Spiraling Problems for Los Alamos Plutonium Facility

On the radar: 8 reasons for scrapping CMRR; Hard lessons on regime change; The Future Nuclear Arsenal; India posture shift; Albright on Iran’s timeline; A graph of nuclear proportions; Israeli intel on Iran; and Attacking the Republican Revolutionary Guard.

January 19, 2012 | Edited by Benjamin Loehrke and Mary Kaszynski

Rising costs, uncertain mission - The mission, cost, and design of Los Alamos’ proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Facility have spiraled out of control, writes Dana Liebelson at POGO. In case you haven’t read POGO’s recent report advocating scrapping the CMRR-NF program, Liebelson gives a quick 8 point summary arguing why the facility should be cut. http://owl.li/8zdTP

Problems with regime change - Advocates for regime change in Iran harbor assumptions that the U.S. has the ability to topple the Iranian regime, micromanage Iran’s transition to a liberal democracy, and have the resulting Iranian government forsake its nuclear program. Robert Wright argues that these assumption do not stand up to the situation in Iran and our recent experience at forced regime change in Iraq. http://owl.li/8zdOV

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Event - The Arms Control Association hosts “The Future of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal: Issues and Policy Options” featuring Morton Halperin, Hans Kristensen, Amy Woolf and Daryl Kimball tomorrow at 9:30am. RSVP here. http://owl.li/8wpVY

India’s posture change? - “India’s nuclear weapons ‘are not for warfighting,” said the chief of India’s army Gen. V. K. Singh. The weapons have “a strategic capability and that is where it should end.”

--”If Gen. Singh’s rejection of nuclear warfighting is reflected in India’s future nuclear posture, two important things will have been achieved: rejection of the mindless tit-for-tat philosophy that otherwise dominates nuclear posturing; and limiting the scenarios where nuclear weapons otherwise could come into use,” writes Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists. http://owl.li/8zdR4

Nuclear hedging - Iran has not yet decided to build a bomb, but it is taking steps to be able to do so quickly, according to a new ISIS report. The shorter timeline makes coming up with a peaceful solution even more important, the authors conclude. http://owl.li/8zdXn

Nuclear weapons to scale - The Enola Gay dropped a 15 kiloton bomb on Hiroshima. One of the United States’ B-2 bombers, if fully loaded, packs 19.2 megatons of explosive energy. On a scale, what does that look like? Peter Fedewa on the Ploughshares Fund Blog has the (really long) chart. http://owl.li/8zekU

A Slippery Slope to War - Biting sanctions, international isolation, and the covert campaign against their nuclear program may push Iran to a confrontation with the U.S. The administration must resist political pressure to take a tougher line if we are to avoid a disastrous war, writes Geoffrey Kemp in Real Clear World. http://owl.li/8zdVs

Israeli intel - Even as Iran improves its nuclear capabilities, it has noy yet decided to build a nuclear warhead. “That's the Israeli intelligence assessment that U.S. officials will hear this week during security meetings with U.S. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to Israeli media reports.” Edmund Sanders at the LA Times has the story. http://owl.li/8zdZB

Regime change recycled - Tweets Patrick Disney of Yale (@TalkingWarheads), “Had not read the Fly/Schmitt Iran piece. Thought comparisons to Iraq were sufficiently robust to dismiss it...Then noticed Fly/Schmitt call it the "Republican Guard" instead of "Revolutionary," as if lifted from an actual Iraq piece circa 2002.” http://owl.li/8zfLm