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Wonderful times together for Carol Alonso and her fellow nuclear weapons designers seemed just about over last August when we spoke at her workplace, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It has never been large, this tribe that for half a century has wielded such power over America's imagination and military budget, this tribe with its own guarded mysteries, its own language, rituals, colored badges of belonging, and walled settlements named Sandia and Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. In the Cold War boom year of 1987 there were, in the federal nuclear weapons network, only a few thousand employees in weapons-related research. Only a few dozen of those were, like Carol Alonso, at the very heart of the work.

By 1994, personnel and budget numbers were headed down. Treaties obliged the United States to cut its 1993 stockpile of 16,750 warheads by nearly half within a decade. Gone was the heyday that saw up to four shots a month, more than 1,000 explosions since 1945. President Clinton's renewed moratorium meant the tribe hadn't been allowed a single underground test for nearly three years. Momentum, in fact, seemed tilted towards a permanent worldwide comprehensive test ban. Last summer, weaponeers told me morale was souring as they saw their work and way of life shrinking. "We're subcritical now," said one old-timer, dourly confiding his fear of the unimaginable: the Bomb Design Tribe's imminent extinction.

Today, with the new Republican Congress, such fears appear to have been wildly pessimistic. But to understand how deep the tribe's power runs, you have to go back to something that happened even before the election. On October 21, 1994, the tribe won a stunning victory in the struggle it never really abandoned, the self-preserving fight for more money, more technology, more thinkers, and more latitude to pursue what the tribe has always made its mission: preparing to create the next Bomb.

That victory came when Department of Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary gave the official go-ahead for a new superlaser project called the National Ignition Facility, to be built at Lawrence Livermore. As noted science reporter Keay Davidson details in an accompanying article, NIF is a $1.8 billion nuclear weapons designer's dream machine advertised as a peaceful energy program. And 