Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Joseph Cirincione

  • Need Cash? Cut Nuclear Weapons Budget

    This article was originally published in the Boston Globe

    President-elect Barack Obama needs money. “To make the investments we need,” he said last week, “we’ll have to scour our federal budget, line by line, and make meaningful cuts and sacrifices, as well.”

    There is no better place to start than the nuclear weapons budget. He can cut obsolete programs and transfer tens of billions of dollars per year to pressing conventional military and domestic programs.

    Transfers to domestic programs will help jumpstart the economy. Military spending provides some economic stimulus but not as much as targeted domestic spending. This is one reason Representative Barney Frank has called for a 25 percent reduction in military budgets that have exploded from $305 billion in fiscal year 2001 to $716 billion in fiscal year 2009, including the $12 billion spent every month for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    We must, of course, spend what we need to defend the country. But a good part of the military budget is still devoted to programs designed for the Cold War, which ended almost 20 years ago. This is particularly true of the $31 billion spent each year to maintain and secure a nuclear arsenal of almost 5,400 nuclear weapons, with 1,500 still deployed on missiles ready to launch within 15 minutes.

    We can safely reduce to 1,000 total weapons, as recommended by Senator John Kerry and other nuclear experts. That reduction would save over $20 billion a year, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

    The reductions could be done without any sacrifice to US national security, particularly if the Russians did the same (as they indicated they’d be willing to do) either by a negotiated treaty or the kind of unilateral reductions executed by former presidents George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.

    The arsenal of 1,000 warheads could be deployed on 10 safe and secure Trident submarines, each with enough weapons to devastate any nation. In total, the smaller, cheaper arsenal would still be sufficient to destroy the world several times over. Further reductions would generate further savings over time.

    Additional savings are available in the related anti-missile programs created during the Bush administration. Total spending is now $13 billion a year – up from $4 billion in 2000. Bush and former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld exempted the agency from the normal checks of Pentagon tests and procurement rules in an effort to institutionalize the program, locking in the next president. Obama will inherit half-built facilities in Alaska and California, along with plans to build new sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, but no assurance that the interceptors actually work -and a huge bill to pay. If Obama were to continue the program as is, he would spend an estimated $62 billion through 2012.

    In a congressional review of these programs, Representative John Tierney of Massachusetts concluded, “Since the 1980s, taxpayers have already spent $120 to $150 billion – more time and more money than we spent on the Manhattan project or the Apollo program, with no end in sight.” Tierney recommends refocusing the program to concentrate on defenses against the short-range weapons Iran and other nations currently field, and restoring realistic testing and realistic budgeting. Doing so could save $6 billion or more a year.

    Further savings can be found by stopping a planned expansion of nuclear weapons production facilities pushed by contractors and some government nuclear laboratories. The facilities would cost tens of billions of dollars and produce hundreds of new nuclear warheads. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates strongly backs the expansion. In a direct challenge to Obama’s plans to reduce nuclear weapons and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Gates said in October, “there is absolutely no way we can maintain a credible deterrent and reduce the number of weapons in our stockpile without either resorting to testing our stockpile or pursuing a modernization program.” Obama will have to back him down or pony up billions to pay Gates’s nuclear tab.

    What will the new president do? He comes to office with a comprehensive nuclear policy that could save billions. Obama will now have to show that his new security team will implement the change he promised, not their own parochial agendas.

    Joe Cirincione is President of the Ploughshares Fund and author of “Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.”

  • New Leaders and Policies are a Cause for Hope

    Article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel on March 8, 2008

    We are in a period of dramatic political transition. The U.S. presidential election is just one part of an unusual simultaneous change in global leadership. Combined with two other political developments, they could lead to sweeping change in policies governing the 26,000 nuclear weapons in the world today.

    By early 2009, four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (France, Britain, the United States and Russia) will have new leaders. Other key states, including Iran and Israel, may also. Several already have made the switch – South Korea, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

    The rise of so many new leaders less wed to past policies brings the possibility that some, perhaps many, could adopt new policies to dramatically reduce many of the nuclear dangers that have tormented governments for decades. They would not need new policies if the old ones were working. But they are not.

    The second big development is the collapse of current U.S. nuclear policy. Bush administration officials were openly contemptuous of their predecessors who had negotiated security arrangements that treated all nations equally. In their view, there were good proliferators, like India, and bad proliferators, like Iraq. The former got trade deals, the latter would be eliminated. The Iraq War was the first implementation of this radical regime change strategy. It proved fatally flawed. The Iraq threat was inflated. Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, and Iran and North Korea, the two other states targeted as the “axis of evil,” accelerated their nuclear programs after the invasion. Efforts to coerce them into surrender or collapse failed.

    Globally, terrorist threats grew while programs to secure loose nuclear weapons languished. The rejection and neglect of international treaties weakened U.S. security and legitimacy. Today, most of the proliferation problems the administration inherited have grown worse.

    The emergence of new policies is the third critical development, and they come from an unlikely source: veteran cold warriors who helped build the vast U.S. nuclear weapons complex. With two prominent op-eds in The Wall Street Journal in the past 14 months, former Democratic defense secretary William Perry, former Democratic senator Sam Nunn, and former Republican secretaries of state George Schulz and Henry Kissinger have laid out a plan for “a world free of nuclear weapons.”

    It is not just words. They have started a policy movement including seminars, in-depth studies and, just this month, an international conference in Oslo, Norway. Their efforts have garnered the backing of 70% of the living former national security advisors and secretaries of state and defense, including James Baker, Colin Powell, Melvin Laird and Frank Carlucci.

    The political world is responding. The new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged last month, “We will be at the forefront of the international campaign to accelerate disarmament amongst possessor states, to prevent proliferation . . . and to ultimately achieve a world that is free from nuclear weapons.”

    While Sen. John McCain has not addressed this issue in any detail, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama says “we need to change our nuclear policy and our posture.” He embraces the vision of a nuclear weapon-free world and marries it to practical proposals to negotiate deep reductions in arsenals and ban long-range missiles like those Iran and others want to build. He pledges to virtually eliminate nuclear terrorism by leading “a global effort to secure all nuclear weapons and material at vulnerable sites within four years,” something the Bush or Clinton administrations did not.

    Together, these developments indicate that a rare policy window is opening. Nothing is guaranteed, and much work will be required of many. But with new leaders, a new vision and a new activism, this might be a moment when changes seem not just possible but probable.

    Joseph Cirincione is president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation focused on nuclear weapons policy. He is the author of “Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons.”