Yesterday the House Armed Services Committee marked up (i.e. wrote) the Fiscal Year National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).  As was the case last year, Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH) led the charge in offering risky amendments that could undermine American nuclear policy.  Capitalizing on the new Republican majority in the House, the amendments adopted this year were even more extreme than last year.  

This defense bill is scheduled to be debated on the House floor the week of May 23.

During the strategic forces section of the mark up the committee addressed (by my count) a total of 13 amendments.  Two of these amendments were accepted by voice vote, three were withdrawn, two were accepted without any debate, one was defeated on a voice vote, and five particularly controversial amendments were approved almost entirely by party line roll call votes.  

One of the amendments on ground based midcourse defense system prompted two GOP defections.  

Democrats on the committee made a valiant effort to talk some sense into their GOP colleagues, but their ears were closed.

It seems that Republicans on the committee have a love affair with nuclear weapons.  They find even modest treaties that enjoy overwhelming bipartisan support difficult to accept, and want to prevent further nuclear weapons cuts.

Republicans yesterday kept using the figure of 1,550 U.S. nuclear weapons. That is the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons allowed by the New START Treaty, but in fact as of 2010 the U.S. retains a total of 5,113 nuclear bombs, almost all of which are much larger than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and can destroy a city.

Many of the Republican amendments were drawn from a bill introduced by Rep. Turner on May 5 known as the New START Implementation Act – which should more aptly be described as the New START Undermining Act.  

According to Turner, the purpose of the bill (H.R. 1750; full text here) is to hold the Obama administration accountable to the long-term commitments it made on modernization and missile defense during the Senate’s consideration of the New START treaty and limit the administration’s ability to pursue nuclear weapons reductions below New START levels.  

Senator Kyl plans to introduce his own version of H.R. 1750 in the Senate soon.  

Turner’s bill contains many egregious provisions, the most harmful of which is the section containing limitations on the implementation of New START and potential future nuclear reductions even if such reductions would strengthen U.S. national security.  The clear intent of the provision is to interfere with the Pentagon’s ability to implement the New START treaty and undercut the authority of the President and senior military leaders to determine U.S. nuclear policies…

Section 4 of H.R. 1750 would delay the reductions in deployed forces under New START until the Secretaries of Defense and Energy certify that the plan to modernize the nuclear weapons complex and delivery systems is being carried out.   Supporters of this provision describe it as an effort to put speed bumps in the way of New START implementation.  

Section 4 also states that no funds may be obligated to retire, dismantle, or eliminate any non-deployed strategic or non-strategic nuclear weapon until the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement (CMRR) nuclear facility and the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) are fully operational and capable of producing 80 plutonium pits, the core unit of a  nuclear weapon, and 80 canned subassemblies per year (which house the uranium secondary of a nuclear warhead), respectively. These buildings are not scheduled to be operational until at least 2024. 

Finally, section 4 prohibits any reductions below the limits of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads and 700 deployed delivery vehicles (missiles and bombers) in the New START treaty unless such action is sanctioned by a treaty approved by the Senate or authorized by an Act of Congress.  All of these provisions, some of which were amended for clarity, were included in the House Armed Services Committee’s mark of the defense bill. UPDATE: The amendments can be viewed here.

Section 4’s language on New START is daft:

• Implementation of the New START treaty is legally binding on the United States in domestic and international law.  
• Section 4 could infringe on the Department of Defense’s flexibility to implement the New START treaty and structure U.S nuclear forces.  It could require the military to spend scarce financial resources to retain deployed nuclear forces longer than it would prefer to keep them.
• Withholding funding for implementation of the reductions required by the New START treaty could prompt Russia to follow suit.  This could leave Russia with a larger number of nuclear warheads with which to target the U.S.
• Continued efforts to link New START to nuclear modernization are redundant. This issue is already addressed in Condition 9 of the New START Resolution of Ratification.
• While the Obama administration’s budget requests for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency (NNSA) in Fiscal Year 2011 and Fiscal Year 2012 and its ten-year plan to modernize the stockpile as required by the Section 1251 report demonstrate its strong commitment to nuclear modernization, it was House Budget Committee Chairman Ryan and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rogers who proposed to slash these funds by over $300 million in H.R. 1 earlier this year.
• Implementation of New START should not be held hostage to unforeseen events such as a decision by a future Congress to limit funding for NNSA (as was the case in H.R. 1), delays in the completion of a life extension program or the construction of a new facility (a recent GAO report found that such delays are common and due to many factors), the discovery of efficiencies that could allow for the completion of programs at a reduced cost, or new geopolitical/military/economic circumstances that might alter current plans.

The prohibitions on reductions of the stockpile of nuclear weapons not currently deployed on missiles and bombers and potential unilateral reductions below New START levels are equally dubious:

• Previous Republican administrations have unilaterally reduced the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal unencumbered by extreme preconditions.  For example,in 1991, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, President George H.W. Bush announced that the U.S. would dramatically reduce its arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons, which led the Soviet Union to take similar steps, dramatically increasing U.S. security.  Furthermore, the George W. Bush administration announced in 2004 that it planned to unilaterally reduce the U.S. nuclear stockpile by “nearly 50 percent” by 2012.  This reduction was achieved in December 2007, five years early, at which point the administration also stated that an additional 15 percent reduction would be completed by 2012.
• The provision could prevent the retirement of the TLAM-N as mandated by the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, an archaic non-strategic nuclear weapon the Navy says it no longer needs.
• According to Russian scholar and former State Duma member Alexei Arbatov, Russian strategic nuclear forces will shrink dramatically because Moscow is retiring older systems faster than it is adding new weapons.  As it implements the New START reductions, Russia is likely to reduce its forces well below the treaty’s limits, perhaps to as low as 350-400 deployed delivery vehicles and 1,000-1,100 deployed warheads (according to New START’s counting rules).  Neither this President nor a future President should be precluded from considering reductions to meet Russia at such levels, especially if doing so might encourage Moscow not to build its strategic forces back up to New START levels.  
• As my colleague Nick Roth points out, depending on how one defines “non-deployed,” Section 4 could halt vital dismantlement activities until at least 2024 when the new nuclear facilities are scheduled to be operational, in effect forcing the Department of Energy to retain old warheads it doesn’t need. UPDATE: The amendment accepted by the Committee includes an exception stating that the limitation shall not apply to weapons currently awaiting dismantlement. Even as revised, however, the provision could prevent the Department of Energy from dismantling additional weapons from the active stockpile that it determines it no longer needs or requires to perform surveillance activities in support of maintaining the stockpile.

The practical effect of Turner’s legislation would be to lock in the status quo on nuclear policy for the next 10-15 years.  According to a growing number of national security experts from both parties, this status quo is increasingly untenable.  The bill could force military leaders to maintain an excess number of nuclear weapons when it no longer makes strategic or financial sense to do so.  

Finally, I would note that this legislation is in keeping with Republican efforts in the mid/late 1990s to impose legislative constraints on the ability of President Bill Clinton to reduce the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal below the limits in the START I treaty, which forced the Navy and the Air Force to spend money to keep weapons, including 4 Trident submarines and 50 Peacekeeper missiles, that they no longer needed, when the resources could have been better used elsewhere.  While this constraint barred President Clinton from making reductions, it was removed without Republican opposition in the FY 2002 defense bill in part to accommodate President George W. Bush’s desire to unilaterally eliminate the Peacekeeper missiles and remove the Trident submarines from the nuclear force.

The FY 2012 defense bill now moves to the House floor, where the Republican majority will prevent the removal of these damaging amendments from the bill.  Let us hope that cooler heads prevail when the Senate takes up the defense bill this summer.

Yesterday Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Ellen Tauscher delivered a speech at the Arms Control Association’s annual meeting on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).  Tasucher emphasized the vital national security importance of the treaty and indicated that the administration intends to step up its efforts to educate the Senate and the public about the treaty.

Full text below the jump.

The Case for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

Remarks
Ellen Tauscher
Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security
Arms Control Association Annual Meeting at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Washington, DC

May 10, 2011

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As prepared

Good morning. I want to thank my good friend Daryl Kimball for inviting me to speak today. Daryl, as everyone knows, is one of the world’s most tireless advocates for arms control, especially banning nuclear testing. His work and that of the Arms Control Association, which was recognized by the MacArthur Foundation last year, is tremendously important.

Many of you have heard me speak many times about what this Administration intended to accomplish and what we have accomplished. In the two years since President Obama’s speech in Prague, the Administration has taken significant steps and dedicated unprecedented financial, political, and technical resources to prevent proliferation, live up to our commitments, and to move toward a world without nuclear weapons.

Under the President’s leadership, we have achieved the entry into force of the New START agreement, adopted a Nuclear Posture Review that promotes nonproliferation and reduces the role of nuclear weapons in our national security policy, and helped to achieve a consensus Action Plan at the 2010 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference.

The Administration also convened the successful 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, helped secure and relocate vulnerable nuclear materials, led efforts to establish an international nuclear fuel bank, and increased effective multilateral sanctions against both Iran and North Korea.

As for what’s next, our goal is to move our relationship with Russia from one based on Mutually Assured Destruction to one on Mutually Assured Stability. We want Russia inside the missile defense tent so that it understands that missile defense is not about undermining Russia’s deterrent.

Even though this is a bipartisan goal – President Reagan and President Bush both supported missile defense cooperation – it will not be easy. I know that many of you have opposed missile defenses. I have as well when the plans were not technically sound or the mission was wrong. But this Administration is seeking to turn what has been an irritant to U.S.-Russian relations into a shared interest. Cooperation between our militaries, scientists, diplomats, and engineers will be more enduring and build greater confidence than any type of assurances.

We are also preparing for the next steps in nuclear arms reductions, including – as the President has directed – reductions in strategic, non-strategic, and non-deployed weapons. We are fully engaged with our allies in this process.

But let me turn to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. President Obama vowed to pursue ratification and entry into force of the CTBT in his speech in Prague. In so doing the United States is once again taking a leading role in supporting a test ban treaty just as it had when discussions first began more than 50 years ago.

As you know, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the United States ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned all nuclear tests except those conducted underground. The Cuban Missile Crisis, which was about as close as the world has ever come to a nuclear exchange, highlighted the instability of the arms race. Even though scholars have concluded that the United States acted rationally, the Soviet Union acted rationally, and even Fidel Castro acted rationally, we came perilously close to nuclear war. Luck certainly played a role in helping us avoid nuclear catastrophe.

In the months after the crisis, President Kennedy used his new found political capital and his political skill to persuade the military and the Senate to support a test ban treaty in the hopes of curbing a dangerous arms race. He achieved a Limited Test Ban Treaty, but aspired to do more. Yet, today, with more than 40 years of experience, wisdom, and knowledge about global nuclear dangers, a legally binding ban on all nuclear explosive testing still eludes us.

This being Washington, everything is seen through a political lens. So before discussing the merits of the Treaty, let me talk about this in a political sense for a moment. I know that the conventional wisdom is that the ratification of New START has delayed or pushed aside consideration of the CTBT.

I take the opposite view.

The New START debate, in many ways, opened the door for the CTBT. Months of hearings and debate and nine long days of floor deliberations engaged the Senate, especially its newer Members, in an extended seminar on the composition of our nuclear arsenal, the health of our stockpile, and the relationship between nuclear weapons and our national security. When the Senate voted for the Treaty, it inherently affirmed that our stockpile is safe, secure, and effective, and can be kept so without nuclear testing.

More importantly, the New START debate helped cultivate emerging new arms control champions, such as Senator Shaheen and Senator Casey, who are here today. Before the debate, there was not a lot of muscle memory on treaties, especially nuclear treaties in the Senate. Now, there is. So we are in a stronger position to make the case for the CTBT on its merits. To maintain and enhance that momentum, the Obama Administration is preparing to engage the Senate and the public on an education campaign that we expect will lead to ratification of the CTBT.

In our engagement with the Senate, we want to leave aside the politics and explain why the CTBT will enhance our national security. Our case for Treaty ratification consists of three primary arguments.

One, the United States no longer needs to conduct nuclear explosive tests, plain and simple. Two, a CTBT that has entered into force will obligate other states not to test and provide a disincentive for states to conduct such tests. And three, we now have a greater ability to catch those who cheat.

Let me take these points one by one.

From 1945 to 1992, the United States conducted more than 1,000 nuclear explosive tests – more than all other nations combined. The cumulative data gathered from these tests have provided an impressive foundation of knowledge for us to base the continuing effectiveness of our arsenal. But historical test data alone is insufficient.

Well over a decade ago, we launched an extensive and rigorous Stockpile Stewardship program that has enabled our nuclear weapons laboratories to carry out the essential surveillance and warhead life extension programs to ensure the credibility of our deterrent.

Every year for the past 15 years, the Secretaries of Defense and Energy from Democratic and Republican Administrations, and the directors of the nuclear weapons laboratories have certified that our arsenal is safe, secure, and effective. And each year they have affirmed that we do not need to conduct explosive nuclear tests.

The lab directors tell us that Stockpile Stewardship has provided a deeper understanding of our arsenal than they ever had when testing was commonplace. Think about that for a moment. Our current efforts go a step beyond explosive testing by enabling the labs to anticipate problems in advance and reduce their potential impact on our arsenal – something that nuclear testing could not do. I, for one, would not trade our successful approach based on world-class science and technology for a return to explosive testing.

This Administration has demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to a safe, secure, and effective arsenal so long as nuclear weapons exist. Despite the narrative put forward by some, this Administration inherited an underfunded and underappreciated nuclear complex. We have worked tirelessly to fix that situation and ensure our complex has every asset needed to achieve its mission.

The President has committed $88 billion in funding over the next decade to maintain a modern nuclear arsenal, retain a modern nuclear weapons production complex, and nurture a highly trained workforce. At a time when every part of the budget is under the microscope, this pledge demonstrates our commitment and should not be discounted. To those who doubt our commitment, I ask them to put their doubts aside and invest the hard work to support our budget requests in the Congress.

When it comes to the CTBT, the United States is in a curious position. We abide by the core prohibition of the Treaty because we don’t need to test nuclear weapons. And we have contributed to the development of the International Monitoring System. But the principal benefit of ratifying the Treaty, constraining other states from testing, still eludes us. That doesn’t make any sense to me and it shouldn’t make any sense to the Members of the Senate.

I do not believe that even the most vocal critics of the CTBT want to resume explosive nuclear testing. What they have chosen instead is a status quo where the United States refrains from testing without using that fact to lock in a legally binding global ban that would significantly benefit the United States.

Second, a CTBT that has entered into force will hinder other states from advancing their nuclear weapons capabilities. Were the CTBT to enter into force, states interested in pursuing or advancing a nuclear weapons program would risk either deploying weapons that might not work or incur international condemnation and sanctions for testing.

While states can build a crude first generation nuclear weapon without conducting nuclear explosive tests, they would have trouble going further, and they probably wouldn’t even know for certain the yield of the weapon they built. More established nuclear weapons states could not, with any confidence, deploy advanced nuclear weapon capabilities that deviated significantly from previously tested designs without explosive testing.

Nowhere would these constraints be more relevant than in Asia, where you see states building up and modernizing their forces. A legally binding prohibition on all nuclear explosive testing would help reduce the chances of a potential regional arms race in the years and decades to come.

Finally, we have become very good at detecting potential cheaters. If you test, there is a very high risk of getting caught. Upon the Treaty’s entry into force, the United States would use the International Monitoring System to complement our own state of the art national technical means to verify the Treaty.

In 1999, not a single certified IMS station or facility existed. We understand why some senators had doubts about its future, untested capabilities. But today the IMS is more than 75 percent complete. 254 of the planned 321 monitoring stations are in place and functioning. And 10 of 16 projected radio-nuclide laboratories have been completed. The IMS detected both of North Korea’s two announced nuclear tests.

While the IMS did not detect trace radioactive isotopes confirming that the 2009 event was in fact a nuclear explosive test, there was sufficient evidence to support an on-site inspection. On-site inspections are only permissible once the Treaty enters into force. An on-site inspection could have clarified the ambiguity of the 2009 test.

While the IMS continues to prove its value, our national technical means remain second to none and we continue to improve them. Last week, our colleagues at the NNSA conducted the first of a series of Source Physics Experiments at the Nevada Nuclear Security Site. These experiments will allow the United States to validate and improve seismic models and the use of new generation technology to further monitor compliance with the CTBT. Senators can judge our overall capabilities for themselves by consulting the National Intelligence Estimate released last year.

Taken together, these verification tools would make it difficult for any state to conduct nuclear tests that escape detection. In other words, a robust verification regime carries an important deterrent value in and of itself. Could we imagine a far-fetched scenario where a country might conduct a test so low that it would not be detected? Perhaps. But could a country be certain that it would not be caught? That is unclear. Would a country be willing to risk being caught cheating? Doubtful, because there would be a significant cost to pay for those countries that test.

We have a strong case for Treaty ratification. In the coming months, we will build upon and flesh out these core arguments. We look forward to objective voices providing their opinions on this important issue. Soon, the National Academy of Sciences, a trusted and unbiased voice on scientific issues, will release an unclassified report examining the Treaty from a technical perspective. The report will look at how U.S. ratification would impact our ability to maintain our nuclear arsenal and our ability to detect and verify explosive nuclear tests.

Let me conclude by saying that successful U.S. ratification of the CTBT will help facilitate greater international cooperation on the other elements of the President’s Prague Agenda. It will strengthen our leverage with the international community to pressure defiant regimes like those in Iran and North Korea as they engage in illicit nuclear activities. We will have greater credibility when encouraging other states to pursue nonproliferation objectives, including universality of the Additional Protocol.

In short, ratification helps us get more of what we want. We give up nothing by ratifying the CTBT. We recognize that a Senate debate over ratification will be spirited, vigorous, and likely contentious. The debate in 1999, unfortunately, was too short and too politicized. The Treaty was brought to the floor without the benefit of extensive Committee hearings or significant input from Administration officials and outside experts.

We will not repeat those mistakes.

But we will make a more forceful case when we are certain the facts have been carefully examined and reviewed in a thoughtful process. We are committed to taking a bipartisan and fact-based approach with the Senate.

For my Republican friends who voted against the Treaty and might feel bound by that vote, I have one message: Don’t be. The times have changed. Stockpile Stewardship works. We have made significant advances in our ability to detect nuclear testing. As my good friend George Shultz likes to say, those who opposed the Treaty in 1999 can say they were right, but they would be right to vote for the Treaty today.

We have a lot of work to do to build the political will needed to ratify the CTBT. Nuclear testing is not a front-burner issue in the minds of most Americans, in part, because we have not tested in nearly 20 years. To understand the gap in public awareness, just think that in 1961 some 10,000 women walked off their job as mothers and housewives to protest the arms race and nuclear testing. Now, that strike did not have the same impact as the nonviolent marches and protests to further the cause of Civil Rights.

But the actions of mothers taking a symbolic and dramatic step to recognize global nuclear dangers showed that the issue has resonance beyond “the Beltway,” beyond the think tank world and beyond the Ivory Tower. That level of concern is there today and we need your energy, your organizational skills, and your creativity to tap into it.

If we are to move safely and securely to a world without nuclear weapons, then we need to build the requisite political support and that can only be done by people like you.

Thank you very much and I’m happy to try to answer any easy questions that you might have.

In a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on May 9 in Berlin, South Korean President Lee Myungbak said,”I offer a proposal to invite Chairman Kim Jong-il to the Nuclear Security Summit on March 26-27 next year if North Korea agree…

Last Wednesday the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee held a hearing on NNSA’s FY 2012 budget request.

The hearing prompted a very interesting and lively exchange between Subcommittee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the team of NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino and NNSA Deputy Administrator for Defense Programs Don Cook on plutonium pit aging and production.  Jeffrey Lewis has a short write up about the discussion of pit corrosion over at Armscontrolwonk.

Of particular interest to me was NNSA’s rationale for why they need to produce new pits, Feinstein’s frustration with this explanation and NNSA’s unwillingness to tell her how many pits they plan to produce, and Feinstein’s general awesomeness.  Re: Feinstein’s awesomeness, below are my three favorite quotes from her from the hearing:

1. “I mean, it’s one of the reasons why I’m sitting right here, why I run for this office because I want my grandchildren and their children to grow up in a nuclear-free world. And I’m going to do everything I can to be helpful to get there.

So this is not something that I’m just going to fluff off and forget about.”

2. “And it’s fair to say that you guys wanted to develop new nuclear weapons. That’s what RRW essentially did. It was killed because of it. And I don’t want to see, you know, RRW in Mufti right now.”

3. (to D’Agostino) “I don’t want you to do it off the top of your head. As much as I think you’re terrific, I really — this is a big thing for me.”

All elements of the triad need to be modernized.  You may have to make some choices there.

So I’m just trying — I want to frame this so that it’s not a math exercise but so people understand the strategic and national security consequences of the decisions that they’re making.  And it’s up to us to do that, I think, in stark terms.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, DoD News Briefing with Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright, April 21, 2011.