OBAMA WANTS TO MAKE NEW NUCLEAR WEAPONS, WTF!

I was horrified when President Obama discussed increasing the numbers of nuclear power plants in the United States during his state of the union address. Now I have to say I am bewildered and saddened upon finding out he has given the go ahead to building new nuclear bomb factories in an attempt to appease the Republicans in the senate. Once again a few Republicans have held progress hostage and Obama caved to their demands in the hope of making progress on his overall plan. During his campaign Obama said, "It's time to send a clear message to the world: America seeks a world with no nuclear weapons." Obama speaks with forked tongue.

Obama and the works of death
Fr. John Dear is a peace activist:

New Mexico is abuzz with the news. Soon from our austere landscape will rise a spanking new, state-of-the-art, plutonium bomb factory. Setting pen to paper and thereby blessing the project was President Obama, who had announced a year ago in Prague the goal of a nuclear-free world, but with his recent budget, will actually increase nuclear weapons production more than any other president since Ronald Reagan.
Here's a piece of hypocrisy that surpasses even that of George W. Bush. Cheer on disarmament while drawing up plans for new facilities. Raise up a hopeful vision and, behind the scenes, ensure its dying. An Orwellian nightmare.

Need it be added, the weapons manufacturers are delighted.
In the new budget request for 2011 the Obama Administration proposes to freeze discretionary domestic spending for programs such as education, nutrition, air traffic control and national parks for three years while dramatically increasing funding for new US nuclear weapons production facilities. Meanwhile the proposed budget for dismantling warheads retired from the stockpile is down by 40%. Funding for a new nuclear facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory to be used in direct support of plutonium pit production, the CMRR-NF, is increased to $225 million requested from $97M in FY10 (+132%). After FY11, funding is proposed to triple the FY10 amount to $300 million for each of the following four consecutive years.
"Obama's Nuke Vision Sees Cash Flow to Labs," was the headline last week in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The article reported that Obama will increase funding for nuclear weapons research and security programs $7 billion more next year, an increase of $624 million from the 2010 fiscal year.

Obama approved three new nuclear weapons facilities, according to the National Catholic Reporter, the second in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the third in Kansas City, Mo. As Obama feeds the nuclear weapons industry with a $7 billion increase, he'll go through the motions of hammering out a disarmament deal with Russia -and of reviewing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. In that convoluted logic, so common to the holders of nuclear weapons, he thinks he can promote peace while adding billions for nuclear advances.
"This budget is implementing the president's nuclear vision," Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the Santa Fe New Mexican.
The total Department of Energy request for Los Alamos National Nuclear Laboratory totals $2.21 billion, up from $1.82 billion in 2010.
In the actions-speak-louder-than-words department, all this is telling. Said Greg Mello, director of the nuclear watch-dog Los Alamos Study Group "The nation hasn't seen any increase in weapons activities like this since the early years of Ronald Reagan ... It's a complete surrender to Senate Republicans."
Some of this largess, pending final review, will go toward building the new plutonium plant -- a chemical and metallurgy research facility known as the "CMRR," to replace a 58-year-old lab. The CMRR will enable Los Alamos to make far more new plutonium pits (a nuclear weapon's triggering device). In previous years they could make 20 a year; they'll soon be able to make 125 a year.
Obama -- the nuclear free world visionary -- has given the green light to the nuclear madmen of Los Alamos to lay their largest nest of doomsday bombs in years.
Under Obama, the Pentagon budget for mass murder and the impasse we call deterrence would grow by more than three percent, not counting separate funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It adds up to $741 billion. The budget cuts no weapons programs, only social programs.
All this insanity is hard to bear. Obama's recent unmanned drone blitz killed 123 civilians and three al-Qaeda leaders in January; Guantanamo, the off-shore prison and torture center, is still in business; our troops still occupy Iraq and invade Afghanistan. All this insanity while Haiti lies in ruins at our doorstep, like Luke's starving Lazarus lying at the rich man's door. American culture is rotting from the inside out.


From Nuclear Watch New Mexico:

Funding for a new “Uranium Processing Facility” (UPF) at the Y12 production plant near Oak Park Ridge, TN, is proposed to increase to $115M from $94M in FY10 (+22%). However, its big money is in the following four consecutive years, climbing to $320 million by 2015 (in all a 240% increase from FY10 funding). Totals costs for both the CMRR and UPF are still “TBD” [To Be Determined], meaning they don’t know, but each will probably cost $3 billion or more.


Outside of the federal budget, groundbreaking is expected this Spring on a new privately-financed ~$700 million Kansas City Plant for nonnuclear components production for US nuclear weapons, subsidized by Kansas City municipal bonds. This pretty well spans the spectrum of future US nuclear weapons production, with big increases for new facilities for plutonium, uranium and nonnuclear components. At the same time, the Obama budget proposes to cut dismantlement from $96.1 million in FY 2010 to $58 million.


Obama is preemptively surrendering to the nuclear weapons labs, the for-profit private corporations running those labs, and the 2/3rd’s Senate majority including Republicans needed for treaty ratifications. All of these special interests explicitly seek to extract more taxpayer funding for nuclear weapons programs in exchange for ratification of a renewed bilateral arms control treaty with Russia and a long-sought-for Test Ban Treaty.


We went through this a decade ago, when the nuclear weapons complex got billions of dollars and but ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty failed. History is getting ready to repeat itself, this time with the nuclear weapons labs seeking the capability to produce future new-design weapons. Obama’s new budget begins to give them just that, welfare for warheads that can’t be used while American public needs are not adequately met.

From Time Magazine:

Shortly after taking the oath of office on Tuesday, he turned what had been a campaign promise into an official presidential commitment: the new Administration "will stop the development of new nuclear weapons," the White House declared flatly on its website, with no equivocation, asterisks or caveats.



Obama and Gates are "at loggerheads on this," says Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution who has specialized in nuclear issues. A senior Pentagon official says talk of a resolution is "premature" because he doesn't believe Gates and Obama have discussed the matter.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates who was George W. Bush's defense secretary has been trying to get new nuclear weapons since the Bush administration. Why would President Obama have Gates for a Defense Secretary if he supposedly is for peace? Obama has been talked into warring in Afghanistan and Pakistan, prisoners in Afghanistan are continuing to be kidnapped, tortured, and murdered, no wonder Obama did not want to prosecute the archetects of torture in the middle east. I am horrified that I worked my butt off to get him elected.

All forty Republican Senators wrote Obama a letter stating they would block ratification of the new treaty with Russia unless he funds new facilities at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn. to build modern warheads. Obama is hoping if he does what they want they will give him the majority he needs in the senate to ratify the treaty. We have seen Obama bend over backwards to make compromises with the Republicans before and it is clear they are not honorable nor do they believe in cooperation or compromise. I think this is a foolish move and very detrimental to our country. The rationale that the nuclear weapons need to be replaced because they may have degraded a little does not hold water, so what, we can still blow up the world multiple times. These new plants will be able to produce nuclear bombs faster and will be in place for future presidents, that is scary considering how our war machine has escalated over the last decade. Russia will most likely now build new nuclear weapons as well.
The hypocrisy of telling Iran they can't build nuclear weapons is now increased exponentially.