Lest readers of this blog think my only journalistic avocation is climate: LANL May Begin Building Nuke Pits

By John Fleck And Michael Coleman
Journal Staff Writers

WASHINGTON— Federal officials on Monday proposed expanding nuclear weapons manufacturing at Los Alamos National Laboratory, part of a sweeping plan to develop new nuclear weapons for the first time since the end of the Cold War.

By 2012, they hope to be able to make 30 to 40 new plutonium nuclear weapon cores per year, according to the Bush administration’s fiscal year 2007 budget request.

The government’s top nuclear weapons official cautioned that the new program remains primarily a research effort for now, aimed at finding ways to build safer and more reliable nuclear weapons. But the spending plan delivered to Congress on Monday includes, for the first time, a long-term spending plan for moving the weapons from the drawing board to production.

(Michael was the one in Washington. I just have a telephone, a pdf reader and an inordinate fondness for federal budget documents.)