So New Mexico's national laboratories, under fire from Washington in recent years, suddenly find themselves the darlings of President Barack Obama's Fiscal 2011 budget: Manned moon flights, another Cold War relic, would be moved to the back burner, but nuclear bombs once again are in vogue.

Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was born, would get a $393 million boost, making next year's lab budget more than $2.2 billion. Sandia labs down in Albuquerque would get a $364 million increase, to about $1.5 billion.

Jeff Bingaman, who as chairman of the Senate's energy committee exercises great influence over the Department of Energy's nuclear labs, called it good news for his state. Yet he was at his circumspect best in describing the amounts of money headed our way: "Some of that is weapons related. Some of it is for general research and development ... but I think all of that is favorable, uh, good, for New Mexico."

Some of it for weapons? Try most of it for weapons. The convoluted process of disarmament, says our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president, demands having plenty of weaponry on hand. Whether he believes that or is simply cozying up to congressional hawks is hard to tell.

The push is on to develop a whole new generation of nuclear scientists and engineers — and few would be naive enough to deny that we need such exquisitely skilled people. But how many of them? Enough to get us through massive disarmament projects — or enough to keep building bigger and better bombs in case we need to fend off the growing number of nuclear-armed enemies?

After a decade or so of congressional criticism, financial cutbacks and layoffs on "the Hill," the money could be a tonic for what ails el norte; a new building for plutonium work, tentatively priced at $4 billion, by itself may mean lots of folks back on the job building, maintaining and securing it.

But when there are so many promising projects in alternative energy and electricity-storing batteries in their infancy at LANL, not to mention "pure science" research likely to have practical value, the notion of new-weapons research — and manufacturing — puts a damper on whatever celebrations might have been going on at the labs during the past week.

If this were a science-fiction movie, we'd call it Son of Rocky Flats: Having turned a grubby tract in the hills above Denver into a radioactive mess while assembling plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs, our military-scientific establishment moves that operation to the scenic Jemez Mountains.

Yes, snowmelt from those mountains runs into the Río Grande. And yes, millions of people in the Southwest United States and northeast Mexico count on that stream for their drinking water. But we have enemies — held at bay only by our power to obliterate them. So what's a little nuclear contamination among friends?

It'll be up to Sen. Bingaman to make sure that enough of American taxpayer dollars go into protecting the region from the slovenly dangerous practices of the past — at Rocky Flats and at LANL.

Felizmente, today's lab leaders know more than their predecessors did about the need for absolute caution in nuclear-weapons research and development. Not that the A-bomb pioneers and their H-bomb successors didn't know a bit about weapons-component dangers. But environmental protection wasn't high enough a priority even during the past couple of decades since their insouciance became a national scandal.

Creating a new plutonium plant demands more than highest-possible levels of safety and security; it also means painstaking treatment of the old buildings, either in re-using them or demolishing them.

The investment that the president and Energy Secretary Steven Chu have in mind for our labs needs congressional approval — so expect some Capitol Hill critics to try whacking the nuclear-research expenses.