New low for Newsweek

Cultural Clash Fuels Muslims Angry at Online Video

September 16, 2012
NYT
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Stepping from the cloud of tear gas in front of the American Embassy here, Khaled Ali repeated the urgent question that he said justified last week’s violent protests at United States outposts around the Muslim world.

“We never insult any prophet — not Moses, not Jesus — so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” Mr. Ali, a 39-year-old textile worker said, holding up a handwritten sign in English that read “Shut Up America.” “Obama is the president, so he should have to apologize!”

When the protests against an American-made online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad exploded in about 20 countries, the source of the rage was more than just religious sensitivity, political demagogy or resentment of Washington, protesters and their sympathizers here said. It was also a demand that many of them described with the word “freedom,” although in a context very different from the term’s use in the individualistic West: the right of a community, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish, to be free from grave insult to its identity and values.

That demand, in turn, was swept up in the colliding crosscurrents of regional politics. From one side came the gale of anger at America’s decade-old war against terrorism, which in the eyes of many Muslims in the region often looks like a war against them. And from the other, the new winds blowing through the region in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, which to many here means most of all a right to demand respect for the popular will.

“We want these countries to understand that they need to take into consideration the people, and not just the governments,” said Ismail Mohamed, 42, a religious scholar who once was an imam in Germany. “We don’t think that depictions of the prophets are freedom of expression. We think it is an offense against our rights,” he said, adding, “The West has to understand the ideology of the people.”

Even during the protests, some stone throwers stressed that the clash was not Muslim against Christian. Instead, they suggested that the traditionalism of people of both faiths in the region conflicted with Western individualism and secularism.

Youssef Sidhom, the editor of the Coptic Christian newspaper Watani, said he objected only to the violence of the protests.

Mr. Sidhom approvingly recalled the uproar among Egyptian Christians that greeted the 2006 film “The Da Vinci Code,” which was seen as an affront to aspects of traditional Christianity and the persona of Jesus. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and other Arab countries banned both the film and the book on which it was based. And in Egypt, where insulting any of the three Abrahamic religions is a crime, the police even arrested the head of a local film company for importing 2,000 copies of the DVD, according to news reports.

“This reaction is expected,” Mr. Sidhom said of last week’s protests, “and if it had stayed peaceful I would have said I supported it and understood.”

In a context where insults to religion are crimes and the state has tightly controlled almost all media, many in Egypt, like other Arab countries, sometimes find it hard to understand that the American government feels limited by its free speech rules from silencing even the most noxious religious bigot.

In his statement after protesters breached the walls of the United States Embassy last Tuesday, the spiritual leader of the Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, declared that “the West” had imposed laws against “those who deny or express dissident views on the Holocaust or question the number of Jews killed by Hitler, a topic which is purely historical, not a sacred doctrine.”

In fact, denying the Holocaust is also protected as free speech in the United States, although it is prohibited in Germany and a few other European countries. But the belief that it is illegal in the United States is widespread in Egypt, and the Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, Mohamed Badie, called for the “criminalizing of assaults on the sanctities of all heavenly religions.”

“Otherwise, such acts will continue to cause devout Muslims across the world to suspect and even loathe the West, especially the U.S.A., for allowing their citizens to violate the sanctity of what they hold dear and holy,” he said. “Certainly, such attacks against sanctities do not fall under the freedom of opinion or thought.”

Several protesters said during the heat of last week’s battles here that they were astonished that the United States had not punished the filmmakers. “Everyone across all these countries has the same anger, they are rising up for the same reason and with the same demands, and still no action is taken against the people who made that film,” said Zakaria Magdy, 23, a printer.

In the West, many may express astonishment that the murder of Muslims in hate crimes does not provoke the same level of global outrage as the video did. But even a day after the clashes in Cairo had subsided, many Egyptians argued that a slur against their faith was a greater offense than any attack on a living person.

“When you hurt someone, you are just hurting one person,” said Ahmed Shobaky, 42, a jeweler. “But when you insult a faith like that, you are insulting a whole nation that feels the pain.”

Mr. Mohamed, the religious scholar, justified it this way: “Our prophet is more dear to us than our family and our nation.”

Others said that the outpouring of outrage against the video had built up over a long period of perceived denigrations of Muslims and their faith by the United States or its military, which are detailed extensively in the Arab news media: the invasion of Iraq on a discredited pretext; the images of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison; the burning or desecrations of the Koran by troops in Afghanistan and a pastor in Florida; detentions without trial at Guantánamo Bay; the denials of visas to prominent Muslim intellectuals; the deaths of Muslim civilians as collateral damage in drone strikes; even political campaigns against the specter of Islamic law inside the United States.

“This is not the first time that Muslim beliefs are being insulted or Muslims humiliated,” said Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo.

While he stressed that no one should ever condone violence against diplomats or embassies because of even the most offensive film, Mr. Shahin said it was easy to see why the protesters focused on the United States government’s outposts. “There is a war going on here,” he said. “This was a straw, if you will, that broke the camel’s back.

“The message here is we don’t care about your beliefs — that because of our freedom of expression we can demean them and degrade them any time, and we do not care about your feelings.”

There are also purely local dynamics that can fan the flames. In Tunis, an American school was set on fire by protesters angry over the video — but then looted of computers and musical instruments by people in the neighborhood.

Here in Cairo, ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis initially helped drum up outrage against the video and rally their supporters to protest outside the embassy. But by the time darkness fell and a handful of young men climbed the embassy wall, the Salafis were nowhere to be found, and they stayed away the rest of the week.

Egyptian officials said that some non-Salafis involved in the embassy attacks confessed to receiving payments, although no payer had been identified. But after the first afternoon, the next three days of protests were dominated by a relatively small number of teenagers and young men — including die-hard soccer fans known as ultras. They appeared to have been motivated mainly by the opportunity to attack the police, whom they revile.

Some commentators said they regretted that the violence here and around the region had overshadowed the underlying argument against the offensive video. “Our performance came out like that of a failed lawyer in a no-lose case,” Wael Kandil, an editor of the newspaper Sharouq, wrote in a column on Sunday. “We served our opponents something that made them drop the main issue and take us to the margins — this is what we accomplished with our bad performance.”

Mohamed Sabry, 29, a sculptor and art teacher at a downtown cafe, said he saw a darker picture. “To see the Islamic world in this condition of underdevelopment,” he said, “this is a bigger insult to the prophet.”

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

Neocons Slither Back

September 15, 2012
By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT
WASHINGTON

PAUL RYAN has not sautéed in foreign policy in his years on Capitol Hill. The 42-year-old congressman is no Middle East savant; till now, his idea of a border dispute has more likely involved Wisconsin and Illinois.

Yet Ryan got up at the Values Voter Summit here on Friday and skewered the Obama administration as it struggled to manage the Middle East mess left by clumsily mixed American signals toward the Arab Spring and the disastrous legacy of war-obsessed Republicans.

Ryan bemoaned “the slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration.” American foreign policy, he said, “needs moral clarity and firmness of purpose.”

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

A moral, muscular foreign policy; a disdain for weakness and diplomacy; a duty to invade and bomb Israel’s neighbors; a divine right to pre-emption — it’s all ominously familiar.

You can draw a direct line from the hyperpower manifesto of the Project for the New American Century, which the neocons, abetted by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, used to prod an insecure and uninformed president into invading Iraq — a wildly misguided attempt to intimidate Arabs through the shock of overwhelming force. How’s that going for us?

After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world.

Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the Middle East — trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost — because of how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We’re still stumbling in the dark. We not only don’t know who our allies and enemies are, we don’t know who our allies’ and enemies’ allies and enemies are.

As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress.

“Off the record, Paris is burning,” Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. “On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

Before he played ventriloquist to Ryan, Senor did the same for Romney, ratcheting up the candidate’s irresponsible bellicosity on the Middle East. Senor was the key adviser on Romney’s disastrous trip to Israel in July, when Mittens infuriated the Palestinians by making a chuckleheaded claim about their culture.

Senor got out over his skis before Romney’s speech in Jerusalem, telling reporters that Mitt would say he respected Israel’s right to make a pre-emptive, unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

While the Muslim world burned on Friday, Mitt was in New York with Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan confessing that he wears “as little as possible” to bed. With no global vision or historical perspective — he didn’t even remember during his Tampa convention to mention our troops or the years of war his party reigned over — Romney is simply kowtowing to the right again.

Paul Wolfowitz, an Iraq war architect, weighed in on Fox News, slimily asserting that President Obama should not be allowed to “slither through” without a clear position on Libya.

Republicans are bananas on this one. They blame Obama for casting Hosni Mubarak overboard and contradict themselves by blaming him for not supporting the Arab Spring. One minute Romney parrots Bibi Netanyahu’s position on Iran, the next Obama’s.

Romney’s cynical braying about Obama appeasement in the midst of the attack on the American diplomatic post in Libya and the murder of the brave ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was shameful. Richard Williamson, a Romney adviser, had the gall to tell The Washington Post, “There’s a pretty compelling story that if you had a President Romney, you’d be in a different situation.”

He’s right — a scarier situation. If President Romney acceded to Netanyahu’s outrageous demand for clear red lines on Iran, this global confrontation would be a tiny foretaste of the conflagration to come.

Cheney, described by Romney as a “person of wisdom and judgment,” is lurking. On Monday, he churlishly tried to deny President Obama credit for putting Osama in the cross hairs, cattily referring to a report that Obama had not gone to all his intelligence briefings.

Well, yes. W. got briefings, like the one that warned him on Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” That didn’t work so well either, did it?

Bernanke on the brink

By Robert J. Samuelson, Published: September 16, 2012
The Washington Post

We are reaching — or may already have passed — the practical limits of “economic stimulus.” Last week, the Federal Reserve adopted an open-ended bond-buying program of $40 billion a month to goad the economy into faster growth. But even before the announcement, there was skepticism that it would do much to lower the unemployment rate, which has exceeded 8 percent for 43 months. The average response of 47 economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal was that a similar program might cut the jobless rate 0.1 percentage point over a year.

At a news conference, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke explained what the Fed hopes will happen. By buying mortgages, the Fed would push interest rates down. They’re already low (3.6 percent in August for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage) and would fall further. Lower rates would stimulate more homebuying and construction. Greater housing demand would raise home prices. Fewer homeowners would be “underwater” (homes worth less than mortgages). Banks would refinance more existing mortgages at lower rates because the collateral — the homes — would be worth more. Feeling wealthier, homeowners would spend more and cause businesses to hire more.

Good news would feed on itself. The brighter outlook would boost stock prices (the Dow jumped 206.5 points the day of the Fed’s announcement). This rebuilds Americans’ depleted wealth. Optimism, consumer spending and hiring would revive even more.

It could happen. Why, then, so much doubt?

One reason is history. The government has dispensed huge amounts of stimulus — in the form of lower interest rates, government spending and tax cuts — and the benefits have been overestimated. Based on experience, people have grown skeptical.

Let’s do the numbers.

Start with the Fed. Since late 2008, it’s held short-term interest rates (the Fed funds rate) between zero and 0.25 percent. Beginning in late 2008, the Fed purchased more than $2.75 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities to lower long-term interest rates. (By buying bonds, the Fed seeks to raise their price; when bond prices rise, their interest rates fall.) Interest rates have dropped, though it’s unclear how much reflects the Fed’s bond-buying and how much other factors (the weak economy, a flight to the “safety” of U.S. Treasuries).

Still, the recovery stumbled. There have been offsetting tendencies. Low interest rates mean less income for savers, which dampens consumer spending. Personal interest income has dropped about $400 billion a year, notes economist Timothy Taylor on his blog. Another reason: “Many of the problems facing the economy can’t be addressed with lower interest rates,” writes veteran economic journalist John M. Berry in The International Economy. Low rates don’t matter if tougher credit standards prevent potential homebuyers from qualifying for loans. Or banks curb lending to restore capital.

Next, consider government spending and tax cuts. President Obama’s first stimulus totaled about $833 billion, says the Congressional Budget Office. But the true stimulus also includes subsequent tax cuts and spending increases plus “automatic stabilizers.” These refer to the budget’s tendency to swing into deficit during a recession, because tax revenues fall and spending on unemployment benefits and other safety-net programs rise. Budget deficits broadly measure stimulus. From 2009 to 2012, they’re about $5.1 trillion.

What impresses is this: the massive stimulus programs and the meek recovery. How much worse things might have been without stimulus is an open question. Economists argue ferociously, and the numbers vary widely. For example, the CBO estimates that Obama’s initial stimulus has created between 200,000 and 1.2 million jobs in 2012. But whatever the benefits, massive stimulus clearly hasn’t triggered a monster recovery.

Explanations abound. One is that the stimulus programs were still too timid. If we’d done more, we’d be in better shape. Another theory is that the trauma of the financial crisis and recession made households and businesses deeply cautious; they postponed spending, paid down debt and hoarded cash. Magnifying their anxieties were persisting threats: Europe’s financial turmoil; the stubborn housing bust; the uncertainty of public policy (Obamacare’s impact, the debt ceiling fight, and now the “fiscal cliff”).

To these might be added a perverse possibility: the stimulus programs themselves. Intended to inspire optimism by demonstrating government’s commitment to recovery, they could do the opposite. If consumers and companies interpret them as signaling that the economy is in worse shape than they thought, they might retrench even more. Some stimulus benefits would be offset.

There is a desperate air to Bernanke’s latest move. At best, it will reinforce a long-awaited housing revival. At worst, it will founder on obvious problems. How much lower can the Fed drive long-term interest rates? How much money can the Fed shovel into the economy without rekindling inflationary expectations and behavior? The Fed is on the brink of moving beyond what it understands and can control.

The B61 bomb: A case study in costs and needs

By Dana Priest, Published: September 16, 2012

The Washington Post  

ALBUQUERQUE — On the outskirts of New Mexico’s largest city, a team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories is engaged in a long-running treasure hunt to make sure the oldest weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal, the B61 bomb, remains safe for deployment.
They cannibalize spare B61s for parts, such as the vacuum tubes needed to keep the radars working on active bombs. If they don’t have spares, they track down outdated machines to manufacture the components themselves, as they did when they bought a machine to produce integrated circuits.
But after the manufacturer of the circuits went bankrupt and its machines were no longer available, the Sandia engineers had to become even more innovative.
“We bought three or four on eBay,” Gilbert Herrera, who manages Sandia’s microsystems research and facilities, said as he stood on the work floor recently. “For $100,000 apiece.”
The B61 was once heralded as a cornerstone of the country’s air-delivered nuclear force. Developed as a major deterrent against Soviet aggression in Europe, it is a slender gray cylinder that weighs 700 pounds and is 11 feet long and 13 inches in diameter. It can be delivered by a variety of aircraft, including NATO planes, anywhere in the world.



Now, nearly five decades after the first version rolled out of Los Alamos National Laboratory 100 miles north of here, age threatens to make the workhorse of the arsenal unreliable. So the B61 is poised to undergo a major renovation to extend its life span, a project that could cost as much as $10 billion, according to the Pentagon, or about $25 million for each of the 400 or so left in the arsenal.
The current estimate is more than double some early projections, so high that the Federation of American Scientists, a respected Washington disarmament think tank, dubbed it the “gold-plated nuclear bomb project.”



The Obama administration and Congress have pushed the program forward despite the enormous cost of refurbishing such complex weapons and over the strenuous objections of some nuclear strategists, who say the threat the B61 was designed to counter disappeared with the Cold War. Advocates, including the Obama administration, argue that the bomb is still essential to U.S. national security. In their view, the B61s deployed in Europe are the most concrete example of shared responsibility among the NATO countries, providing the indispensable psychological glue that binds the often-fractious alliance.
The B61s represent less than 10 percent of the 5,113 bombs and missiles that make up the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the coming decade, updating vast elements of the nation’s nuclear weapons complex — from weapons to delivery systems to the labs and plants that make and test them — is expected to cost at least $352 billion, according to the Stimson Center, another nonpartisan Washington think tank.
Eighty percent of the stockpile’s bombs and missiles are scheduled for major renovations similar to those for the B61. The National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the complex, predicts that the work will take 25 years of intense effort by the country’s leading physicists, material scientists, engineers and computer programmers. The NNSA has not put a cost on the total weapons overhaul, but it is certain to top $20 billion, according to preliminary government figures.
The B61 provides a case study in the expense and innovations driving the ambitious effort to maintain the nation’s nuclear defenses at a time of fiscal constraints and a shift away from reliance on nuclear deterrence.
The most versatile in the stockpile
Sandia National Laboratories is the engineering center of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, a sprawling collection of labs and warehouses at Kirtland Air Force Base on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Sandia’s primary mission is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear arsenal.
Inside one of those warehouses, on a gray-painted floor, sits a full-scale replica of the B61. The model is where young engineers and nuclear maintenance technicians learn to care for the aging weapon. A preflight control panel displays the commands that technicians are trained to carry out: “Delivery/Option/Delay” and “Strike Enable” to detonate the fearsome bomb.
The device looks simple, but its appearance is deceptive. Inside are 6,500 parts, making the bomb one of the most complex weapons in the arsenal. The firing mechanism alone has 400 components.
Built to withstand supersonic speeds, the B61 is the most versatile weapon in the stockpile. It can be carried long distances by a wide number of aircraft, from a B-2 stealth bomber flying from a base in Missouri to North Korea or China to an F-16 or Tornado jet fighter flying to Russia from a NATO base in Europe.
The versatility extends to the explosive power. Different variations produce different yields, the “dial-a-yield,” or DAY. Depending on the warhead, the president could choose an explosion slightly less powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, or he could dial it up to a thermonuclear blast 30 times as strong.
The B61 can be dropped free-fall or with a parachute, detonated in the air or on the ground. Its Kevlar parachute, wrapped so tightly it is as hard as an oak tree’s trunk, can slow the bomb’s descent speed from 1,000 mph to 35 mph.
Five versions are still in service. The latest is the B61-11, activated in the mid-1990s as the only ground-penetrating nuclear weapon, known as the “bunker buster.” It is designed to reach hardened bunkers buried far underground and to detonate its nuclear payload on a time delay.
As the most modern version, the bunker buster will escape renovation. The other four models will be collapsed into a single version, an experiment never tried before, according to nuclear weapons experts.
Tight deadline for reinvention
Modernizing a nuclear weapon is not like upgrading any other machine. In the automobile industry, for example, cars are improved each year to reflect the latest technological advances and design changes. By contrast, few of the B61’s major components have been rebuilt to 21st-century, digital-age standards.
Most of the new components will not be replacements. They will be completely new, state-of-the-art versions, designed and built with equipment that did not even exist when the first iterations were turned out in the mid-1960s. “The entire arsenal was built with less computational power than what’s inside an iPhone,” one weapons manager said.
Arrays of supercomputers, advanced electronics and astonishingly detailed simulations will be used to renew the B61. The bombs will get new batteries, new neutron generators to ignite the thermonuclear explosion and new radar systems to signal when the bomb should detonate. New tail kits and special electronics will transform the B61 into the first precision-guided nuclear bomb, which means the designers can get rid of the parachute.
The first renovation must be completed within five years — a blink of an eye in the world of nuclear design and engineering — and all of them have to be done by 2022. If the work veers off schedule — something the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon say they fear, given the NNSA’s record of delays and cost overruns — the life expectancy of the old bombs will expire and they will no longer be regarded as reliable.
Even if the work meets the deadline, the B61 faces an uncertain future outside the United States. Some NATO countries see nuclear weapons as the last remnant of the Cold War and face increasing calls from anti-nuclear and environmental groups to get them off their soil.
In Germany, popular support is growing for removing the B61s stationed at a German air force base near the village of Buchel in the western part of the country. Short of such a drastic step, the German government has not committed to paying for the expensive upgrades required to carry nuclear weapons when it replaces its aging fleet of Tornado aircraft with the new Eurofighter.
The plans of NATO allies are not the only threat to the B61. Some members of Congress have questioned the soaring cost of the redesign and the old bomb’s place in the modern arsenal.
Computer-simulated explosions
The B61 traces its lineage to the first nuclear test, which occurred on the morning of July 16, 1945, in the desert near Alamogordo, N.M. The detonation of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity Site took place less than three weeks before the bomb called Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, killing 70,000 people instantly and at least the same number from radiation exposure and injuries over the next five years.
In the years that followed, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests as it perfected and expanded its nuclear arsenal during the arms race with the Soviet Union. Hundreds of tests also were conducted by other nuclear powers, including the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China. President George H.W. Bush called a halt to U.S. nuclear tests in 1992. His decision was reaffirmed in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The Senate rejected the treaty in 1999 and has not voted on it again, but the ban has remained in place. Russia, Britain and France are among the 36 countries that have ratified the treaty.
Without the ability to test, the United States still must guarantee that its arsenal is reliable and safe. So nuclear physicists and computer engineers have turned to mimicking nuclear explosions through some of the world’s most sophisticated computer simulations.
The virtual tests occur at the Los Alamos laboratory. From a glass-enclosed viewing room, a visitor can see supercomputers with 32,000 processors lined up in a vast, sterile room. Together, the machines can run 1.35 petaflops of data per second — a single petaflop is the equivalent of a million billion calculations. Lab officials said it takes programmers six months just to write the code to create a simulation of that magnitude. And the supercomputers and processors need an additional three weeks of churning 24 hours a day every day to process the code, even at petaflop speed.
The best view of this miracle of engineering and science is from inside what programmers call the “cave,” an array of high-resolution monitors in X Division, the weapons-design section at Los Alamos. The results are mind-boggling in their detail and precision, a true-to-life simulation that allows scientists to test the properties of materials and components used in a thermonuclear weapon without actually detonating a device.
Wearing three-dimensional glasses and standing on the cave floor, the rare outsider can watch animations that don’t just look like a missile hitting a wall and crumpling, but depict the actual way a missile hitting a wall would crumple, down to the molecular level of the metals used in the missile’s nose cone, body and tail fins.
Another simulation, restricted to personnel with only the highest security clearances, re-creates the reaction inside the thermonuclear explosive package of a warhead. It shows the signal sent to the detonator and the detonation of high explosives that trigger the critical mass. The trigger ignites the primary radioactive plutonium component, which in turn sets off the secondary uranium device, which in turn dramatically increases the power of the blast.
The advances in computer simulations, combined with the data from actual past tests, have allowed scientists to understand more about the physical attributes of nuclear weapons than the scientists who invented them. Now, they say, this knowledge will allow them to add 20 years to the quiet life of the B61. But not more.
Staggering sums
All of this modernization and invention requires staggering sums, time and testing. Twenty-eight teams of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos and Sandia determined what would be required in terms of new technology to update the B61 — and how much it would cost.
In the fall of 2011, a little-known interagency group called the Nuclear Weapons Council gathered in Washington to hear the results of the project. The council coordinates work by the NNSA and Pentagon on nuclear weapons and must approve any technical changes. Its members include senior officials from the Defense Department and the Energy Department and the head of the NNSA.
When the group gathered a year ago and first heard the new price tag for the B61, there was stunned silence even in a roomful of people accustomed to dealing with billions of dollars. “It was the trigger that sucked all the air out of the room,” one participant said.
The cost was $7 billion for an estimated 400 bombs. The explanation was that it had climbed so high in part because designers had added more safety features to an already nearly foolproof bomb, namely an optical scanner that required a retina scan from authorized personnel. Eventually the scanner and some other new equipment were dropped to save money, cutting the cost to $6 billion.
But recently, an independent Pentagon assessment concluded the cost would actually be much higher — at least $8 billion and possibly as high as $10 billion, according to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development, which has funding jurisdiction over the NNSA. Officials at the agency say it is too early in the process to have an accurate budget figure for the program.
The soaring cost has rippled through other modernization programs. To try to keep the entire stockpile overhaul within budget, the administration delayed refurbishing two other aging warheads used on Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles by three years and pushed back construction of a new nuclear-armed submarine by two years.
In the complex matrix of repairs and deployments, the two-year delay in submarine modernization means that at some point in the near future, the nuclear-armed sub fleet patrolling the oceans will be reduced by two vessels for a period of time.
Each delay adds to the cost of maintaining the nuclear status quo. But the work goes on. An Air Force team with a $340 million budget is trying to figure out how to mount the B61 onto its new F-35 fighter jet, which itself is expected to be the most expensive weapon in U.S. history. And once the B61 overhaul is completed, the nation’s vast nuclear weapons complex will turn its attention to the next major weapons renovations: the W78 and W88, a pair of thermonuclear warheads whose redo is already predicted to cost at least $5 billion more.

Puzzled by a ‘red line’ demand

By David Ignatius, Published: September 14, 2012

The Washington Post 

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his almost daily demands that the United States announce its “red line” for going to war with Iran, the question puzzling the White House is what he wants beyond what President Obama has already stated.
Obama believes he has drawn the U.S. red line as clearly as a superpower ever should, given that some ambiguity is useful in deterring an adversary. For the record, Obama said in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic in March that it was “a profound national security interest of the United States to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.” U.S. intelligence would provide “a pretty long lead time in which we will know that they are making that attempt.”
Obama was even more explicit in a speech a few days later to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”
Beyond this rhetorical pledge, Obama has directed the U.S. military to prepare detailed plans for attacking Iran if it should cross the line he has set. The Israelis know what signals the United States will look for in determining if Iran has begun weaponization, and what weapons the United States will use in its preventive attack.
So what does Netanyahu seek from Obama that he hasn’t yet gotten? Apparently, it’s some sort of ultimatum or deadline for Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment, which could someday provide fuel for a bomb.
In the latest eruption, Netanyahu said Tuesday that leaders who won’t make such ultimatums “don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”
The White House might reasonably respond by asking: What are Israel’s “red lines”? If it doesn’t accept the president’s public commitment to stop Iran, then where would it draw the line? It has been hard to get a clear answer.
Israel says that Iran shouldn’t have nuclear enrichment capability, but unfortunately that line was crossed long ago. Now, apparently, Netanyahu wants to prevent the Iranians from installing enough centrifuges in their fortified mountain base near Qom that they would enter a “zone of immunity,” in which they could produce enough highly enriched fuel for a bomb. But how many centrifuges are we talking about? And if the United States can bomb Qom and destroy the centrifuges, why does this issue matter so much?
Watching Netanyahu’s public, Hamlet-like anguishing over the past year about “to bomb or not to bomb,” one suspects the real issue for him isn’t red lines so much as trust that they will be enforced. Despite Obama’s record of lethal covert action against al-Qaeda, the president clearly hasn’t convinced Bibi.
Netanyahu should understand that no country can allow another to impose the conditions under which it will go to war. The Israeli leader wants a tripwire that would trigger military action. But presidents don’t turn over that power of war and peace, even to their best friends. Indeed, it’s precisely because Obama means what he says about going to war that he wants maximum flexibility in how and when he takes action.
The Israeli leader also ought to realize by now that Obama doesn’t like to be jammed. That’s the most interesting revelation of Bob Woodward’s new book, “The Price of Politics.” The book describes how Obama was prepared to risk a financial default last year in preference to giving congressional Republicans a chance to create another debt-ceiling crisis during the 2012 election year. “He could not give the Republicans that kind of leverage. . . . It was blackmail,” explains Woodward.
In the White House view, Netanyahu is trying to do the same thing that House Speaker John Boehner attempted, and this isn’t likely to work. And officials are surely peeved that Netanyahu is making such comments (and pushing for a personal meeting) in the middle of the U.S. election campaign.
The danger of these months of semi-public Israeli debate about going to war is that, rather than making Tehran tremble, they may lead Iranian leaders to doubt Israeli resolve. Netanyahu is creating a situation where he almost has to attack, to save face. Obama should help the Israeli leader to climb down from his unwise rhetoric.
Yes, the United States has already drawn a red line. But it’s worth restating, publicly, perhaps in a very visible forum such as the U.N. General Assembly this month. The United States needs to take control of the deadly confrontation with Iran, rather than being cajoled and buffeted by its smaller, weaker ally. Obama needs to own the policy of prevention he has declared.
davidignatius@washpost.com