President Bush will travel to Moscow for a May 23-26 summit to discuss slashing U.S.-Russian nuclear stockpiles. Both have agreed to cut caches of 6,000 deployable warheads each by two-thirds over the next decade. But they disagree about what to do with the decommissioned weapons. Moscow wants them dismantled, but Washington wants them warehoused for quick retrieval.

The Pentagon's leaked Nuclear Posture Review offers a chilling glimpse into the world of war planners. The paper calls for manufacture of new warheads, including a Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, or "bunker buster," a nuclear-tipped missile intended to access caves and buried facilities. The Senate will debate its funding - which stands at $15.5 million - beginning May 21. The review also outlines contingency plans to use nukes against 7 nations, including several with no nuclear weapons of their own.

The Department of Energy is preparing to resume nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.

• A federal study released in February says that over 15,000 cancer deaths have resulted from test fallout.
  
  
• Development of the bunker buster would break a decade-old moratorium on nuclear testing.
  
  
• Nuclear experts warn that the bunker buster would not burrow deeply enough to contain the explosion - raining radioactive dust to distances of one-half mile and killing tens of thousands of civilians.

Analysts question the logic of building new nukes while cutting current stockpiles. The Bush blueprint reverses a two-decade trend of relegating nuclear weapons to last resort status. It also blurs the crucial distinction between nuclear and conventional arms, replacing half a century of deterrence and restraint with a readiness to use nukes as first-line weapons of war.

Are we building a nuclear boomerang, only to rebound against us? Would these new nukes undermine our demands that others forgo the nuclear option? Are our health and safety being willingly risked?