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United States: Cutting Nuclear Research, House Appropriators Demand Better Planning By David Ruppe The committee also criticized the administration for not producing a detailed plan to change the current nuclear arsenal, saying in committee report released yesterday that the U.S. arsenal was “built to fight the now defunct Soviet Union.” The House appropriators cut all $6 million requested for research and development through the Advanced Concepts Initiative, under which new, low-yield nuclear weapons would be researched. In addition, the committee reduced funding for researching modifications to an existing nuclear earth-penetrating nuclear weapon, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, by $10 million from the requested $15 million. Both the House and Senate earlier this year authorized spending on it up to $15 million in bills yet to be finalized. Yesterday’s cuts, contained in the House Energy and Water Development Appropriations bill marked up by the committee, contrast with largely enthusiastic support for the administration plans in the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Both the House and Senate have passed bills that would authorize full spending on the programs (see GSN, July 9). Senate appropriators are scheduled to act on the bill tomorrow. The funding cuts would be made, the committee report says, “in favor of higher priority current mission requirements.” Testing Readiness Cut The committee also cut the entire $24 million request to shorten the time needed to prepare for a nuclear weapons test. The committee report says the administration must provide a “better definition of the national security requirement.” The report says the proposal “reflects a disturbing ‘cost-is-no-object’ perspective in the [Energy] Department’s decision-making process.” The administration is seeking funding for reducing the lead-time from an estimated 24 to 36 months down to 18 months. “The committee is concerned with the open-ended commitment to increase significantly funding for the purpose of Enhanced Test Readiness without any budget analysis or program plan to evaluate the efficiency or effectiveness of this funding increase,” the report says. The administration also needs to provide better justifications of its nuclear weapons stockpile requirements, the report says. “The committee is concerned the NNSA [the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration] is being tasked to start new activities with significant outyear budget impacts before the administration has articulated the specific requirements to support the president’s announced stockpile modification,” it said. Looking for Money John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms control lobbying organization, attributed the cuts to something else altogether. “My understanding is the committee is looking for money for water projects, which the White House cut by $300 million, and this is how they got it,” he said. The committee targeted cuts to the administration’s nuclear weapons priorities, Isaacs said, because unlike developing national missile defenses they have not been “an article of faith of the Republican party.” “It means they were more vulnerable when looking for money,” he said. Overall, the committee increased funding for NNSA, which oversees Energy Department nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs, by $330.1 million more than fiscal 2003 levels to $8.5 billion for 2004. That is, however, $326.4 million less than the administration had requested. Budget Process Called Flawed The committee report says the U.S. nuclear weapons program has not been forced to make the difficult cost-benefit trade-offs other programs make. It says the current process for deciding requirements and shaping the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal is “flawed” because the Pentagon sets requirements while Energy is required to fund them. When Defense “develops their requirements,” the committee report says, “their decision process is not constrained by the normal types of budget trade-offs that an agency confronts in the process of formulating a budget request.” The report calls for a “serious debate about whether the approximately $6 billion spent annually on DOE’s nuclear weapons complex is a sound national security investment.” “If these costs were funded directly by the DOD, the nuclear weapons activities would be considered against other national defense priorities, such as developing improved conventional weapons, procuring more existing weapons systems, paying ever increasing operational and training costs, and providing a better quality of life for our sailors, soldier and airmen,” it says. The committee report says the Bush administration is asking too much of the NNSA at this time. “It appears to the committee the [Energy] Department is proposing to rebuild, restart, and redo and otherwise exercise every capability that was used over the past 40 years of the Cold War and at the same time prepare for a future with an expanded mission for nuclear weapons,” it said. The committee said it would not “support redirecting the [NNSA’s] management resources and attention to a series of new initiatives” until it could demonstrate it is successfully meeting its primary mission, “maintaining the safety, security and viability of the existing stockpile” (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2002). Reporting Faulted The committee faulted the Bush administration for not delivering a committee-requested report providing specific plans to reduce the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal in accordance with the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, which took effect last month (see GSN, June 2). A Defense official recently told Global Security Newswire the administration was planning to begin “retire” some of the planned downloaded warheads beginning in 2006, but said “dismantlement plans are not yet finalized.” The official added, “Other warheads removed from missiles and bombers will be maintained in a nondeployed status as a hedge against unforeseen technical or international events.” The appropriators yesterday said that lacking specific new plans for the future structure of the stockpile, NNSA continues to budget for maintaining active and inactive strategic nuclear warheads at START I levels. “The National Nuclear Security Administration has not been able to reconcile the recently announced dramatic reductions planned for deployed operational nuclear warheads to its strategic weapons modernization plans, some of which will cost billions of dollars each, and which are currently structured to upgrade the maximum number of warheads,” the committee report says. “NNSA is forced, through inertia and indecision, to maintain all contingencies regardless of how unlikely the threat,” the report says.
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