Sometime after its return from the July 4th holiday, the Senate is expected to vote on its Appropriations bill. NIF's budget, then any differences between the House and Senate funding levels would be negotiated in committee. If approved by the full Congress and the President, this new law would lift certain key restrictions imposed by a 1994 law barring the DOE nuclear weapons labs from conducting research and development that could lead to the production of a precision, low-yield nuclear weapon with an explosive force of less than 5 kilotons. This cadre of Strangeloves also thinks the U.S. should scuttle the CTBT altogether and resume full-scale underground nuclear blasts. Witness, as two more examples, the current push to revive Star Wars and the U.S. Space Command's plan to militarily control the earth from the sky by 2020, using space-based nuclear weapons and exotic laser technology.
Public outcry is crucial.
What we all do, or fail to do, right now will impact our Mother Earth's future. IBM has built a supercomputer that runs 12 trillion calculations per second - the fastest in the world to date. Soon, it will be hauled on 28 tractor trailer trucks from NY to CA's Livermore Lab. Once installed, the computer, called ASCI White, will be used to model nuclear weapons explosions in three dimensions. ASCI stands for Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative.