There has been a lot of talk recently about the need for a post-Cold War nuclear strategy. However, instead of outlining a new way of looking at the world and our national priorities, much of the rhetoric seems to focus on how old our stockpile is and the need to modernize our arsenal and complex. Glimpses of this can be seen in the interim report of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States released yesterday.
POGO has a different take than the Washington Post's Walter Pincus, who writes that “the interim report took no position on the Bush administration's effort to produce a new nuclear warhead under the now-deferred Reliable Replacement Warhead [RRW] program.” We think the report actually does contain some coded references to RRW, which Chair of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Strategic Forces Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) recommended renaming in order to avoid all the opposition RRW has garnered in Congress and among the public. For example, an interim finding of the report states the need for the complex to be “refurbished” and that:
Although the Life Extension Program has been successful to date, it will face increasing challenges as components age and more changes are made. In our final report we intend to define the most efficient and effective way to maintain a credible, safe, secure, and reliable deterrent for the long term. We recognize also that broader infrastructure issues must be addressed in any such program. [Emphasis added]
With so many people dreaming about a modernized nuclear weapons complex, it was refreshing to read the recently released House Appropriations Committee Energy and Water Subcommittee fiscal year 2009 Report, which explained why the Committee denied President Bush's request for RRW funds:
The Committee will not spend the taxpayers' money for a new generation of warheads promoted as leading to nuclear reductions absent a specified glide path to a specified, much smaller force of nuclear weapons....
The Committee also finds no validity in arguments that we should (1) first build a new nuclear weapons complex and later decide what to do with it, (2) produce a new nuclear warhead and later contemplate how to arrive at a contemporary, coherent, and durable strategy for it, or (3) design a new high-margin warhead first and consider the question of nuclear testing afterward.
The report also highlights an example of why it is so important to exercise restraint and accountability in spending for our stockpile:
The Committee was dismayed at a recent hearing to find that the Deputy Secretary of Defense was unaware that the cost of the nuclear stockpile is the responsibility of the Department of Energy.
For further reading, we highly recommend checking out an article published this week in the Bulletin for Atomic Scientists by Yousaf Butt, a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, with recommendations for the next administration on a wide range of nuclear security issues. Another thought-provoking piece recently published in Slate offers some important lessons from William Weed Kaufmann, a leading Cold War nuclear strategist who passed away this week at the age of 90. After spending most of his career working on nuclear issues at RAND and the Pentagon, Kaufmann's observation about being entrenched in the defense establishment is particularly relevant to today's debate:
"...it was easy to get caught up in the whole nuclear business. You could eat and breathe the stuff....Then you'd move away from it for a while, look at it from a distance, and think, 'God, that's a crazy world.'"
-- Ingrid Drake
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