From the morning paper, an attempt to frame and make sense of the questions Congress will face in coming years and the views of New Mexico’s Senate candidates thereon:

Nuclear weaponry is big business in New Mexico.

More than 20,000 people work at Sandia and Los Alamos labs, two of the nation’s three nuclear weapon design and maintenance research centers, and the companies and government offices that support their work.

With budgets totaling $4.6 billion per year in taxpayer funding, the two labs are an economic force that cannot be ignored by members of the state’s congressional delegation. And while efforts to diversify the labs’ missions have waxed and waned over the years, nuclear weapons work remains the core of their mission and the largest single part of their budgets.