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…
Do You Even Have to HASC: House Republicans Still Love the Bomb
by Kingston Reif Just when you thought the Republican-controlled House Armed Services Committee (HASC) couldn’t possibly go any crazier on nuclear weapons and missile defense, it doubled down on its fanaticism during last week’s mark up of the FY 2014 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The result is a bill that if passed into law […]