In May, President Obama gave a stirring speech in Prague emphasizing his commitment to abolish nuclear weapons.

Last week, he released the budget for fiscal year 2011, in which the level of funding for nuclear weapons laboratories was raised more than at any time since Reagan. This funding will allow Los Alamos National Laboratory to proceed with construction of a new facility for plutonium research, euphemistically named the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement and to increase production of plutonium pits. Plutonium pits are the cores that trigger the explosion of nuclear bombs.

LANL is becoming a bomb factory.

The contradiction between Obama's promises in Prague and his nuclear arms budget is clear.

When his predecessor, George W. Bush, re-wrote nuclear weapons policy, it emphasized the admissibility of the use of such weapons in pre-emptive first strikes and stressed the importance of making new, tactical nuclear weapons that would be "safe, reliable and useable."

Leaving aside the oxymoron that any nuclear weapon can possibly be safe for any living creature, the key to this policy is that these new weapons will be useable. New weapons designs will be the same.

Thermonuclear weapons are so powerful that they are not useful; the consequences of using them are simply too great. But with a smaller, useable nuclear weapon, it will be possible to target a single area — let us say, Iran — without destroying the entire world.

But these smaller nukes are projected to be three times the size of the weapon used against Hiroshima. Many of us — but not all — are aware of the horrific consequences the use of a single bomb had on the Japanese city. It was leveled. Up to 200,000 people died excruciating deaths as a result.

The effect of the fallout on the rest of the world from this bombing has never been properly assessed, but years later, during the Kennedy administration, Congress outlawed above-ground tests because of their terrible effect on surrounding populations.

We also know that cancer rates have risen steadily since the war, from an incidence of 1 in 20 to the current incidence of 1 in 2 (males). And while treatments have become more effective (though still horrible to endure), 1 in 5 of those cancer patients will die of their disease.

Connecting the dots, we may infer that rising nuclear contamination of our nation and our planet are at least in part responsible for this rise. Ionizing radiation is the single greatest cause of cancer. Given the cost of treatment, it is no wonder that health care has become so unaffordable. This rise in cancer happened without the occurrence of outright nuclear war.

Obama's investment in the production of new nuclear weapons not only contradicts his stated commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and eventual disarmament; it is unconscionable and deplorable.

Outspoken resistance to this policy by all Americans — and New Mexicans in particular — is the only hope for stopping the building of useable nuclear weapons.

We must oppose this work at Los Alamos and other nuclear weapons sites in America.

Stephanie Hiller is a member of New Mexicans for Nuclear Weapons Reduction and founder of Women for a Better World. She lives in Santa Fe.