FILM VERY, VERY NOIR: Last week I watched Dr. Strangelove again. When that movie first came out, and was shown at the theatre on the Air Force SAC base where my father was stationed, there was cheering from the audience when Slim Pickens rode the dropping bomb like a bucking bronco. The nuclear weapons were much bigger then. Forty years later, engineers seeking endless improvements in size have literally made suitcase bombs possible. The advantage is more precise targeting, which can reduce the number of civilian casualties.

The Bush misadministration, never bothered about what they dismiss as "collateral damage", has begun steps to a new bomb policy. According to a New York Times story:

... American scientists have begun designing a new generation of nuclear arms meant to be sturdier and more reliable and to have longer lives.... ... critics say it could needlessly resuscitate the complex of factories and laboratories that make nuclear weapons and could possibly ignite a new arms race. ...

Originally, the roughly 10,000 warheads in the American arsenal had an expected lifetime of about 15 years, officials say. The average age is now about 20 years, and some are much older. Experts say a costly federal program to assess and maintain their health cannot ultimately confirm their reliability because a global test ban forbids underground test detonations.

This is the foot in the door. Think of it as a new nostalgic movie called Battlefield of Dreams, with the recurring motif of "If you build it, they will test." The new Edward Tellers of the world are desperate to prove their geeky manhoods with plutonium pyrotechnics, and think this will be the loophole they can slither through to bring back the Golden Age where their predecessors actually got to explode new toys. The testosterone intoxicated lab rats and their many-starred promoters still wish they had one of those Doomsday Machines.

(Thanks for the pointer to the Progressive Blogger Union. --PBU7.)