How Los Alamos is Driving the Development of New Nuclear Weapons

Extract

In 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer declared, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” after he witnessed the first nuclear explosion under the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His statement, a line from the Bhagavad-Gita, displayed his own apprehensions with helping to create weapons capable of overwhelming destruction Almost 60 years later, Los Alamos, located in northern New Mexico, once again stands at a major crossroads in nuclear weapons development, but this time around lab officials do not openly harbor the same reservations as Oppenheimer. In fact, Los Alamos, in its own entrenched institutional interest, has been driving drastic changes in national nuclear weapons policy. Now that Bush has been reelected and Congress has drifted farther right, these troublesome developments are sure to continue.