Bush Nuclear Policies Undermine Nonproliferation, Republican Congressman Says

By David Ruppe
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration’s nuclear weapons research and development programs are inconsistent with and undermine U.S. efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, a powerful senior Republican legislator said at a conference here yesterday (see GSN, June 28).

Efforts that could lead to new nuclear weapons capabilities and the program to shorten the preparation time for resuming underground testing appear to be “very provocative and overly aggressive policies that undermine our moral authority to argue that other nations should forgo nuclear weapons,” said House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development Chairman David Hobson (R-Ohio).

The U.S. nuclear weapons complex, furthermore, needs serious managerial reform to remedy problems that may undermine the quality of U.S. nuclear deterrence, Hobson added, in an unusually strong intraparty criticism during an election year. He called the U.S. nuclear weapons complex a “national treasure,” but said its $6 billion complex looks like a “jobs program for Ph.D.s.”

Guiding legislation through the House over the past two years, Hobson has aggressively tried to set things right as he sees them, and in doing so has become perhaps the most forceful critic of the Bush administration’s nuclear weapons plans.

Bucking the House’s traditional deference to Senate appropriators on nuclear weapons issues, Hobson portrayed himself as a “little old country lawyer” trying to bring some common sense to the programs and expressed confidence in his ability to push changes through this year despite some administration opposition.

Speaking at a conference hosted by the National Academy of Sciences, Hobson said the nuclear weapons stockpile, estimated by nongovernmental experts at about 10,000 active and reserve bombs, is “sized to fight the Soviet Union” and is unnecessarily large with respect to future U.S. adversaries.

“Other than a Cold War ‘Russia gone bad,’ scenario, I don’t believe that our nuclear stockpile is useful against our new foes,” he said, adding that the stockpile at its current size has failed to dissuade Iran and North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Hobson faulted the Bush administration for not presenting to Congress a plan for reducing the nuclear stockpile until June of this year, even though President George W. Bush signed an agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin in May 2002 to take thousands of warheads out of operational deployment by 2012 (see GSN, June 22).

“Subsequent to the president’s decision, there was no evidence that the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense were serious about reducing the stockpile,” he said.

However, he praised the administration’s plan in the June report to reduce the stockpile to “roughly half of its current size,” which he called a “more realistic and responsible level.”

Following his initiative, Congress had frozen some Energy Department expenditures for advanced concepts nuclear work this fiscal year until the plan was delivered.

Hobson noted that this year his committee blocked all appropriations for administration nuclear weapons research and development programs — the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator study and other nuclear weapons concepts work — and for constructing a new nuclear weapons pit production facility.

The House approved the cuts with its June vote on the overall fiscal 2005 energy and water appropriations bill.

Hobson argued the pursuit of new nuclear weapons capabilities undermines the U.S. ability to persuade other countries to forgo such weapons.

“We cannot advocate for nuclear weapons proliferation around the globe and pursue more usable nuclear weapons options here at home. That inconsistency is not lost on anyone in the international community,” he said.

He added that nuclear weapons should have “very, very limited” role in U.S. post-Cold War national security strategy, arguing that having earth-penetrating nuclear weapons would not deter terrorists and using them against rogue regimes would be unwise.

“Some think that, if we had low-yield nuclear weapons in our arsenal, we should have used them on some of [former Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein’s bunkers that we assumed to be holding weapons of mass destruction,” he said, in an apparent indirect criticism of a comment made by a fellow Republican legislator last year. 

He said discussing using nuclear weapons in the way conventional weapons currently are used “just does not make sense” and “leads to policy outcomes that are irrational in today’s post-Cold War world,” he said.

While the United States will in the future need a robust deterrent, he said, “The glory years for the nuclear weapon complex are over. Never again will the federal agencies and national labs have the discretion or the budget that was allowed during the Cold War to pursue any type of nuclear weapon research no matter what the cost.”

Energy Department managerial problems, he said, include recurrent security failures, continued delays in achieving program milestones, construction project schedule delays, and cost overruns.

“These are all problems resulting from a lack of realistic priority setting and oversight from the federal managers” he said and could be solved not with more funding but rather “by holding people and organizations accountable for their performance.”

Such problems where they impact the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear arsenal, may pose “the greatest threat to our stockpile” and be “a more serious national security concern than the existence or nonexistence of a robust nuclear earth penetrator,” he said.

After touring the national laboratories and production facilities over the past two years, Hobson said he found the nuclear weapon complex “could be viewed as a jobs program for Ph.D.s — the ultimate in white collar welfare — where the federal oversight organization did not demand accountability for performance and where business practices were two decades behind the times.”

He said laboratory contracts “had not been competed in over 50 years, including the two weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore.”

Last year, following his committee’s direction, Congress required the Energy Department to open its nuclear research laboratory contracts for competition (see GSN, Aug. 9).

“Nothing ensures beneficial change as much as true competition,” he said.

A national laboratory culture of “we know best” “threatens the reputation of the entire enterprise,” Hobson said. He advocated an independent commission to review the future requirements of the nuclear weapons complex.

The White House has criticized the House nuclear weapons program cuts, stating in June that the reductions “would diminish the nation’s ability to respond to future national security threats.”

The Senate has not yet voted on a version of the bill.

National laboratory officials also are not particularly pleased with Hobson.

“I’m unfortunately not just a little old country lawyer from the Midwest. I’m one of those arrogant lab directors. I did get a Ph.D. in physics,” Sandia National Laboratories head Paul Robinson said, also speaking at the conference.

He argued that the post-Cold War emergence of new types of security concerns from “rogue states” with unconventional weapons requires developing nuclear weapons capabilities (see GSN, Aug. 8, 2003).

“The big question is, can we adapt [the U.S. nuclear deterrent] to the world ahead of us and how can it serve that world in the future,” he said.

Hobson said the administration has not pressured him to abandon such measures, with the exception of one phone call to protest the cut for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator program.

He said the administration has resisted pressure, “Because I’ll beat them, and they don’t want to go there. They don’t want a vote on it.  … I think they can count.”

The administration is hoping for a congressional compromise deal on the funding, Hobson said, but added, “I’m not excited about doing that.”

He said, though, he might be open to some kind of deal.

“I think we can reach some accommodations that make the world a better place, and that’s what I’m going to try to do,” he said.

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