[Colorado Congressman] Doug Lamborn, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said the bill “takes decisive action against the divisive initiatives of the radical left” and praised its funding for missile defense and nuclear capabilities…
— from a news article by Lindsey Toomer on Colorado Newsline, June 14, 2024.
Well, looks like Americans might be a lot safer next year, if House Republicans have anything to say about it. To and including any American embryos who might be hanging out inside American military wombs. That is to say, no abortions allowed for military personnel, thank you. Presumably, that would include the distribution of abortion pills?
We will also be safe from unnecessary diversity, equity and inclusion, and from gender-affirming care. At least, in the military.
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the annual military spending bill — the National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA — $884 billion dollars aimed at keeping us safe. The Lamestream media that reported on this event didn’t seem too pleased with the “decisive action against the divisive initiatives of the radical left.”
At least the NDAA wasn’t divisive. Among House Republicans, I mean. But apparently the radical left didn’t like the bill. For a number of reasons.
And some of the scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, didn’t like the bill, regardless of the diversity and abortion stuff. The scientists are concerned about having to work overtime to build ‘plutonium pits’.
A plutonium pit is sort of like an peach pit, but different. To build a useful thermonuclear bomb — a hydrogen bomb — you need to include a small plutonium bomb inside, as a ‘pit’, to set off the hydrogen.
Such bombs can kill a fairly large number of people.
In 1967, the U.S. government estimated that an all-out thermonuclear exchange with the Russians would probably kill about 91 million Americans and 81 million Russians. (Which I really don’t understand, considering that, in 1967, we had more bombs than they had. Doesn’t seem fair.)
According to my non-political research, the U.S. stopped building ‘plutonium pits’ after the Cold War ended, and people nearly forgot how to make them. (It’s apparently an easy thing to forget?) But according to Robert Webster, Los Alamos’ deputy director for weapons, Los Alamos “became like monasteries in the Dark Ages that preserved the knowledge” of plutonium pit production. Thank goodness!
Anyway, the House Republicans want the U.S. to get back into the plutonium pit business — like, yesterday, if not sooner — so we can build more hydrogen bombs. We have only about 5,000 nuclear warheads, and Russia has about 5,500. (Again, doesn’t seem fair.). But the scientists at Los Alamos think they can maybe produce one ‘pit’ this year. One single, solitary pit. Maybe.
The NDAA passed by the House Republicans demands that they do better than that. They want at least 80 pits per year, by 2030.
But my own personal concern is about the abortion rules. The House version of the 2025 NDAA prohibits members of the military from getting abortions. Presumably, they mean female members. As we all know, if a woman is prohibited from getting an abortion, she is likely to have a baby.
Seems to me, the more babies we have in the U.S., the more people will be killed in a thermonuclear war. Are the Republicans thinking about that little problem?
The chance that the House version is going to get passed by the Democrat-led U.S. Senate is slim to none. And vice versa. While the House Republicans want female soldiers to have babies, the Senate wants to require women to register for the Selective Service — a.k.a. the Draft.
This is a bit awkward.
In a social media post, House member Chip Roy, R-Texas, reacted to the new Senate provision that would require women to register for the draft, declaring: “You can go straight to hell. Over my dead body.”
With enough plutonium pits, that could probably be arranged.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.