Global Security Newswire

The Obama administration plans to seek more than $5 billion in additional funding over five years for sustaining the U.S. nuclear complex and deterrent, starting with a $600 million increase in fiscal 2011, Vice President Joseph Biden wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary published yesterday (see GSN, Jan. 19).

The funding boost is necessary even as President Barack Obama pursues the nuclear-disarmament agenda he laid out last April in Prague, Biden stated (see GSN, Jan. 28).

"As long as nuclear weapons are required to defend our country and our allies, we will maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear arsenal," he wrote.

"Among the many challenges our administration inherited was the slow but steady decline in support for our nuclear stockpile and infrastructure, and for our highly trained nuclear work force," according to Biden.

"For almost a decade, our laboratories and facilities have been underfunded and undervalued. The consequences of this neglect -- like the growing shortage of skilled nuclear scientists and engineers and the aging of critical facilities -- have largely escaped public notice," he said in the column, noting that the congressionally mandated Strategic Posture Commission took the same position last year (see GSN, July 28, 2009).

"The budget we will submit to Congress on Monday both reverses this decline and enables us to implement the president's nuclear security agenda," the column states.

The same facilities and specialists needed to ensure the reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons would also help to protect sensitive nuclear materials internationally while enabling the United States to "maintain our arsenal without testing" and "to track and thwart nuclear trafficking, verify weapons reductions, and to develop tomorrow's cutting-edge technologies for our security and prosperity," Biden wrote.

"Even in a time of tough budget decisions, these are investments we must make for our security. We are committed to working with Congress to ensure these budget increases are approved," he said.

"This investment," expected to raise U.S. nuclear weapons spending to $7 billion in the next budget cycle, "is long overdue," Biden added. "It will strengthen our ability to recruit, train and retain the skilled people we need to maintain our nuclear capabilities. It will support the work of our nuclear labs, a national treasure that we must and will sustain.

The budget request will be pursued alongside -- and is not contradictory to -- the administration's effort to conclude a new nuclear arms control deal with Russia, issue its Nuclear Posture Review on March 1, conduct a nuclear security summit in April, and have the United States ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, according to the vice president. To bolster his argument, Biden cited a recent Journal commentary by four U.S. statesmen who have in recent years pressed the case for global nuclear disarmament.

"Maintaining high confidence in our nuclear arsenal is critical as the numbers of these weapons goes down. It is also consistent with and necessary for U.S. leadership in nonproliferation, risk reduction and arms reduction goals," according to former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn (Jospeh Biden, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 28).

The proposal described by Biden "underscores the fact that the United States can maintain a reliable arsenal without resuming nuclear testing or building newly designed nuclear warheads," the Arms Control Association stated today.

Strategies for sustaining a functioning deterrent has been a hot topic in Washington in recent years. Congress repeatedly turned back a Bush administration effort to develop warhead designs that would replace existing weapons, but the debate continues (see GSN, Aug. 19, 2009).

"Contrary to myth, the U.S. nuclear arsenal is not 'degrading.' In fact a major effort to refurbish warheads and modernize the weapons complex has been underway for some time. Even without this additional funding, confidence in the ability to maintain U.S. warheads in the absence of nuclear test explosions has been increasing," said Tom Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, in a release.

"We urge the administration and Congress to focus the nuclear weapons laboratories' resources on core stockpile surveillance and maintenance tasks, refrain from research and development on new-design warheads, and guard against unnecessary alterations to existing warheads that could undermine their reliability," he stated (Arms Control Association release, Jan. 29).