In an interview this week with Knoxville News reporter Frank Munger, Tennessee GOP Senator (and Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee Ranking Member) Lamar Alexander expressed is frustration and displeasure with the exploding costs of the nuclear weapons enterprise
Don’t waste money upgrading obsolete nukes
In a post-sequester era, members of Congress who are leaders on budget issues should be giving close scrutiny to wasteful government spending, including expensive weapons programs whose national security rationale is dubious. I wrote an op-ed in the Morristown Daily Record arguing that the expensive upgrade of the B61 nuclear bomb should be a target of such scrutiny. New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen is a fiscally conservative Republican with extensive influence over the nuclear weapons budget, so he’s well-positioned to ask the tough questions about whether taxpayers can – or should – fork over $10 billion to upgrade the B61.
It’s smart to scale back nuclear weapons spending
Published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Online on May 21, 2013. Article summary below; read the full text here. As part of his effort to win Republican support for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) in 2010, President Obama submitted to lawmakers a 10-year plan to maintain and modernize US nuclear warheads, […]
HASC preparing to go wild
At last week’s House Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing on the FY 2014 budget request for nuclear weapons programs at the Department of Energy and the Pentagon, Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) once again declared his intention to use t…
Budget Busting SSBN(X) Style
Last week, STRATCOM Commander Gen. Robert Kehler provided further confirmation of what we’ve been suggesting for some time: The current plan to build twelve new Ohio-class replacement ballistic missile submarines (also known as the SSBN(X)) probably is…