Fox has some alarmist news:

Workers Use Tape to Secure Aging Nuke Bomb

WASHINGTON — Workers dismantling an aging nuclear weapon (search) secured broken pieces of high explosive by taping them together, federal investigators found. An explosion could have occurred, they said.

....

About 250,000 people live within 50 miles of the Pantex plant, where the motto on its Web site is "Maintaining the safety, security and reliability of America's nuclear weapons stockpile."

I have written explosive safety documentation for Pantex, so this is kind of interesting to me. But this article has a lot of over the top stuff that isn't correct in that story. And the stuff that is correct is very alarmist. Like the bit about 250,000 living within 50 miles of the plant. It isn't like these guys are standing in the middle of the Wal-Mart parking lot handling warheads. They are in underground chambers designed to contain a blast if anything occurs. I wouldn't hesitate in an emergency situation to use tape to hold cracked explosives on a nuke - seems like a good idea to me. Plus, duct tape is good for everything! But this was not an emergency situation, it was in the course of normal work at a DoE facility. So that means procedures, and review, and more review, and then the safety guys review it some more. Read further into the article and the Defense Facilities Nuclear Safety Board wasn't concerned so much that tape was used, but that they hadn't followed all of the procedural steps for making the decision to do that. They are very involved, because I spent about a month working on one document on explosive handling safety there, and I never found out the final disposition of that document.

An email from Paula Zahn's producer to an organization called "Military Families Speak Out":

From: Holland, Emily
To: 'mfso@mfso.org'
Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 1:41 PM
Subject: EMILY HOLLAND, CNN PAULA ZAHN NOW>MFSO

Emily Holland, producer for CNN's Paula Zahn Now in New York. I am writing to request your urgent help for a story we are developing on "Untrained Soldiers in Iraq."

Envision an in-depth look at American soldiers overseas -- fighting for our country but without the necessary expertise and/or equipment to do so. The danger, the reasons why, the personal stories.

To that end, anyone who has direct experience - family member, friend, etc. - who can speak about lack of proper training/equipment, please get in touch with me as soon as possible. Cellphone - not email - is the best.

As a final note, we are on deadline! So any help you can give us is certainly appreciated.

Many thanks in advance,

Emily Holland
CNN New York
(917) 716-9001

Watching the Democratic debate tonight, I was kind of stunned by one question and answer - Peter Jennings asked Al Sharpton who he would name as head of the Federal Reserve Board, in charge of monetary policy. Sharpton first went down the road of taking the IMF to task, and Jennings politiely prompted that he had asked about the Federal Reserve. Sharpton then laid out the same boilerplate he had on the IMF for the Federal Reserve.

Granted, it was probably the most specific question I heard asked, but it was clear that this is not he the sort of thing that Al Sharpton and his candidacy are about. Governance - the actual conduct of doing the job as President - are just not important to him. His whole candidacy is just a protest. Despite my previous post that he represented real honesty for Democrats, he shouldn't be anywhere near the stage with the other candidates.

Of course, John Edwards didn't show himself to be all that concerned with the details, either, when asked about the Defense of Marriage Act. In what has been a big issue with the President's mention in the SOTU and clearly will be important among Democrat voters, it seems he would have some knowledge of it.

And Kucinich wants to fund all his moonbat ideas with a 50% decrease in the Defense Budget? (or did he say 15%?) Regardless, that's not going to help counter the whole "weak on defense" argument. But then again, he is polling maybe just a little above Sharpton, and really not that far behind Lieberman, who has a strong pro-defense, pro-war on terror message.

Dean's flameout flamed him out. That the other candidates didn't bother addressing him much shows they know the dynamics.

And Clark - well, that's all I've got to say about that.

Oddly enough, it appears that the Kerry momentum is a real thing, and is actually the Democrat electorate coalescing around the credible candidate. But those who think that Rove was most afraid of Kerry are probably wrong. Massachusetts is the bluest of the blue states (or in this map, reddest of the red states - more appropriate in my book). No other state went Democrat in every county. Kerry was Lt. Governor to Michael Dukakis. And, as I noted earlier, he's Al Gore in New England drag - that doesn't sound like a winning combination to me.

I saw part of Kerry's self-congratulations speech. My take - the Democrats are going for Al Gore one more time. Long-winded, boring, condescending, always fighting! - and didn't that people vs. the powerful thing go out of style like 3 years ago? I guess not.

I used to think that Dean was faking anger. Not any more!

Gephardt gone and Kucinich still in? And my man Al Sharpton got ZERO percent. GEN Clark got .1%, and he wasn't even running.

Good thing he wasn't running - he might feel a little weird losing to a mere LT.