The Bush administration has made a point of condemning countries like North Korea and Iran for their nuclear weapons (or alleged nuclear weapons) programs. As recently as last Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney charged Iran with being "heavily involved in trying to develop nuclear weapons enrichment, the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade levels"-comments that were at odds with last fall's National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
But amid the flame throwing, the administration has also quietly tried to launch its own new nuclear weapons production system-one that has been roundly criticized by nonproliferation experts and diplomats and has been rejected by Congress.
The program in question would result in the creation of a cache of so-called Reliable Replacement Warheads-newer, safer, and more transportable than existing ones-which would replace the country's current stockpile as those warheads are phased out.
Supporters of the RRW program don't mince words about it, hinting at, or directly threatening, that without it the United States might have to resume nuclear testing, breaking a self-imposed 1992 moratorium on the practice imposed by George H.W. Bush. (The United States is also signatory to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, but has never ratified it.) In April of last year, Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), ranking member of the Energy and Natural Resources committee, and one of the RRW's early advocates, sent letters to the secretaries of state and defense, and to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, asserting his "confidence [in our ability] to design and manufacture RRW weapons that will be deployed without underground testing."
His audience was largely receptive and less coy about the consequences of not moving forward. In July 2007, the secretaries of state, defense, and energy released a joint statement warning that delays on RRW "raise the prospect of having to return to underground nuclear testing to certify existing weapons." This despite a 2006 Pentagon-commissioned report that found that most of the weapons in America's existing stockpile have, at a minimum, a shelf life of 100 years.
Members of Congress, however, were not convinced about the necessity of the initiative. Despite an effort by the program's sponsors to secure billions in appropriations, the final version of the omnibus spending package, which passed at the end of last year, granted no federal money to implementing the RRW program.
But even that rebuke didn't scuttle the administration's hopes for a new era of nuclear development. Buried in the administration's new budget request, unveiled in early February, the president asked Congress to allocate $10 million exclusively to begin work on RRWs.
Though it marks a significant reduction from previous hundred-million-dollar requests, its modesty is precisely what nonproliferation advocates find so alarming. They say Congress could easily overlook the request, or view its meager size as a sort of compromise and allocate the money passively. That could kick-start the program and lead to more and more funding for nuclear warheads further down the line.
The program has almost no support among nonproliferation experts, who say that America's existing stockpiles are perfectly functional, and that, considering the dangers of proliferation and the diplomatic problems a new nuclear weapons system would cause, the country's focus should remain on its commitment to reduce its existing stockpiles without building new bombs.
Joe Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, worries that the RRW may be a bank-shot attempt on the part of the Bush administration to keep the United States from ratifying a test-ban treaty. As he noted in an October 2007 article for the Web publication Science Progress (which is affiliated with the progressive Center for American Progress), "Though based on an old design previously tested, there is no certainty that officials would not add new features [to the RRWs] that could require testing," adding that the administration "lacks both scientific and congressional support for its nuclear expansion efforts."
Nonproliferation advocates argue that building new weapons could be disastrous (politically and otherwise) and that RRWs could easily undercut our ability to squash weapons programs and testing in more volatile countries. Devin Helfrich, who works on nuclear issues for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker-founded nonviolence lobby, says that producing any new nuclear weapons would be counterproductive: "We already have thousands of working, deployed warheads. Our focus should be on bringing that number down without stepping backward by building replacement warheads."
Backward steps can only be taken with the assent of Congress. Last year, Congress said no to a large-scale request. The next few months will tell if smaller is smarter for those in the Bush administration seeking new nukes.
