A happy little line item from the Bush Budget: "mini-nukes" in 2006

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146535,00.html

Lawmakers who hailed Congress' decision in November to squash funding for two controversial nuclear weapons programs may have to go to the mat once again after indications from the Bush administration that it will seek to revive the program in its 2006 fiscal year budget.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been a proponent of new nuclear weapons research since early in his term. After Congress ignored the administration's prior request of nearly $37 million to continue studying several weapons — including the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (search), or "bunker-buster" bomb, and a low-yield bomb, or "mini-nuke" — officials began quietly looking for ways to restore them.

Earlier last week, the Washington Post reported on a memo Rumsfeld sent to then-Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham about two months ago. "I think we should request funds in FY06 (fiscal year 2006) and FY07 to complete the study. Our staffs have spoken about funding the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) study to support its completion by April 2007," Rumsfeld wrote in the Dec. 10, 2004, memo.

The RNEP, a B61 or B83 nuclear bomb enclosed in an extra-hard casing, currently can tunnel through the earth no more than 30 feet and has never been tested. A bunker-buster that can't get more than several hundred feet below ground would require a yield 10 times greater than that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 in order to destroy a target buried more than 1,000 feet deep.



"Boom"

[chicagojoe]

1. Fire the guy that hired this guy!