The arsenal that the weapons complex and laboratories support is comprised of increasingly obsolescent arms and their delivery platforms.
Part of the problem, according to the IG, is that the facilities of the nuclear weapons complex have been aging and need increased spending for maintenance and replacement.
The past four years have witnessed the dramatic decline of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex and the uniquely skilled workforce that is responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent.
That safety, and indeed, the reliability and credibility of the nuclear deterrent will, accordingly, rely ever more critically on a dwindling number of highly skilled scientists, engineers and technicians in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
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This prospect has been accelerated by the departure of large numbers of America's top nuclear scientists and engineers from the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons laboratories and industrial complex since 1992.
Modern weapons are often so complex that there are only two or three competent suppliers for any given system, and once a major award is won, the company that prevails becomes a monopoly supplier of the system in question.
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Fiji's military spokesman, Colonel Filipo Tarakinikini, said Mr Speight was arrested because of his failure to comply with the terms of an accord under which he had agreed to release the hostages his gang had held inside the Parliament complex for 56 days and hand back weapons which had been stolen by the rebels.
Like the Neanderthals, the newcomers had been busy, too, developing advanced tools and weapons, better navigational skills, trade, complex language, art and other forms of symbolic thinking.
While doves are aflutter with the notion that the military-industrial complex is on the march, nobody expects Japan to become a major weapons exporter anytime soon.
This is particularly true among the small cadre of physicists who have actually had first-hand experience with the extremely esoteric business of designing, testing and maintaining the nuclear weapons in our stockpile today -- arguably, the most complex pieces of equipment ever produced by man.
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After all, if the safety and reliability of these weapons are allowed to degrade -- how safe and reliable is any complex piece of machinery if left untested for years?
The retired weapons must be taken apart and their pieces re-used or rendered safe, an extremely complex procedure.
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