Those were the recent words of the nation's top nuclear weapons
executive, Linton Brooks. Here in New Mexico - the center of the
country's nuclear weapons program - a new nuclear age appears to be on
the horizon. Bush recently asked Congress for $27 million to help
jumpstart the country's first new nuclear weapons program in two
decades. The money will be used to fund a competition between the Los
Alamos and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories to find and design a new
generation of nuclear bombs to replace the country's entire nuclear
arsenal.

Meanwhile in another major development in the country's quest
for new nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Britain conducted a joint
underground nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site last week.
Anti-nuclear activists including the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
in Japan denounced the test, the first in nearly two years. In
Hiroshima, the peace watchtower at the Peace Memorial Museum -- which
displays the number of days since the last nuclear test -- was reset to
zero.