If everyone is happy then what the heck...
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades. Since the 1950s, the two labs have fiercely competed in the bomb trade with technologies as different as Microsoft and Apple.
But some veterans of nuclear arms development are strongly opposed, arguing that building new weapons could trigger another arms race with Russia and China, as well as undermine arguments to stop nuclear developments in Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. And, the critics say, it would eventually increase pressure to resume underground nuclear testing, which the U.S. halted 15 years ago.
Inside the labs, however, emotions and enthusiasm for the new designs are running high.
"I have had people working nights and weekends," said Joseph Martz, the head of the Los Alamos design team. "I have to tell them to go home. I can't keep them out of the office. This is a chance to exercise skills that we have not had a chance to use for 20 years."
A thousand miles away at Livermore, Bruce Goodwin, associate director for nuclear weapons, describes a similar picture: The lab is running supercomputer simulations around the clock and teams of scientific experts working on all phases of the project "are extremely excited."
Excerpt from LA Times
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