Gates' False Choice on Nuclear Weapons
One of the more objectionable arguments in yesterday's speech on nuclear weapons by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was his assertion that "there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program." In plain English, Gates is threatening that the Pentagon and the National Nuclear Security Administration -- which runs the nuclear weapons complex -- will break a longstanding moratorium on nuclear testing if they are not allowed to build a new warhead (known in bureacratese as the "Reliable Replacement Warhead." This assertion is wrong in so many ways it is hard to know where to start. Point one is that according to the Pentagon's own experts, the plutonium "pits" that form the most important active component of current bombs are good for at least 85 years, as set out in an analysis by Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association.
Beyond the issue of how long current bombs will be "safe and reliable," in Gates' phrase, is the more important point that we should be working to eliminate nuclear weapons sooner rather than later. Better that webe safe than that we worry about whether our nation's nuclear bombs are "safe" decades hence.
Bearing this in mind, one urgent task that should be taken up by the next President and the new Congress is to derail plans not only to build new nuclear bombs but to build new nuclear bomb factories, as part of an initiative known (again, in the antiseptic rhetoric of government bureaucrats) as "Complex Transformation." Congress has already de-funded the Reliable Replacement Warhead project several years running -- the next president should make sure it doesn't find its way into the budget yet again, even as he looks at how to reduce the existing warhead complex rather than spending $200 billion or more to sustain and modernize it over the next two decades or so (this is a rough estimate from a spring 2008 policy paper by the author).
If a costly new infrastructure for designing and building bombs is allowed to be built, it will just intensify pork barrel pressures to keep it up and running (and to find something for it to do, like designing new warheads) that much longer. Ensuring that there are no new nukes and no new nuclear weapons factories will be one important step towards creating a "world without nuclear weapons," as Barack Obama has promised to do.
I feel like once again I am on the slow-to-catch-on side, like I was with Global Warming (where I wound up apologizing to my wife after making the time to watch An Inconvenient Truth).
So, what's really the big deal with nukes... we still have some very nasty bombs in the arsenal like daisy cutters and bunker busters; and I'm sure there are many other kinds that I would not like to be blown-up or disintegrated or melted by.
Is the argument that we'd have to use so many of those if we really wanted to decimate people/things that doing so would become impractical and therefore we wouldn't do it?
Or is it that there's so much downwind radiation that we wouldn't just decimate "the enemy", we also befoul the neighborhood (and the neighbors)?
Or is it that the nuke industrial complex is just so much more expensive than more traditional bullets, bombs, and those new-fangled laser dazzlers, etc. ?
Or is it the combo? Why really does it matter that we have a "world without nuclear weapons" when we have a world with every other conceivable kind?
October 29, 2008 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Didn't we (taxpayers that is) spend a rather large sum of money developing simulation software and purchasing gazillion dollar computer systems to test the efficacy of our aging nuclear arsenal? I'm quite sure one or more of our national laboratories were doing this and had a very big dollar amount funded precisely for this purpose. I also seem to recall some top Bush or DOD official bragging about this project and how it would save tons of money etc. I don't remember exactly but this project ran into the hundreds of millions as I recall.
October 29, 2008 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Gates' comments show that old Cold Warriors don't fade away, they just get recycled by subsequent Republican administrations...
October 29, 2008 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I guess I would want to know how new nukes would rebalance our strategic posture. Prior to the current administration, the posture supported a peaceful stand off with USSR and then later Russia. The Bush Admin restarted SDI and talked a good game about Nato membership for former Soviet bloc countries, thereby undermining the stasis.
Will renovation of the existing arsenal rebalance the Russia/US equation? Or will it be another destabalizing exercise, like SDI?
October 29, 2008 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Great Post, Bill.
Care to continue? with:
1) The extent to which this fear mongering is an attempt to lock in some business and commit the taxpayer to LR dollar support for LANL, Livermore, and Sandia as the nuclear Titanic goes down? Any connection to the recent proliferation (18%) of Military Capital expenditures? To the sabotage of the Tinner case and the India nuclear deal? To an effort to manipulate other countries in continuing to support our debt?
2) What do you know about the attempt of a developer to relocate the Kansas City plant for the non-nuclear components of nuclear weapons:
a. To a private KC facility owned by the developer, and commit the taxpayer to a long term lease? The condition of the current facilities?
b. Near Sandia Labs in NM? As you surely know, Nukewatch and NRDC has filed suit to oppose the move, or at least be more transparent (with an EIS) about such a move (Transformation). Some see this litigation as an attempt to REQUIRE the facility move to NM. Your take (both on the validity of the rumor, and to y6our take on whether (if true), such a consolidation would further or hinder nuclear proliferation.
Thanks for all your efforts.
erich a TPM and NAF supporter.
November 1, 2008 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink