Biden: Nukes Shall Make Us Free

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden gave a long speech explaining why increasing the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration to rebuild two vital facilities is actually going to help us execute a nonproliferation agenda better. 

Capabilities like an adaptive missile defense shield, conventional warheads with worldwide reach, and others that we are developing enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons, as other nuclear powers join us in drawing down. With these modern capabilities, even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong.

As we’ve said many times, the spread of nuclear weapons is the greatest threat facing our country. 

That is why we are working both to stop their proliferation and eventually to eliminate them. Until that day comes, though, we will do everything necessary to maintain our arsenal.
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That’s why earlier this month we announced a new budget that reverses the last decade’s dangerous decline. 

It devotes $7 billion to maintaining our nuclear stockpile and modernizing our nuclear infrastructure.  To put that in perspective, that’s $624 million more than Congress approved last year—and an increase of $5 billion over the next five years.  Even in these tight fiscal times, we will commit the resources our security requires.

This investment is not only consistent with our nonproliferation agenda; it is essential to it.   Guaranteeing our stockpile, coupled with broader research and development efforts, allows us to pursue deep nuclear reductions without compromising our security.  As our conventional capabilities improve, we will continue to reduce our reliance on nuclear weapons.

Responsible disarmament requires versatile specialists to manage it. 

The skilled technicians who look after our arsenal today are the ones who will safely dismantle it tomorrow.

And chemists who understand how plutonium ages also develop forensics to track missing nuclear material and catch those trafficking in it.   

The funny thing about the Obama administration's position is how centrist it is. The right will hate it because he's reducing the number of nuclear weapons and building up nonproliferation activities. That's not going to lead to bombing Iran. The left will hate it because he's not reducing nuclear weapons fast enough and he's building up the nuclear weapons labs, when there are reports about our nuclear weapons being in pretty good shape.

But it's very responsible to both preserve the intellectual capital and infrastructure of the US nuclear weapons program as long as other nations have nuclear weapons. And as VP Biden said, as long as they do, so will we. 

Comments

[Cheryl Rofer]

And some of us dislike it because he won't give up on the missile defense scam. But I guess he isn't willing to make all those defense firms go cold turkey when the unemployment rate is this high.

[J.]

Yeah, I should have put in here that my one disappointment is the Obama administration's continuing love affair with national missile defense. Still funded at more than $9 billion/yr, and having US forces doing missile defense for the EU because Iran might some day target them with nukes is just screwed up.

According to the CBO, costs for missile defense are going to get much higher over the next decade as they start fielding missile interceptor and X-band radar capabilities in larger numbers. Still waiting for some reputable think tank to point out what a waste of money this is, when realistically viewing the challenge of countering adversarial nuclear weapons.

[Publius]

J, I did some work in support of the initial "Star Wars" efforts; in fact was working with some of the guys who drove President Reagan's infatuation with the idea. Some were honest about the chances of ever succeeding in "hitting a bullet with a bullet"; some were ideological dudes who said it wasn't all that hard. All were bright scientists who tended to be pretty obscure when it came to non-physicists such as me or the run-of-the-mill politician ever truly understanding their stuff.

This led to a situation where even very bright people without the proper technical background essentially had to put their money with the Dr. Strangelovian group they believed more credible. Some, the ones I intuitively supported, went with the skeptics who didn't believe the holy grail of missile defense was feasible, particularly given the number of Soviet ICBMs. Others, the winners, led by President Reagan, went with those who said it could be done.

Thus far, the skeptics have been proven right. If you've followed the progress of SDI, BMD, whatever the current name is, you know that test "successes" have all come about through cooking the books, i.e., no experiment has replicated real-world conditions. They're still not anywhere near where they want to be and it's very hard to predict when they might get there.

So put it in the too-hard box and shut it down, right? Well, there is a problem with that. First, defense of the homeland is motherhood and Democrats have already lost out to the Republicans in the "who's better at national defense" game. Second, there is a sophisticated and wealthy right-wing community in this country that never met a defense program it didn't love. Nowadays these folks are called "Republicans."

Obama can't shut Star Wars down. The political heat would be unbearable and his party would continue to lose support amongst the voters. Star Wars is a very difficult thing to understand, but the one thing the average voter understands is that he doesn't want a nuke landing in his backyard.

Obama lost the ability to shut Star Wars down before he even considered being in politics. That would be back when the Democratic Party decided it would cede the national security turf to the Republicans. You know, those decisions on the part of Democrats back in the 70s and 80s still haunt the nation. They're why anybody named Bush ever got elected; they're why we have such a political divide now. They're also why Obama can't simply disengage from Afghanistan or shut national missile defense down.

A lot of guys like me left the Democrats 20-30 years ago. Some went back; most did not. Check how many former Democrats provided the intellectual fuel for the neocon nonsense and much of the other stuff peddled by the Republicans. It wasn't just the Republicans that drove a lot of their moderate, sane people out.

[J.]

Publius: I understand your point, but I would suggest that we could easily cut the budget down to $5 billion/yr - a pace set in the Clinton administration - and make as much progress. We ought to pull the idea of establishing missile defense sites in Eastern Europe, not because of the Russians, but because the threat doesn't justify the expense.

I know we can't kill the program, but we can at least put the beast on a diet and insist on continuing R&D until we have a mature capability that can be sustained in the field. And you and I know that a few missile interceptor sites on the East and West coasts don't really amount to a warm bucket of spit, but if that's what political expediency calls for, so be it.

[Andy]

Publius,

I would put it a bit differently. President Obama has a limited amount of political capital. He can't just end missile defense by fiat - he's only the President after all. Given all the competing priorities, should Obama pick a fight with Congress by threatening to veto legislation with missile defense funding? With omnibus spending bills and the President's aggressive agenda, it's hard to battle Congress over these kinds of issues.