Could the New York Times publish this today?

About a week before the presidential election, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued that the United States needed to build more nuclear weapons. In a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — I have to admit, watching some of my colleagues’ eyes bug out was worth the price of admission — Gates said that in order to rejuvenate our aging nuclear arsenal and maintain deterrence, the U.S. would have to field a reliable replacement warhead.

The other day I was reading up about why an RRW program might be necessary, and I landed on William Broad’s exhaustive 1,900-word account in the New York Times, from 2005.

And it occurred to me, would the New York Times still be able to do that story today? Broad is still there, but does the Science section even get that many words anymore?