SMALL GOV’T ADVOCATES, ARMS CONTROLLERS TEAM UP AGAINST CMRR-NF

Groups from the traditional political right and left banded together Friday to cosign a letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee criticizing the committee’s push to fund continued work on the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility at Los Alamos. They ranged from the small-government advocate Taxpayers Protection Alliance to the Quaker-based Friends Committee on National Legislation, arguing that the administration and the nuclear establishment have already said publicly the spending is not needed. “It is a waste of taxpayer money and should be canceled,” said the letter, made public by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). The letter cites Los Alamos National Laboratory’s 60-day study of alternative approaches to meeting US plutonium needs, which has not been made public but which the groups allege “determined that the Laboratory can maintain its plutonium pit manufacturing and sustainment needs without CMRR-NF.”