WASHINGTON INSIGHT

BOX-OFFICE BOMB: Nuclear arms makers are noting solemnly, if not exactly nostalgically, the retirement of the industry’s greatest movie star: A nuclear bomb called the B-53. The 9-megaton, 8,850-pound gravity bomb was the weapon ridden bronco-style to nuclear armageddon by Slim Pickens in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, “Dr. Strangelove.” But with these famously inaccurate weapons now as dated as the Berlin Wall, the remainder of the B-53 stockpile is slated to be disassembled and dispatched to the junkyard and toxic-waste heap.

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THE NIXED FILES: A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that the Air Force stopped investigating reports of UFOs in 1969. Kenneth Bacon was conducting a regular briefing when a reporter, apparently fishing for a connection to stories on the suicides of 39 Heaven’s Gate cult members last week, asked whether the military tracks UFOs. From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force looked into 12,618 reports of UFO sightings, Bacon said, but suspended the practice after finding no evidence of spaceships or extraterrestrials. Of course, a lot can change in almost 30 years. . . .

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HEAD START? A press release from the office of the U.S. trade representative boasts that the rise in U.S. agricultural exports in 1996 “represents a 40.4% increase . . . since 1992 when President Clinton took office.” Actually, Clinton was not sworn in until Jan. 20, 1993.

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SPRING FEVER: When the pols are out of town, the pundits turn to . . . the next election--even if it is more than a year away. With Congress on Easter recess this week, editions of “Hotline,” a computer-distributed daily digest of political news that Washington’s multitudes of political junkies consider as essential to their day as oxygen, has been full of speculation about who will and who won’t run for what. Things are so slow that conservative GOP insiders have started talking about possible replacements for House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), with Reps. Tom Delay (R-Texas) and James M. Talent (R-Mo.) among those receiving mention. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), long considered a likely presidential candidate in 2000, has been spending time in the key primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

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MISERY LOVES COMPANY? Almost immediately after withdrawing from his uphill, protracted and rather nasty fight for confirmation as CIA director, former White House National Security Advisor Anthony Lake got out of town for his version of R & R. Lake, who complained in a letter to President Clinton that his confirmation process had become too much of a circus, headed to sunny Florida to take in some spring training games played by the Boston Red Sox, a team that knows a little something about being on the outs.