Published in The Huffington Post on February 5, 2013.
Article summary below; read the full text here.
The first “fiscal cliff” was temporarily averted through a last-minute congressional deal. The next “fiscal cliff”, the automatic budget cuts, known as sequestration, is scheduled to arrive March first. Between now and March, Congress and the president will be searching for a way to reshape the budget in a more surgical, strategic way, rather than through mindless, across-the-board cuts. One place to start is with the nuclear weapons programs at the Departments of Defense and Energy.
Consider this: over the next decade nuclear weapons and related programs could cost $640 billion. This colossal price tag is impossible to justify. Since the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have played a far smaller role in ensuring American security — yet the nuclear weapons budget remains stubbornly high. For a modern and cost-effective defense budget, we must reshape and right-size this area of defense spending.
