We won't get the February river runoff forecasts until Friday, but the preliminary snowpack numbers from the Natural Resources Conservation Service look good:

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A truly puzzling missive appeared last week from the Defense Nuclear Safety Board outlining Sandia Labs' discovery of an "emergent issue" (don't you just love the careful wording?) with the W76 nuclear warhead, which workers at the Pantex plant in Texas are busily rebuilding. The problem, apparently, is that Sandia was laggardly in letting the Pantex folks know about that issue, and said laggardliness "resulted in operations being performed by the Pantex contractor without a complete understanding of the hazards involved."

What that "emergent issue" might be is apparently one of those "I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot you" sorts of secrets, but I'm reminded of the climax of Goldfinger, as Sean Connery's James Bond works against a ticking clock to disable The Bomb.

It's of course worth remembering that the atomic scientist saves the day in Goldfinger, showing up just in time to switch off the device before Bond rips out the wrong wire. And the outcome seems similarly happy at Pantex, where as near as we can tell the information is now flowing smoothly and nothing's blown up unexpectedly in the last year.

Sandia declined comment. NNSA issued the following statement:

"The referenced event did not introduce a nuclear safety risk at the Pantex Plant. The DNFSB's letter is focused on the length of time between discovery of a component issue and the notification of the issue to Pantex so information, if appropriate, could be factored into the authorization basis and operations. Many of the issues of interest to the DNFSB occurred between January 2009 and June 2009.

"We intentionally design controls so that we do not depend on the safety performance of individual components to assure the safety of operations at Pantex. This is the situation in that case. However, as part of our continuous improvement culture, we are using this opportunity to review the robustness of the interaction between the Laboratories and Pantex to assure that if there was, in the future, a situation where one of the important safety controls was compromised that positive notification and action would assure prompt safety actions will be coordinated."

(Image of Bond puzzling over The Bomb via Universal Exports)

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Rep. Martin Heinrich successfully moved today (Wed. 2/3/10) to add Sandia Labs to a proposed program to enhance the nation's defenses against computer attacks. An amendment approved on the floor of the House Wednesday afternoon would add the national laboratoaries as stakeholders in the Cybersecurity Strategic Research and Development Plan that would be developed under the act, according to Heinrich's staff.

Sandia is well known for its computer security "red teams", which test computer security systems by adopting the techniques of hostile attackers.

Full action on the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act is expected tomorrow (Thurs. 2/4/10).

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The well-informed Jeffrey Lewis offers a useful hypothesis regarding the political maneuvering behind the massive increase the Obama administration has requested for the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Lewis lays out a plausible explanation for the administration's grand strategy to win support for an arms control treaty with the Russians and/or a comprehensive test ban treaty:

If the strategy is to avoid, to the greatest extent possible, politicizing either treaty, starving the nuclear weapons complex probably won't create leverage with the Senate Minority Leader and might, in fact, backfire. If you give Republicans a choice between a well-funded nuclear weapons complex and a talking point to conflate the Prague agenda with unilateral disarmament -- which is a favorite claim by Senator -- most will understandably choose the latter. "Unilateral disarmament" is the "death panel" of the nuclear weapons debate. The goal, then, is to take away Kyl's talking points, rather than to horse-trade with Senators. (That comes later.)

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Some news from around the web:

• Phil Parker reports on efforts to preserve old Manhattan Project sites in and around Los Alamos.
• More pressure on Los Alamos by the folks in charge of Santa Fe's water project to try to ensure no lab contamination makes it to the city's water intake.
• The Knight Science Journalism Tracker reminds, for the umpteenth time, that the NIF laser fusion machine at Livermore was built and paid for by the nuclear weapons program, not as an energy research project.
• It's Elmo's birthday! (Elmo's 3-1/2. "Yes, three and a half. He's always three and a half!")

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