“We had tried desperately to prepare them ... but that required them to show up. And bring qualified people. But they didn’t. They didn’t ask for even an introductory briefing. Like ‘What do you do?’ ”
Roughly half of the D.O.E.’s annual budget is spent on maintaining and guarding our nuclear arsenal, for instance. Two billion of that goes to hunting down weapons-grade plutonium and uranium at loose in the world so that it doesn’t fall into the hands of terrorists. In just the past eight years the D.O.E.’s National Nuclear Security Administration has collected enough material to make 160 nuclear bombs. The department trains every international atomic-energy inspector; if nuclear power plants around the world are not producing weapons-grade material on the sly by reprocessing spent fuel rods and recovering plutonium, it’s because of these people. The D.O.E. also supplies radiation-detection equipment to enable other countries to detect bomb material making its way across national borders. To maintain the nuclear arsenal, it conducts endless, wildly expensive experiments on tiny amounts of nuclear material to try to understand what is actually happening to plutonium when it fissions, which, amazingly, no one really does. To study the process, it is funding what promises to be the next generation of supercomputers, which will in turn lead God knows where
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017...-michael-lewis
The guy in charge of hunting for this stuff under Obama waited to give his briefing to his successor, and for any orders.
Silence.
He packed his things and left, not knowing what to do.
After he left, Senators who know what the DOE actually does called with a huge amount of alarm that this job was not being done anymore and begged him to go back.
This the new Republican norm. "I don't know and don't care what our government does".
This is nuclear ing weapons. Republican ignorance and incompetence here can and will be, fatal.
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