Beyond LANL or Livermore

This post may be redundant. I will fix it later.

One reason that Congress has given for withholding funding for LANL, Livermore, and Sandia next year is that there is no credible plan for why the nation should be spending money especially for spending billions of dollars to counter a threat that does not exist (e.g. Iran cannot make a nuclear weapon for at least 6 years and whatever they make is unlikely to be very sophisticated.)

The commission to create a plan for nuclear weapons is scheduled to start investigations at the end of 2008.

What is the likely short term future of weapons at the weapons lab if congress cuts their funding and will not decide on a realistic level of funding for about 2 years?

The simple answer is apparently that budgets will fall and expertise will leave all labs. Especially bad is the loss of people who can only be competent at their jobs 10 to 15 years after they get their Ph.D.s.