Obama Lays Nonproliferation Plank for 2008 Race

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The United States should shelve its drive for new nuclear warheads, Illinois Senator and Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama stated in a recent essay (see GSN, April 27).

In the essay published in the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, Obama outlines one of the more complete stances on nuclear weapons issues among other top-tier candidates in the scrum of presidential aspirants.

Nuclear proliferation, and the U.S. response to the specter of new nuclear-armed states, has crept up in both the early Democratic and Republican debates for the 2008 election, mainly in the form of discussion on the Iranian nuclear standoff.

Obama appeared to oppose the Reliable Replacement Warhead, the Bush administration’s plan to design and build a next-generation nuclear warhead to replace the aging Cold War stockpile with explosive packages that are easier to make and maintain.

“America must not rush to produce a new generation of nuclear warheads,” he writes.

Lawmakers have expressed significant reservations about the plan, some indicating they want to see a significant re-evaluation of the U.S. nuclear weapons posture (see GSN, June 15).

The House continues to debate a fiscal 2008 spending plan that would eliminate funding for the RRW program.  President George W. Bush had requested nearly $89 million to continue design and engineering work on the warhead.

While elimination of the RRW program funding seems cleared for passage the entire appropriations bill will likely see a final vote until July as lawmakers continue to hash out a number of non weapons-related provisions.

In total, the House bill would cut $632 million from the White House’s $5.9 billion request for nuclear weapons funding.  The Senate is scheduled begin discussions on its version of the same spending bill next week.

Writing in the Foreign Affairs piece, Obama called for the United States to lead a push to secure all nuclear weapons and material at vulnerable sites worldwide within four years, action he said would be “the most effective way to prevent terrorists from acquiring a bomb.”

At its core, Obama’s stance on nonproliferation policy seems to be derived from concerns that sparked the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program to secure WMD and related materials in the former Soviet Union (see GSN, June 18).  During his 2 1/2 years on Capitol Hill, Obama has worked closely with Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), with whom he sponsored a bill in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to create a Nunn-Lugar-type program to deal with conventional weapon stockpiles and to increase nonproliferation funding.

“To renew American leadership in the world, we must confront the most urgent threat to the security of America and the world — the spread of nuclear weapons, material, and technology and the risk that a nuclear device will fall into the hands of terrorists,” Obama wrote.  “The explosion of one such device would bring catastrophe, dwarfing the devastation of 9/11 and shaking every corner of the globe.”

Citing a January Wall Street Journal commentary, Obama noted that the current “nonproliferation regime is challenged.”  In that piece, former Secretaries of State George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn called for a concerted effort to move toward a world free of nuclear weapons (see GSN, Jan. 22).

In his essay, Obama stopped short of a calling for a world without nuclear arms but did adopt a number of suggestions advanced in the Journal commentary.

“This is not a new issue for him.  He’s been positioning himself on these issues since he’s been in the Senate,” said Leonor Tomero an analyst with the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation.  “This is not something that has just popped up on his radar.”

Obama’s essay is very similar to a speech he gave in April on the topic to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

“So far both Obama and Bill Richardson have identified the need to address the threat of nuclear terrorism as a priority,” she said.

Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, has served as the U.S. energy secretary, ambassador to the United Nations and as a recent informal envoy to North Korea (see GSN, April 4).  He addressed the issue of nuclear terrorism in detail during a March speech at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.

Obama called in his essay for U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which then-President Bill Clinton signed in 1996.  The treaty, however, ran into fierce Republican political resistance and has since failed to muster approval (see GSN, June 8).

“We should take advantage of recent technological advances to build bipartisan consensus behind ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty,” he wrote.  Also, as suggested in the Journal piece, Obama called for a verifiable global halt to the production of fissile material (see GSN, Jan. 24).

He urged development of an internationally controlled nuclear fuel bank that could “ensure that countries cannot build — or come to the brink of building — a weapons program under the auspices of developing a peaceful nuclear program.”  This also echoed the Shultz, Kissinger, Perry and Nunn commentary.

Regarding a secure international fuel supply, Obama stated, “My administration will immediately provide $50 million to jump-start the creation of an International Atomic Energy Agency-controlled nuclear fuel bank and update the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.”

On Monday, the House of Representatives passed a bill authorizing the president to make a voluntary donation of $50 million to the U.N. nuclear watchdog for the purposes of a fuel bank.  Such a move, the bill’s advocates said, could deflate Iranian arguments used to justify its pursuit of nuclear fuel-cycle technology (see GSN, June 19).

Iran and all other signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty have a right to peaceful nuclear technology including the centrifuges that have so alarmed the world in the Iranian case.  The same technology that can provide a nation with nuclear fuel for reactors can bring it to the brink of weaponization.  It is a situation that some have called a loophole in the nonproliferation treaty.

“We must develop a strong international coalition to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and eliminate North Korea’s nuclear weapons program,” Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs.  “Iran and North Korea could trigger regional arms races, creating dangerous nuclear flashpoints in the Middle East and Asia.”

In dealing with these threats, Obama indicated he would not eliminate the possibility of military actions but called for “sustained, direct, and aggressive diplomacy” as a first measure (see GSN, June 19).

While the Iranian issue has appeared in early debates, it is unclear if nuclear nonproliferation will become a central issue in the crowded presidential race, according to two experts.

“I think it should, but I’m not sure it will” said Matthew Bunn, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom.  “I think it’s quite important whether the next president has a plan to cope with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.”

Bunn said he anticipates that other candidates will offer nonproliferation plans,, but “whether the public will be able differentiate the quality of those suggestions, one from the other, I don’t know.”

Still, simply keeping nonproliferation issues in the public eye should help, said Jeffrey Lewis of the New America Foundation.

“It’s the G.I. Joe thing, ‘Knowing is half the battle,’” he said.  “That’s a pretty significant realization.”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Sam Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.  NTI is the sole sponsor of Global Security Newswire, which is published independently by the National Journal Group.]

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.