Green Party Says Obama To Outspend Reagan On Nukes

This article was written by Green Party Shadow Cabinet member Steve Breyman on March 17th:

Barack Obama has outlined a nuclear weapon expansion plan that beats Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' debacle in both dollars and dangers.

The anti-nuclear movement spent much of the eighties resisting Ronald Reagan’s new Cold War, and his new nuclear weapons of all shapes and sizes. We pushed back against his giant ‘defense’ budgets and countered his harrowing rhetoric. We knew Star Wars was a scam, and the MX missile a danger. We grimaced at his appointments to key policy making positions, and scoffed at his insincere arms control efforts.

In the end, the tireless work of professional activists, plowshares heroes, and a handful of stalwart others who stayed in the anti-nuclear weapons movement trenches deserve some credit for preventing planetary incineration that seemed frighteningly close at the time (Gorbachev deserves some too). Although nukes were not abolished with the end of the Cold War, most of the rest of us nonetheless moved on to fight other evils, and to work on one or more better world construction projects.

Two recent events should serve to re-awaken this movement and return to this struggle. First is the situation in the Ukraine, where old Cold War Hawks have been re-animated to again advise nuclear armed leaders, East and West, to show 'strength' and beat their chests at one another.

The second call to action has received much less attention. President Obama released his FY 2015 budget on Tuesday, March 4. It asks for considerably more money (in constant dollars) for nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production than Reagan spent in 1985, the historical peak of spending on nukes: $8.608 billion dollars, not counting administrative costs (see graph below). The Los Alamos Study Group crunched the numbers for us.

Next year’s request tops this year’s by 7%. Should the President’s new Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) be approved, yet $504 million more would be available for warhead spending. The OGSI is $56 billion over and above the spending agreed to in the December 2013 two-year budget (unlikely to pass given that it’s an election year, would be paid for by increased taxes on the retirement funds of the rich, and reduced spending in politically dicey areas like crop insurance).

The US currently deploys some 4650 nuclear weapons. That these are mere dangerous remnants of the Cold War, and of no use to counter contemporary security threats, was confirmed by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment which said not a word about Russian nuclear weapons but instead focused on cyber threats, mass atrocities, and the extreme weather events attendant to climate change. (Yeah, Clapper is the guy who lied with impunity to Congress about NSA bulk data gathering on Americans; he’s probably not lying this time). 

The Congressional Budget Office reports that current nuclear complex spending plans total $335 billion through FY2023. Then, believe it or not, the Pentagon and Department of Energy plan to begin replacing current weapons systems by new ones. There’s $100 billion to design and construct twelve new missile submarines, $81 billion for new strategic bombers, tens of billions for a new long-range cruise missile, a new ICBM, and revamped command and control infrastructure. Add to this the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plans for at least $60 billion to “extend the life” of current weapons, and more than $11 billion for the Uranium Processing Facility. None of these CBO figures factored in the usual cost overruns.

For the Administration to find record funds to invest in nuclear weapons in budget under so much political and fiscal pressure reveals how far Obama’s rhetoric has drifted from his actions.

Obama's Nuclear Contradiction

Increased lucre for the nuclear weapons complex maintains Obama’s inconsistency on the Bomb. He wrote his senior thesis at Columbia on the arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Two months after his first inauguration, he uttered these words in Prague: “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”

The Pentagon’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review promised to avoid “new military missions or... new military capabilities” for nuclear weapons (don’t laugh, you’d be surprised how imaginative those guys can be). 2011 was even better: Obama signed the New START Treaty. It limits the number of operationally deployed nuclear warheads to 1550, a 30% decrease from the previous START Treaty, signed in 2002. New START also lowered limits on the number of launch platforms — ICBMs, ballistic missile launching subs, and nuke-equipped bombers.

At the same time, his State Department refuses—under first Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry—to present the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to the Senate for ratification out of timidity over expected resistance (never mind that the U.S. has essentially figured out ways to circumvent the Treaty’s spirit if not letter; the CTB was once the ‘holy grail’ for arms control and disarmament advocates).

That same State Department refrains—under both Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—from getting tough with Pakistan over its years-long obstruction of United Nations-sponsored negotiations over a global ban on the stuff needed to make bombs. (Pakistan is the country building them faster than any other; how about: ‘we’ll ground the killer drones in exchange for a fissile material cut-off?’). And Obama now wants to outspend Reagan on nuclear weapons maintenance, design and production.

Winding down nuclear weapons spending, and eventually abolishing the things (for which no negotiations are underway) has been the right thing to do since the first bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert in 1945. State Department support for the coup in Ukraine and the resultant saber rattling make it as urgent as ever.