Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

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NNSA Nuclear/Radiological Material Security Budget Doesn’t Make the Grade

On March 14 the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia held a hearing titled “Managing Interagency Nuclear Nonproliferation Efforts: Are We Effectively Securing Nuclear Materials Around the World?”

The hearing focused on the status of the U.S.-led effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials within four years. Of particular interest was a question asked by Subcommittee Chairman Daniel Akaka on the FY 2013 budget request for nuclear material security programs.  Below is Sen. Akaka’s exchange with Deputy Administrator for Defense Nuclear Non-Proliferation Anne Harrington on the request for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s material security activities.

SEN. AKAKA: …

Ken Luongo, who is president of the Partnership for Global Security, has raised concerns that this budget is inadequate to meet the nuclear threat to American and international security and could undermine the four-year nuclear security agenda. Others likely will argue that we cannot fully fund the president’s requests.

Please respond to Mr. Luongo’s view that more funding is needed, and address what affect less funding would have on our ability to effectively secure vulnerable nuclear and radiological materials.

Ms. Harrington.

MS. HARRINGTON: I noticed that Mr. Handelman is letting me take this question first, thank you.

If you look at budget projections that were presented several years ago for where we would be in the 2013-2014 space, they’re quite different from where we are right now. But that is very much a reflection of fiscal realities in the United States. The Budget Control Act governs what our limits are going to be. The Budget Committees are very constrained overall. And so across the government, every agency every program is looking at how it can continue to meet mission goals, but with less resource.

We are no exception. And we are confident that the 2013 budget as presented will allow us to continue to meet our four-year goals. That does not mean that it’s only the Global Threat Reduction Initiative Program, but we have to maintain the funding in other programs that are also part of this overall effort. There are at least four different program areas that support the four-year effort, in my office. So we have done our best to balance across those programs to make some tough decisions, but we believe they were the right decisions to be able to carry this effort forward. Thank you.

Harrington is correct that the current budget environment requires difficult budgetary tradeoffs and that an appropriate balance must be struck. However, while the budget request for the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) and the International Materials Protection and Cooperation program (INMPC), the two core NNSA programs in the effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear materials at an accelerated rate were cut by $291 million relative to last year’s appropriated level, the request for the controversial Mixed Oxide (MOX) fuel program is $229 million more than last year’s level.

In addition, the FY 2013 budget includes a onetime request of $150 million for USEC. Formerly the U.S. Enrichment Corp., USEC is a privately owned company that is attempting to build a new gas centrifuge uranium enrichment plant to produce fuel for nuclear power plants at Piketon, near Portsmouth in southern Ohio.

Neither the MOX program nor USEC are core material security programs or contribute to the mission of the four year goal. Last year the House Energy and Water appropriations subcommittee noted that the rising costs of the MOX program’s construction projects are a “threat…to the progress of core nonproliferation activities.” The Senate expressed similar concerns.

There’s of course more to the story than just the topline budget numbers. In short, as Rep. Pete Visclosky (D-IN), ranking member on the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, noted at the subcommittee’s March 6 hearing on the NNSA nonproliferation budget, it’s difficult to conclude that NNSA struck the right balance within the Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation account.

For more on the shortcomings of the FY 2013 budget request not only at NNSA, but across the government, see Ken Luongo’s opening statement at the March 14 hearing’s second panel here.

Understatement of the Day: Nuclear Weapons Funding Edition

“Realistically,” in that the Obama nuclear spending pledge was made “nine months before the Budget Control Act became law, falling 4 percent short of the $7.9 billion target is reasonable given the fiscal reality facing us today.”

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE), Chairman of the Senate Strategic Forces Subcommittee, March 14, 2012.

For more background on Republican criticisms of the FY 2013 request for nuclear weapons programs, see here. We’ll have a more detailed response to the recent Republican Policy Committee memo on nuclear weapons funding and the text of Rep. Michael Turner’s (R-OH) “Maintaining the President’s Commitment to our Nuclear Deterrent and National Security Act of 2012” soon.

"When less is not more"

My March Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists column is now online and I tried to tackle the issue of whether it makes sense for the U.S. to place greater emphasis on counterforce (i.e. targeting an adversary’s leadership and strategic forces) in its nucl…

Kerry to Romney: “Let’s have an honest debate” on Iran

In his latest in a long line of faulty foreign policy articles, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took to the pages of the Washington Post this week to explain what he would do differently, if given the chance, in Iran.

As it turns out, the answer is “not a lot.”

Try as I might, however, I’m not sure my response could hold a candle to Senator Kerry’s remarks, delivered on the Senate floor:

Mr. President, several of us here in the Senate have run for President. Two of us have been our Party’s nominees. Dozens of others have played major roles in tough campaigns. None of us are strangers to the rough and tumble of politics.

[snip]

So it is not as an innocent that I say I was troubled to read an op-ed in this morning’s Washington Post by the likely Republican nominee for President, Mitt Romney – an attack on the Administration’s Iran policy as inaccurate as it was aggressive.

Kerry pointed out that particularly this week, when Prime Minister Netanyahu was in Washington to discuss the issue with President Obama, “we should all remember that the nuclear issue with Iran is deadly serious business that should invite sobriety and serious-minded solutions, not sloganeering and sound bites.”

Kerry made clear that “… Governor Romney’s op-ed does not even do readers the courtesy of describing how a President Romney would do anything different from what the Obama administration has already done,” and argued that, “From his opening paragraphs, Romney garbles history.”

“We’re going to have a bruising election season. And so we should,” said Kerry, “That’s how we decide big issues in the United States. We always have. But let’s have an honest debate, not a contrived one. Governor Romney can debate the man in the White House instead of inventing straw men on the op-ed pages.”

President Obama also criticized the GOP candidates at a press conference the same day:

You know, those folks don’t have a lot of responsibilities. They’re not commander in chief. And when I see the casualness with which some of these folks talk about war, I’m reminded of the costs involved in war. I’m reminded that the decision that I have to make in terms of sending our young men and women into battle and the impact that has on their lives, the impact it has on our national security, the impact it has on our economy.

This is not a game. And there’s nothing casual about it. And, you know, when I see some of these folks who have a lot of bluster and a lot of big talk, but when you actually ask them specifically what they would do, it turns out they repeat the things that we’ve been doing over the last three years, it indicates to me that that’s more about politics than actually trying to solve a difficult problem.