According to a story in this morning's Albuquerque Journal, Albuquerque isn't eligible for a share of the $765 million to be parceled out to 35 urban areas facing the greatest risk of terrorist attacks.

But apart from the blow to our communal self-esteem (Don't they know who we are?) and the potential loss of federal largesse, it seems that this might be good news.

Some of us can remember the good old Cold War days, when there was a nagging thought always in the back of our minds about that great stockpile of nuclear warheads buried in the Manzano Mountains that nobody would ever officially acknowledge, but surely must have been a priority target somewhere in the missile silos of the former Soviet Union. It didn't take much of a stretch to imagine this dusty little desert city melting with a fervent heat in the twinkling of an eye.

But then of course the Cold War ended, and while we may have breathed a sigh of relief, we began to worry about where all those defense dollars would be spent.

In the 1990s, when New Mexico's nuclear warhead kitty was coming out of the bag, semiofficial sources would confirm that, yes indeed, Albuquerque was home to one of the largest caches of nuclear weapons in the nation. It was reported that warheads used to be stored in a complex of bunkers in the Manzano foothills, then were moved to an underground complex southeast of the airport.

In 1995, the Journal's John Fleck reported that Kirtland Air Force Base had housed one of the nation's largest nuclear weapon storage complexes since the 1950s, but by 1995 the underground bunker was "emptier than it has been in years," down to a mere 120 bombs -- putting New Mexico at No. 13 in the nation.

Just two years later, the Journal was citing studies that put New Mexico at the top of a list of 15 states that store nuclear weapons, reporting some 2,850 warheads in storage.

And in 2000, the Journal was reporting that Kirtland was believed to have the largest number of nuclear weapons kept at a single site in the United States.

What gives here? Maybe those Homeland Security folks should take another look at Albuquerque. All of a sudden, we're not feeling quite so secure.

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