Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation
Defense Secretary nominee Ashton Carter’s confirmation hearing is set for the first week of February. Coinciding with Carter’s confirmation, on February 2, the president will send Congress his fiscal year 2016 budget request. One of Mr. Carter’s first tasks as Chuck Hagel’s replacement will be to defend the President’s FY 2016 budget request – a document on which Mr. Carter has presumably had little influence.
5 Myths about America’s Nuclear Weapons Debunked By Phillip Coyle, Robert Gard, John Isaacs, & Greg Terryn The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced last week that it has decided to move its famed “Doomsday Clock” three minutes closer to midnight or, in effect, closer to the “end of humanity.” While this year, the Bulletin focused […]
The Congressional Budget Office’s Report on the Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces has again undercut the tired myth that our current nuclear weapon plans are inexpensive. According to the report, the administration’s plan for modernizing the nuclear triad is expected to cost $348 billion over the next decade, an average of about $35 billion a year. But these costs reflect only the tip of the budgetary iceberg. Reports such as the National Defense Panel Review of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review and the Trillion Dollar Triad estimate the entire modernization plan will likely cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years.
Curious how much money US lawmakers appropriated to prevent nuclear terrorism and the spread of nuclear materials for fiscal year 2015? Deep within the 1,600 page Cromnibus, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) received $1.616 billion dollars, a $337 million reduction from FY 14.
Some good programs went unfunded, like cooperative threat reduction work with Russia. Some bad programs were funded well above the Obama administration’s request, like the Mixed Oxide fuel program dubbed the “fuel to nowhere.”
** Click here for our full analysis of the NNSA’s FY15 nuclear nonproliferation budget
