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| House Defeats Effort to Restore LANL Funding |
June 20, 2007 |
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House Completes Debate on Bill with Radical Shift in US Nuclear Policy, Vote Scheduled in July
Washington, DC – Congresswoman Heather Wilson today voted to restore some funding for nuclear programs and New Mexico’s national laboratories, but the House defeated the proposed amendment 312-121.
The amendment by Rep. Tom Udall (D-NM) would have restored funds to the Road Runner computer, the Readiness in Technical Base and Facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Science campaign.
Wilson said the devastating cuts in the Energy and Water Appropriations Act of 2008 are the most radical change in nuclear policy since the 1990s, and said that the national security impact were not adequately considered before the House completed debate on the bill today. The House will vote on the bill in July.
Speaking on the House floor yesterday, Wilson said, “the decisions imbedded in this legislation will lead us either to return to nuclear testing, or to abandon nuclear deterrence because we will stop maintaining the stockpile.”
Wilson, Ranking Republican on the House Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, strongly opposes the cuts. In addition to speaking on the House floor this week, she released a letter to the Appropriations Committee leaders last week urging reconsideration.
In 1992, the United States stopped nuclear testing. In 1996, the U.S. joined the moratorium on nuclear testing and said we will continue to maintain the stockpile through Science Based Stockpile Stewardship.
“This bill devastates that capability to certify that our nuclear weapons are safe, secure and reliable without testing,” Wilson said.
The bill has a 20 percent reduction in one year in the nuclear weapons program at Sandia National Laboratories, the engineering facilities that are solely responsible for over 6,000 parts in our nuclear weapons. It includes a 40 percent reduction at Los Alamos National Labs nuclear weapons program. Eighty percent of the existing deployed stockpile is designed by Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are responsible for being able to tell us if these weapons are safe secure and reliable.
Wilson said the policy change is “fundamental” and has three major impacts:
It means we will not be able to achieve the stockpile reductions we`re trying to achieve because our confidence in the reliability of our weapons will decline.
It increases the likelihood of the need to go back to underground testing. It will be more likely that, at some point, the lab directors will detect a problem -- anomalies or questions are not unusual -- and they won`t have the tools to be able to assess that problem without nuclear testing.
It undermines allied confidence in the American nuclear umbrella. There are countries that have the capacity to have a nuclear weapons program which have foregone that course because they are protected as allies of America. The existence of reliable American nuclear umbrella has been an important part of our policy to discourage the spread of nuclear weapons.
“In the 1970s and 1980s, prominent Democrats urged a nuclear freeze and argued for unilateral disarmament. Today, without any substantial debate whatsoever, the Democrat majority is moving us in that direction again by cutting the funds to maintain our weapons without testing. I believe that course is unwise,” Wilson concluded.
Wilson also offered an amendment today to restore funding for nuclear medicine research in the Department of Energy, which includes research in new uses of medical isotopes for the detection and treatment of cancer, heart disease, and neurological disorders. The amendment was offered and withdrawn. The amendment would have added $23 million to the bill for this research at national laboratories and universities across the country, restoring funding to Fiscal Year 2005 levels. This is an important program in finding new technologies to help cure cancer. In New Mexico, this research is being done at Los Alamos National Lab and Sandia National Lab, in collaboration with the New Mexico Center for Isotopes in Medicine at the University of New Mexico.
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