With this morning's story on the Obama administration's intent to kill the Reliable Replacement Warhead for good, the Obama administration's direction for the nuclear weapons laboratories is starting to emerge from the fog:

The Obama administration wants to kill major nuclear weapons design and manufacturing programs left by its Republican predecessors and ratchet down the amount of non-weapons science done at Los Alamos and other nuclear weapons labs, according to a document obtained by the Journal. 

The headline is RRW, but the real important nuance is down in the weeds - the proposal to kill the upgrade for LANSCE, the neutron science center. Lab backers have been pushing this project hard, arguing that it was central to maintaining Los Alamos National Laboratory's science base. In dollar terms, it is a relatively small amount, but the symbolism is huge.

Second, look at the recommendation to cut in Lab-Directed Research and Development. Currently, the labs are allowed to set aside 8 percent of all the money given them for lab-initiated research. This is seed corn, money the labs use to fund projects of their own choosing, things they think could contribute to their various mission areas in the long run, but for which there is currently no direct customer support. The proposal, as I understand it, would roll that back to 4 percent (lots of wiggle room here, though, in terms of the details of implementation).

Add this to the study we wrote about last week about the possibility of shifting the labs and the rest of the National Nuclear Security Administration nuclear weapons program to the Pentagon and you can see the shape of the fundamental debate to come.