The Defense Department will strongly support Administration requests for nuclear weapons initiatives like the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP), reports Ian Hoffman in the Oakland Tribune (via John Fleck):
[A]s the administration revives [new nuclear-weapons initiatives] Monday in the president’s 2006 budget request, civilian leaders at the Pentagon are expected to come out swinging, especially for a nuclear “bunker buster” under design at two California weapons labs and a factory to make plutonium bomb cores.
One weapons official told Hoffman that NNSA chief Linton Brooks “felt a little burned last year in Congress and didn’t want to get burned again.”
As I noted yesterday, the appointment of Commander, STRATCOM as the lead combatant commander for WMD—with an explicit mandate to advocate for new WMD defeat capabilities—is one early sign of that support.
So, will General Cartwright do the RNEP shuffle?