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What to Do About America's Nuclear Weapons Stockpile

What to Do About America's Nuclear Weapons Stockpile (aka Sandia's Pat Sena Carries a Shotgun)

http://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/the-manhattan-project/articles/2015/09/28/what-to-do-about-americas-nuclear-weapons-stockpile?int=a14709
U.S. News & World Report, Alan Neuhauser

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. – Pat Sena has a routine: He prays with his wife, he reads, he drives his '97 Chevy pickup through Albuquerque's low-slung outskirts to work. Then, at the office until he heads home, he and his team make sure the U.S. can still – at any moment – blow up the world.

“The way I think of it, I think of myself at my home, my family in my home. It's a rough neighborhood, there are gang members driving by and drive-by shooters, and I'm sitting out on the porch with a big shotgun, saying, 'Don't attack my family because you'll have to deal with me,’” he says.

Sena is deputy chief engineer of the nuclear Stockpile Systems Center at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, part of a gargantuan desert air base dotted with scrub brush, fuel tanks, tall unmarked buildings and a wooden test track that could have been a prototype for the Coney Island Cyclone.

In the seven decades since Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists blasted the New Mexico desert with the world’s first atomic explosion the morning of July 16, 1945, three labs have maintained, studied and – to the extent they can – tested the nation’s nuclear stockpile: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Los Alamos outside Santa Fe, and Sandia.

“We do this because we believe in it,” says Michael Bernardin, acting associate director for weapons physics at Los Alamos.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I'm surprised Sandia allowed Sena to talk to the Press. He came across like a "home boy" with a bandana around his head, wearing sagging pants, in a low rider 1997 truck packing , a sawed-off shotgun under his seat. Surprising, I'm wondering if the "suits" at Sandia will reprimand and demote him for portraying himself like this?
Anonymous said…
Use it in UG tests. Verify life cycle predictions. Modernize it.
Anonymous said…
Use it in UG tests. Verify life cycle predictions. Modernize it.
Anonymous said…
Keep it ready. Muslim zealots are very dangerous and very active. In the next 20 years we may decide to retaliate in kind for devastating harm that some nuclear Muslim state allows to happen to us pr one of our close allies.
Anonymous said…
In the next 20 years we may decide to retaliate in kind for devastating harm that some nuclear Muslim state allows to happen to us pr one of our close allies.

October 2, 2015 at 11:45 PM

If you think it will take 20 years for that to happen, you're a Pollyanna. When ISIS gets enough money from selling Middle East antiquities, they will buy nukes from Pakistan or NK. And Iran doesn't need centrifuges - the sanctions relief will provide them with all the money they need to do the same thing.
Anonymous said…
" And Iran doesn't need centrifuges - the sanctions relief will provide them with all the money they need to do the same thing."

Thank you Obama and Kerry ! Your legacies will surely suck !
Anonymous said…
In an area of drive by shootings, no one with a sane mind is going to sit in the open on their porch, with a loaded shotgun. If he has a family inside, then it becomes even more insane.

Wrong weapon for that style of fighting, wrong cover, and wrong attitute from a government worker.

conclusion: Made up nonsense.


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