Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 20. december 2007 / Time Line December 20, 2007
Version 3.519. December 2007, 21. December 2007
12/20/2007
Foiled
Again: The Defeat of the Latest Bush
Administration Plan for New Nuclear Weapons
By Lawrence S.
Wittner
Advocates of a U.S. nuclear weapons buildup received a significant
setback on December 16, when Congressional negotiators agreed on an
omnibus spending bill that omitted funding for development of a new
nuclear weapon championed by the Bush administration: the Reliable
Replacement Warhead (RRW). Coming on the heels of Congressional
action in recent years that stymied administration schemes for the
nuclear "bunker buster" and the "mini-nuke," it was the third--and
perhaps final--defeat of George W. Bush and his hawkish allies in
their attempt to upgrade the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
The administration's case for building the RRW--a newly-designed
hydrogen bomb--pivoted around the contention that the current U.S.
nuclear stockpile is deteriorating and needs to be replaced by new
weaponry.
But studies by scientific experts revealed that this stockpile
would remain reliable for at least another fifty years. In
addition, critics of the RRW scheme pointed to the fact that
building new nuclear weapons violates the U.S. commitment under the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to pursue nuclear
disarmament and that such a violation would encourage other nations
to flout their NPT commitments.
Naturally, peace and disarmament organizations were among the
fiercest opponents of the RRW, arguing that it was both unnecessary
and provocative. Groups like the
Council for a Livable World, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Peace Action, and Physicians for Social Responsibility
published critiques of the administration plan, mobilized their
members against it, and lobbied in Congress to secure its defeat.
Activists staged anti-RRW demonstrations and, despite the nation's
focus on the war in Iraq, managed to draw headlines with protests
at the University of California and elsewhere.
Members of Congress also were skeptical of the value of the RRW,
particularly its utility in safeguarding U.S. security in today's
world, where the Soviet Union--once the major nuclear competitor to
the United States--no longer exists. "Moving forward on a new
nuclear weapon is not something this nation should do without great
consideration," noted U.S. Representative Peter Visclosky (D-IN),
chair of the House subcommittee handling nuclear weapons
appropriations. With the end of the Cold War and the rise of
terrorism, the U.S. government needed "a revised stockpile plan to
guide the transformation and downsizing of the [nuclear weapons]
complex . . . to reflect the new realities of the world."
But is the defeat of the RRW a momentous victory for nuclear
disarmers? After all, the U.S. government still possesses some
10,000 nuclear weapons, with thousands of them on launch-ready
alert. Moreover, the Bush administration is promoting a plan to
rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Called Complex
2030 and intended to provide for U.S. nuclear arsenals well into
the future, this administration scheme is supposed to cost $150
billion, although the Government Accountability Office maintains
that this figure is a significant underestimate.
Also, the RRW development plan might be revived in the future.
Brooding over the Congressional decision to block funding for the
new nuclear weapon, U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM)—a keen
supporter of the venture--remarked hopefully that he expected the
RRW or something like it to re-emerge "sooner rather than
later."
This situation, of course, falls short of the 1968 pledge by the
United States and other nuclear powers, under article VI of the
NPT, "to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures
relating to . . . nuclear disarmament." It falls even farther short
of their subsequent pledge, made at the NPT review conference of
2000, to "an unequivocal undertaking . . . to accomplish the total
elimination of their nuclear arsenals."
Thus, this December's Congressional decision to zero out funding
for the RRW is only a small, symbolic step in the direction of
honoring U.S. commitments and fostering nuclear sanity. If the
United States and other nations are serious about confronting the
menace of nuclear annihilation that has hung over the planet since
1945, it will require not only the scrapping of plans for new
nuclear weapons, but the abolition of the 27,000 nuclear weapons
that already exist in government arsenals, ready to destroy the
world. Until that action occurs, we will continue to default on
past promises and to live on the brink of catastrophe.
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