Any COLA news?

 Any clue as to the amount of the upcoming LLNS retiree COLA due July1?

LLNS death stats

 I'm reading here that at least 2 LLNS employee deaths (that we know of) may have been prevented with appropriate management employee engagement. My question is, how do these loss of life tragedy stats differ from other USA employers if they do at all? Are LLNS employment related death stats consistent with non-government funded employers?

Russia’s Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons

 From the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies...

"Russia’s Nonstrategic Nuclear Weapons and Its Views of Limited Nuclear War
Dr Sidharth Kaushal and Sam Cranny-Evans
21 June 2022

Russia’s nonstrategic nuclear weapons are designed to achieve deterrence and military success against a technologically superior opponent. They are unlikely to be deployed in Ukraine.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s nonstrategic nuclear arsenal has come to play an increasingly important role in its defensive plans. The definition of nonstrategic nuclear weapons in Russian parlance covers weapons with a range of less than 5,500 km. Tactical nuclear weapons (TNW) are a sub-category of nonstrategic nuclear weapons that are limited in range, typically to 500 km.

Most such weapons are in the kiloton (kt) range. For example, the nuclear capable SSC-8 carries a 10kt warhead. Notably, some Russian missiles which fall into the category of strategic weapons, such as the Layner submarine-launched ballistic missile, are also capable of carrying low-yield warheads suggesting substrategic missions. Though it has been suggested that unlike the Soviet Union, Russia is willing to resort to nuclear first use and has lower nuclear thresholds, this is not quite right. The Soviets incorporated the early use of battlefield nuclear weapons into their planning for a war in Europe. Rather, Russian thinking differs from its Soviet predecessor in that it considers the possibility of limited nuclear use as part of efforts to inflict ‘unacceptable damage’ upon an opponent within the context of a coercive strategy. This is dissimilar to the Soviets who, though they held out the possibility of avoiding strategic exchanges between the Soviet Union and the US, assumed that even tactical nuclear use in

Europe would assume catastrophic proportions. For Russia, nonstrategic nuclear weapons are a controllable part of a framework for achieving both battlefield results and war termination."

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russias-nonstrategic-nuclear-weapons-and-its-views-limited-nuclear-war

Who is Deterring Whom?

 Who is Deterring Whom? The Place of Nuclear Weapons in Modern War

https://warontherocks.com/2022/06/who-is-deterring-whom-the-place-of-nuclear-weapons-in-modern-war/

"In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, old questions about nuclear deterrence have been revisited by a broad swath of academics, scholars, and pundits who have spent the past three decades acclimated to a climate of dramatically reduced nuclear risk. For those of us working in what has been a niche subfield, the attention has been both validating and, at times, surprising.

What is not often said is that nuclear deterrence is working and, as a result, both the United States and Russia face constraints in how they approach conflict that involves the other. Nuclear deterrence has limited the escalation of the conflict in profound ways, despite brutal fighting, heavy casualties, and the supply of substantial amounts of Western weaponry to Ukraine. This is welcome news, but there is a caution: There is no guarantee that it will continue to do so, nor can there be. The management of escalation means that the United States and NATO will have to accept that they too face limits in how to approach the conflict. It would be unwise to hand-wave away Russian nuclear threats, or to dismiss as so many have the Russian threat to use nuclear weapons, based on a warped understanding of deterrence theory."

LANL challenges

 LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY

Contractor Improving in Safety and Other Areas but Still Faces Challenges

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-22-105412.pdf

Give it to Ukraine?

 Why are we increasing the NNSA budget by billions? We could give that money to Ukraine to fight Russia.

Retention bonus

With LLNS desperate for employees they have given out retention bonuses to key employees working on select projects. The rumor is only 1/2 of the employees received this bonus. With moral so low how do they think the other half of the employees will take it?

I am guessing it will turn out like when some of the trades were allowed to work on Davis-Bacon work and others (former employees now) and others were not. Or like when some employees were working “unlimited “ overtime and others were not allowed to work any. I think two guys who worked together for 30 years got into a fist fight over that one.