Related Concerns
Still not time for a new nukes plant.
By Andrew Heaslet
August 5th, 2010
Three years ago, I joined arms control expert William Hartung in warning against the decision to build a new nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City. Today ground is being broken on a new facility that will produce about 85% of the components that go into nuclear weapons.
A few things have changed since penning our piece; the “Reliable Replacement Warhead,” which was to be one of the programs supported by a new plant appears to have been killed in Congress. The nation is also clawing its way out of a deep recession, the Senate is preparing to debate a new arms control treaty with Russia, and, oh, we have a new president. A President who was given a Nobel Prize for daring to dream of a “world without nuclear weapons.”
While our nation certainly finds itself on different ground than three years ago, many things have not changed. The current Kansas City Plant site still contains three separate Superfund sites on its grounds. Questions about nuclear waste disposal still linger – indeed; Obama may be pulling the plug on the planned Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada to help Senator Majority Leader Reid’s reelection campaign. And private dollars are still inadequate to finance the construction of the KC facility, meaning this construction will require millions of local and federal dollars to help cover the nearly $5 billion price tag.
This cost is coupled with plans to modernize the other eight nuclear weapons facilities across the country, adding up to a total of $180 billion budgeted for the next tens years to modernize weapons and update delivery systems. This robust spending, while simply counterintuitive to me – why are we spending billions of dollars on something we don’t want? – has also raised eyebrows at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) who, in June, recommended that the Obama Administration “evaluate the total costs of operating and maintaining existing weapons activities facilities and infrastructure as part of program planning processes and budget formulation, especially in relation to recapitalization and modernization of the nuclear security enterprise.”
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Increasing Our Security By Cutting Military Spending
From DemocracyArsenal.org
New America Foundation Senior Fellow, Bill Hartung
5/27/2010
I agree with Patrick Barry that the emphasis on grounding our security in the strength of our economy is perhaps the most important element of the Obama Administration’s National Security Strategy. As the president puts it in the letter that introduces the document, “Our strategy begins by recognizing that our strength and influence abroad begins with steps we take at home. We must grow our economy and reduce our deficit.”
But how do we grow our economy and reduce our deficit? A central element of any approach has to be cuts in military spending – not just slower growth, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has advocated, but real reductions.
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Costs of War: National Security Tug-of-War
This is a good look at our nation's newest national security strategy and some of the discrepencies that already exist within this very document as well as between this strategy and other Obama administration actions. -PEP-
Obama’s national security strategy lays out a vision of US global power based on a strong, modern economy at home and multilateralism abroad. But other forces in the US body politic are pushing in a different direction, Shaun Waterman writes for ISN Security Watch.
By Shaun Waterman in Washington, DC for ISN Security Watch
June 1, 2010
The strategy, rolled out last week but overshadowed by the continuing ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, is the administration’s first effort to articulate its vision of American national defense and global power.
“Our strategy starts by recognizing that our strength and influence abroad begins with the steps we take at home,” says the introduction, listing deficit reduction, education, green energy and technological progress as the essential building blocks of US security. “We must see American innovation as the foundation of American power,” the document concludes.
The strategy emphasizes soft power, especially the role of American values. “We promote these values by living them,” the document says, emphasizing, in a swipe at Bush-era counterterrorism policies, “our commitment to the rule of law.”
Notably, the strategy acknowledges the limits of American power, warning against the danger of over-commitment and emphasizing the role of US alliances. “Our adversaries would like to see America sap our strength by over-extending its power.”
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White House Is Rethinking Nuclear Policy
February 28, 2010
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
From the New York Times
WASHINGTON — As President Obama begins making final decisions on a broad new nuclear strategy for the United States, senior aides say he will permanently reduce America’s arsenal by thousands of weapons. But the administration has rejected proposals that the United States declare it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, aides said.
Mr. Obama’s new strategy — which would annul or reverse several initiatives by the Bush administration — will be contained in a nearly completed document called the Nuclear Posture Review, which all presidents undertake. Aides said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will present Mr. Obama with several options on Monday to address unresolved issues in that document, which have been hotly debated within the administration.
First among them is the question of whether, and how, to narrow the circumstances under which the United States will declare it might use nuclear weapons — a key element of nuclear deterrence since the cold war.
Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world is naïve and dangerous, especially at a time of new nuclear threats, particularly from Iran and North Korea. But many of his supporters fear that over the past year he has moved too cautiously, and worry that he will retain the existing American policy by leaving open the possibility that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, perhaps against a nation that does not possess a nuclear arsenal.
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Top Officer Urges Limit on Mission of Military
To a degree, this is an encouraging statement from Adm. Mullen, but part of the problem he discusses, “the military receives vast resources – and then is asked to do even more,” is a chicken and egg scenario. Part of the reason that the military is able to receive and spend and then be asked to use such vast resources is the result of less-than-wholesome behavior from current and former senior officers making their treks through the infamous revolving door. Click on the revolving door link, there, for recommendations from Sen Bernie Sanders and Defense Analyst William Hartung on how we can help Adm Mullen hone his arguments.
On the whole, though, this statement makes me a optimistic about the opportunities that are becoming available with the incoming administration.
The New York Times
By THOM SHANKER
1/12/2009
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Monday that senior officers must work to prevent the militarization of American foreign policy, and he urged generals and admirals to tell civilian leaders when they believed the armed forces should not take the lead in carrying out policies overseas.
Adm. Mike Mullen, who as chairman is the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, also called for more money and personnel to be devoted to the civilian agencies responsible for diplomacy and overseas economic development.
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