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Published on Saturday, 31 December 2005 10:52
The final agreement on the US nuclear
weapons budget shows that an experiment to test the
impact of the proposed bunker-buster bomb will be
carried ou t, despite Congress withdrawing overall
funding for the project. The test will involve slamming
a mock bomb into a wall. It was to have been carried
out at the Sandia Nuclear Weapons Laboratory, but has
been moved to a Defence Department
facility.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman
said:
\"There will be money for a conventional
test, and we had a—and I’ve been worried that they were
going to try to do the nuclear—the nonnuclear test at
Sandia, and I got a problem with that because—and I
wonÂ’t go into why, but thereÂ’s, in my opinion, a
violation of the law or the understanding or the
protocols on building a wall that got built out there
and so I donÂ’t think we should use that wall at this
time for this stuff and it sends the wrong messages. And
we have a commitment from the secretary of energy that
he will not allow that test at Sandia. And I donÂ’t care
where else they do it, as long as they do it at a DOD
site because I think that if they do it at a DOD site,
that sends the right messages that itÂ’s not a nuclear
test and I think if they do it at a national lab, it
sends the wrong problems.\"