a year. Who are we going to use them on?
As a people, we don't want to ever see another bombed dropped on the entire planet. Do the poll if you like, but I firmly believe people don't want to have a nuke dropped on us, and we don't really want to nuke anyone else either.
The idea of inciterating a neighborhood, a town, a city, or a particular country is not appealing to people who might live in a neighborhood, a town, a city, or a particular country. Is that fucking hard to understand?
How many times over to we need to be able to destroy the planet, before the entire world says "OK, OK, US republican politicians have the largest penises in the world." Because that is all this is.
Over the next 50 years, we will be fighting the same fights our parents fought - the fight for nuclear disarmament. My father told me he had hoped with the end of the cold war that the world had come to a place where the greatest enemy was war itself - but humanity it seems has a way to go before we can truly live up to self evident truth. You know, like the truth that nukes suck and we don't want to use them or have them used.